Olympic - Balanced Lifestyle - 8 Week Training Plan

*Note, all new weekly concepts in this section 'build' off of each other. Continue to do the ideas presented in the weeks before.

Week 1:
Email and internet are time traps. It’s too easy to start following links that people send you or things that are interesting to you (but not necessary). Before you know it, you are on the internet for over an hour and your life is none-the-better for it.

This week:
- No internet/email after you get home from work.
- Limit weekend internet/email to 15 minutes at lunch and 15 minutes in the evening. Skip the evening internet/email session if your life doesn’t depend on it.

1 - Prioritize emails first. If you have time left, surf the net.
2 - Delete emails that friends send you that are just diversionary links to stuff that you know are just ‘hey, this is funny’ – these are big time traps that don’t enhance your life.
3 - Automatically delete emails from people that just ‘forward’ links from others.
4 - Set a timer if needed to keep yourself in check

READING ASSIGNMENT: Start reading the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. This book is indispensible in getting rid of things that don’t really enhance your life.

Week 3:

Cell phones are another time vacuum. And let’s not talk about texting. What percent of your time on the phone or time spent texting is actually beneficial to your life and accomplishes something important?

You can save several hours per week in eliminating wasteful talking and texting and creating ‘new time’ for you or your family. This will be tough – it all depends on how important it is to you to be ‘connected’. People spend so much time talking on the phone and texting – especially today’s teenagers, instead of thinking, doing and creating. Being a part of the ‘social revolution’ has it’s downside as it’s incredibly addictive and accomplishes very little.

This week:

1 - Let your cell phone go to the message box if you are not expecting a call. Feel free to check the mailbox to make sure it’s not an emergency. The goal is to not let the initial point of the conversation evolve into meaningless and non-life enhancing chit-chat.

2 - Keep your conversations on topic and to the point – even limit them to 5 minutes.

3 - If you are driving, don’t answer or instead pull over to the side of the road or into a parking lot to talk. Don’t make the roads any more hazardous than they already are with other drivers driving under the influence with the increasing amount of electronic distractions in our society.

4 - Eliminate texting except for business purposes. It’s incredibly addictive without adding any real value to your life.

Week 4:

Continue to do the ideas from weeks 1-3.

We are unplugging this weekend and every 4rth week from here on out. No cell phone (except for emergencies), no TV, no video games – no distractions from our family time.

1 - Create an auto responder for your emails to this effect saying that you will be offline during the weekend and if there is an emergency to call you - though let it go to message first. Resist the urge to fall into the trap of mindless chit-chat during any emergency phone-calls. Frequently, the world will not end if we don’t fire off an email reply within 30 minutes of getting an email. The world doesn’t really revolve around us and will not come to a halt if we don’t respond fast.

2 - Plan ahead this week for activities to do with your family.

3 - Find a scenic vista (mountain, ocean, sunset, etc) to go to and just enjoy 30 minutes of silence.

Week 5:

You have hopefully made some good changes to your life by now and have started taking some time back for you or your family. This week we are working on further life optimizations. Make a list of EVERYTHING you normally do down to half-hour increments. Do this by month or by week depending on how regular (or irregular) your schedule is during the month. Place a checkmark next to necessary things you NEED to do, place and ‘X’ next to things that either: don’t really positively add value to your life and things that you can perhaps offload to someone else to do (work stuff) – even pay them to do it if the time saved is worth it. Just don’t fill that newly found time with other ‘busy stuff’. Make sure the new time goes to your family or improving yourself.

If you are reading the 80/20 book, this is in-line with the premise that 80 percent of what we do does not really add positively to our lives. It’s the 20% that contributes to 80% of our success, wealth and happiness.

One of the most powerful ideas I have implemented is to create a checklist of only 2-4 items that NEED to be done per day. No more than four though! These items are the 20% of the things you do that create 80% of your income or gets the most important things done everyday. Hopefully you can fill the other 50-80% of the things you do everyday with things that enrich your life. Do these things without ANY distractions. Just knock them out one right after the other and don’t leave your seat until done with all of them.

Frequently we wait until the last deadline moment to accomplish the really important things or projects. We drag it out over days or weeks where once done, they actually only took several hours of focused worked but in the meantime ate up hours and hours of time being distracted away from the real work. Remember book reports?

Try to eliminate another 5 hours per week or 20 hours per month of ‘unnecessary’ work from this list. This sounds like a lot but only ends up being 5% of our time awake during a month. Some examples are:

1 - Unnecessary driving – don’t go to the store if you just need one item! This is a waste of time and gas. Plan ahead and try to do all of your shopping at once to take advantage of efficiencies.

