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Nature never hurries, yet everything gets done.  — Tao Te Ching

My good friend Rosie Taylor, a yoga teacher of nearly 30 years, has a wonderful saying, “after ecstasy comes the laundry.” This saying has always stuck with me and is deep with layers of meaning. No matter what your peak moment of ecstasy, whether it’s religious or spiritual fervor, making money, setting a new personal record, or winning a championship, most life and training boils down to the seemingly mundane, daily grind. Learning to bring awareness into the normal, daily work can bring us happiness in life and transfer to performance in surprising ways.

What Now?

This challenge can be especially obvious in the gym or training hall when athletes get addicted to chasing the high of constant progress and the setting of personal records. They are riding on the excitement of small rewards and the immediate tangible sense of accomplishment that comes with a moment of perceived victory or success over a challenge provides. While not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, this behavior can be a trap because, as many of us know; the longer you train, the less you get back for twice the work (law of diminishing returns).

This can also happen when an athlete accomplishes an amazing goal like competing at a high level for the first time or winning a competition. Afterward, there can be a sense of “what now?”. Sometimes singularly goal-oriented people may even experience depression or anxiety and have trouble navigating normal life after achieving the highest honors and accolades in their chosen endeavor. The high was so high and the experience was so intense that the drop on the other end is devastating.

The same can be true for many other situations where there are large peaks and valleys in the emotional experience that create a huge chemical dump. This can make intense experiences as addicting as any food, drug, or gambling out there. Let’s face it, our modern industrialized and technology-based culture makes it easy to fall into the cycle of instant gratification, neophilism, and outcome-based thinking, rather than a process-oriented approach that ultimately leads to longer term happiness and serenity.  

Pleasure in the Daily Grind

The fact that so much of life and sport is beyond our control, that having a stenciled expectation of a particular outcome leaves little flexibility. Not only can this lead to heavy disappointment but also limits our palette of possibilities in situations that require real-time creativity and problem-solving. In this way too much focus on goal-oriented thinking can potentially be a handicap if it is not used properly.  

Being able to take pleasure in the daily grind, the chopping wood and carrying water of each day, allows us to take a conscious approach to any behavior we engage in and bring it back into our performance. This behavioral bias better brings us into flow states, and connects us to  “the zone”, and then ultimately to perform better than we may have been able to imagine.

Performing the most menial of tasks with full attention helps us connect the dots between various behaviors we engage in whether training or non-training related, and develop a deeper understanding of what it is we are actually doing and what it’s doing to/for us. Staying mentally connected with skill development in our chosen endeavor may seem less sexy than going big every day. However, in the moments that really matter if the laundry is done it leaves us to focus our full attention on pinnacle moments when they arise.

Embodying a process-based way of thinking also keeps us humble. We ride the crests and troughs of life more easily, and we can then truly enjoy the highest of highs because we know that this too is impermanent and that life will fall back to a lower and less exciting rhythm. This waxing and waning is ultimately in accordance with Nature.

It’s ok to have goals and to be excited about achieving them. However, keeping a balanced perspective that allows us to fully participate in our own process will allow the best version of reality to unfold. So partake fully in your moments of ecstasy, wherever they may reveal themselves. But to remember that the balance of peace in the mundane is what makes those moments possible.

When it comes to sport, especially endurance, the ability to suffer can not only mean the difference between a good and a great race, but can determine whether you cross the finish line at all. Developing the grit and willpower to deal with, push through, and rise above the discomfort, pain and doubt of race day can be a lifelong goal. But how do we get there?

Go for the Ride

Willing herself through suffering is something our own Erin MacKenzie, 2x Olympic Gold Medalist in rowing, is known for. Small for rowers’ standards (long levers make long strokes), the
competitive advantage Erin developed and now coaches her athletes to use is grit. That seed was planted by one of Erin’s mentors who would tell her before every big race that no one could out-suffer her. Erin kept those words close and turned them into her own personal mantra as she sat at the starting line on race day. It didn’t matter if that were actually true, and it didn’t matter what Erin’s ability to suffer was compared to anyone else. What mattered was that she believed it. She used it to push herself through when she felt fatigue set in or even when her team was losing in the last 500m of the race.  The race was never over until the finish line.  

For Brian, watching his wife endure and succeed through her Olympic training solidified for him the power of purpose with singular focus. “When Erin’s training became difficult, she never quit; instead when emotions and her tired body got the best of her, she’d change her recovery strategies: get more sleep, eat more healthy fats, add another massage appt. In time her outlook changed. Winning gold like Erin at the Olympics is the stuff of our dreams. We downplay the difficulties in training and romanticize the highs, but training is ups and downs, and life includes seasons. Life is change. You must go up, and you must come down. You cannot control life’s peaks and valleys, but you can go for the ride.”