2 - This is a great principle to use if you are self-employed or work from home. Many times we create unnecessary work that really doesn’t contribute to our happiness, wealth or the immediate job.
--> OPTIONAL READING: The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss.

3 – Do you pay your bills everytime they come in? Can you pay them all at once or twice per month only?

*Find more example like this. When listing all the areas you spend your time, look for the same things that you do multiple times per week or month that you can perhaps reduce the frequency of doing them.

Week 6:

Start and continue a monthly or every 2 month counseling session. I know, I know…”I don’t need counseling…I am fully aware of myself.” This may be true but all too often I notice that even if we are aware of our problems and shortcomings, we don’t know how to truly AFFECT CHANGE. And don’t even think that counseling is a sign of weakness or ‘disease’. It’s not. It’s a way of enacting change where you otherwise have a hard time doing. Or just don’t know how. Counseling also acts as a necessary pressure relief valve if you are a person that keeps your feelings to yourself.

Counseling has been invaluable for me, first to be very introspective of myself, my feelings and ‘what makes me truly happy.’ We need to focus on the daily events that will put us to sleep with a satisfying smile on our face. We want to go to sleep knowing that the day has been ‘lived to its fullest’ and not just living today to prepare for tomorrow, repeat, with little satisfaction. Second, counseling on a regular basis (monthly) will make sure we don’t fall into our old bad habits that we have tried hard to correct.

Are there seemingly hopeless situations that make you generally unhappy, angry or depressed and drain all of your mental energies? Counseling will allow you to:

Remove yourself from the situation, change it or accept it totally (Tolle). This sounds easy but from personal experience, it’s not. Once you can apply one of these three principles to an unhappy situation, then and only then you can be truly liberated.

READING ASSIGNMENT:
The Power of Now – Echart Tolle
Read the first two chapters to get familiar with the concepts and how the author speaks, then start the book over again and it will be a lot easier reading. Try to read this book without any outside distractions. If you are a person that is dealing with undesirable situations that are mentally draining or that make you unhappy or angry, this book will be invaluable.

Week 7:

These next ideas are easy, quick and painless.

1 - Most of us drive to work in the morning. TURN OFF THE RADIO. THINK. Plan your day. Get rid of things that won’t enhance it. Optimize and enhance your day before it starts. This is also a good time to think about certain goals to further improve your life or to accomplish something that you have always wanted to do. Beware, don’t obsess about your goals and getting them done. Simply put the actions into place to reach your goals. Obsessing about the future doesn’t allow us to live in the ‘now’.

2 – At every meal - breakfast, lunch and dinner, divide up the portions on the plate into 4 equal quarters. The first quarter is a meat product (fish, chicken), the second is your carbohydrate source (potato, rice) the third quarter is a vegetable and the fourth quarter is another vegetable or fruit. The important concept is to have every portion EQUAL in size. Typically we make the vegetables and fruits smaller in size than the meat and carbohydrate portions - consequently over-eating in calories.

3 – As athletes and people who want to lose weight, we want to eat smaller meals 5-6x per day. To prevent over-eating, eat all of your meals on the smaller ‘salad’ plates. Throw-out the big plates. If you are still hungry after your first serving, have a little more meat and eat more fruits and vegetables.

--> When eating out and the food comes to your table, ask immediately for a take-home bag and put half of the meal into it for leftovers. Society’s restaurant portions encourage overeating with giant plates filled with lot’s of food.

--> A lot of us go to Subway or a similar fast-food place. A whole footlong is very unnecessary – but we eat it anyway because it’s hard to stop. If you want to lose weight, even 6 inches is usually too many calories especially when adding in the cheese and condiments. Get the footlong and have them cut it up into quarters. Eat the quarter and supplement with fruits and vegetables and a glass of Milk (Soy or Regular). Save the rest for lunch for the next few days.

*Of course if you are a very active athlete and train at or above the half-Ironman level, you probably can eat what you want as you will be burning it training. Do your homework to make sure you are getting enough calories in for your training as most of these tips are geared for those looking to lose some weight.

Week 8:

This is another weekend to unplug, see week 4.

Re-evaluate all of the weeks before this and figure out what you did good at and what needs improved. We need to always strive to refine, if we don’t, we will slip into old habits again.

Feel free to repeat this 8 week training plan.