Stay Mindful of Your Goal

Whether we’re aiming for Olympic gold or aiming for the victory of a personal PR, all sports require grit. Running a marathon for three or four hours hurts. The pain and deterioration that accompany running 100 miles for 25 or 30 hours really hurts. Failing at setting a new Squat Max sucks. Being stuck at the same Squat Max PR for months on end really sucks. No matter the distance or goal, your motivation for why you started in the first place can help push you through the pain. Grit is the ability to push through that temporary discomfort for a longer term goal. A goal that nothing will stop.

Whether your training seems too hard or is flowing just right, whether your life is peaking or kicking you in the nuts, remember that action is king. We can sit around with our doubts, letting them weigh us down into inaction. Or we can get up, go back outside, and go around our doubts. It’s always harder to move a parked car.

Beyond sport, grit can help you succeed in business or in whatever activities you pursue. Humans are wired to want to push further. We like to explore the boundaries of our comfort zones. We want to do more, go further, make our pursuits more difficult. Being curious about your self-perceived limitations will help push you through everyday challenges.

Change Your Reaction

We all have ups and downs, and we all have moments of doubt when we question our choices.  When (not if) you feel those deep valleys of physical and mental pain, when you want to quit, when you want to do anything else but what you are doing right now, practice changing your reaction to the pain. You don’t need to ignore the pain, just be with it. Ask yourself where it hurts, can I take just one more step, and most importantly is there anything I can do right now to alleviate this feeling.

We concentrate on skill first and foremost in Shift because it gives you a toolbox to solve your own pain and dysfunction when the going gets tough. By reasoning with yourself and breaking down the problem you may just solve it. Suffering is a skill just like running, biking, swimming, and rowing. While you practice your ideal technique, also practice your ideal reactions to stress.

It’s common in our society today to seek short-term solutions in exchange for big gains. But compare the costs of short-term gains, which often come with a hefty price, versus long-term lifestyle changes, which may take longer but often yield longer term success. Short term, for example, we’ve seen athletes who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s are now metabolically dysfunctional due to quick fixes for energy (sugar, fructose, glucose, dextrose, etc… simple carbohydrates), and never allowing their bodies to actually get good at burning fat. Metabolically, that liver filtering process has allowed us to survive on this planet for more than three million years. The ability to eat and then not have to eat for a couple of days – for our ancestors due to physical survival – shows what our bodies are capable of when functioning correctly.

Extreme Feats

The human body is capable of extreme feats. We like to look at nature as extreme, when in fact we actually are a part of nature. We have just removed ourselves through convenience and technology. More or less convincing ourselves we can outwit nature through short-term solutions. With that have we forgotten what we’re capable of?

In 1966 Angus Barbieri, a 26-year-old Scotsman, endured 382 days without eating anything. He started the fast at a grossly obese 456 pounds and after more than a year of only ingesting liquids, he ended his fast more than a year later at 180 pounds. While not a feat suggested for most, Barbieri’s fast and loss of body fat is evidence of what our bodies are capable of when functioning correctly. So is that an extreme feat? Or was it his body returning to stasis?

Consider also the nature’s greatest endeavor, the behavior of the emperor penguin, whose male species stand in a circle to protect newly laid eggs for two months, huddled together against the harsh Antarctic environment. During this extended babysitting, male emperor penguins do not eat. We are enamored with these animals, with these seemingly extreme feats. But those emperor penguins are part of our same ecosystem. Those feats are not extreme; they’re by design what the animals are designed to do. In fact, man has been found to have existed in the arctic circle 10,000 years prior to when we thought he could have been there… he did not have Patagonia to help. So what are you designed to do, human animal?

Find Your Fuel

Of course, if you were to feed sugar to any animal in the wild, they’ll come back for more. Introduce us to sweets and we want more as well. But be aware of what’s happening to you metabolically when you ingest sugar, and it’s quick transition to glucose, and bypass gluconeogenesis all together. Be aware of the chemical reactions that can change your performance for the long term. When we depend on fast-acting sugar we get hungry quickly, we bonk, we develop many of the diseases that are prevalent today. When we are dependent on fast-acting sugar, we enter a constant feeding and purging cycle where the body is unable to break down stored fat. We’ve seen a profound number of athletes who relied on almost solely carbohydrates and are now paying the price with diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, or obesity. At a resting state, you have 2,000 calories of glycogen available in your system for immediate use as fuel. Additionally, you have more than 40,000 calories of fat that’s available for fuel. Whether you’re an endurance athlete or not, which system would you rather have access to? It’s simple. Enter quality food, because real food requires real breakdown, and most of the time we don’t get the fast reactions because whether it be plants, animals or fats they require more of a breakdown and make you more efficient at oxidizing fat. If you stay away from high-glycemic carbohydrates, you’re left with real food: leafy green vegetables, and fats and proteins from quality ethically treated sources.

Making Changes

If you decide to change how you eat and how you fuel as an athlete, we recommend the following:

1.     Try not to make too many changes at once. Making changes requires you to be in a good place, and if your body is craving sugar it will be more difficult to make proper decisions. Make nutritional changes and not too many others. Once those changes become habit, continue to transition to non-processed foods by including high-carb vegetables such as yams, roots and carbohydrates with fiber.
2.     Understand that any change may include a difficult adjustment period. If you’ve been eating poorly, you’ll undergo a detox process similar to detoxing from drugs. This process comes with an understanding that anything worth having requires weathering this storm.
3.     Learn how to fast, even for a 12-hour period. This could be the time between dinner and breakfast the next day. The body has a way of cleaning itself when you fast.

By Rob Wilson

In so many languages the word for spirit, breath, and life are synonymous. Is this merely a fun coincidence, or is there a deeper understanding of this profound connection that humans have had for a long time? Developing even a basic understanding of the breath connects to our deeper physiology in a profound and meaningful that would be hard to overstate.

While our ancestors may not have had the scientific jargon available to describe the physiological components of breathing they nevertheless had millennia of experiential data and encoded the importance of this subtle and powerful awareness into words, some of which are words used in common vernacular and in esoteric disciplines as well.

These similarities in prescribing a singular word to describe these phenomena, across what are in every other way very different human cultures, speaks to the fundamental keystone that breath represents in the human experience. While some of the verbiage from ancient esoteric disciplines is lost on our modern ears where we often prefer scientific nomenclature over more poetic descriptions, it’s important to not lose sight of the simple fact that hidden in these words is a deep human connection to the breath.

Qi/Chi (Chinese), Ki (Japanese/Korean), Prana (Sanskrit), Spiritus (Latin), Dukh (Russian), Anda (old Norse), and Neshumah (Hebrew) are just a handful of examples of ancient words meaning not only subtle energy as the Eastern traditions often use them, but are also synonymous with breath and the force of life itself. In Hawaii, the term for foreigner, ha’ole, literally means without breath. As the Hawaiians observed that the early Europeans who arrived on the islands breathed inattentively during prayer and thus had no spirit. Whether you buy into this romantic notion one thing is for sure; the ancients had a deeper appreciation for breathing than most of us in today’s modern climate.

Breathing is something we mostly take for granted. On average humans take 23,040 breaths per day, 8,409,600 breaths per year, and a whopping 600+ million breaths in a lifetime. Breathing is the fundamental life-giving force in our bodies. We can go weeks without food, days without water, but only minutes without air. Yet, of all the nutrients it gets the least credence. We are paying attention to how we move, how we eat, and our hydration (fanatically so at times in sport and fitness), but we give breathing a miniscule amount of psychological energy. We take it almost wholly for granted. Until it’s gone that is. If you’ve ever choked (or been choked), spent time pinned under water, or just trained to your full cardiorespiratory capacity you have come face to face with just how important air is. Unfortunately, human beings are often short sighted. When the emergency lights go off we forget all about it and resume our normal behavior.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Just as we can bring awareness into any other aspect of our lives, taking on a breathing practice is just as much about controlling our minds and being centered in the present moment as it is about having greater dominion over our biochemistry. In fact one could argue that these are two descriptions for the same phenomena. Maybe the ancients had more right than we give them credit for? An interesting example of this is how the cadence breath of apnea training 1:4:2 (inhale:hold:exhale) is the same instruction given to yogis to raise energy* in their bodies and ultimately control subconscious physiological processes (read autonomic nervous system). This same pattern of using the breath to control the body/mind continuum is seen in spiritual practices the world over and is found in warrior disciplines both feudal (samurai “hara”) and modern (marksmanship involves breath hold on trigger pull). These all boil down to the fundamental concepts of  and therefore extend a more powerful influence into the world in which we live. Whether this is through sports performance, combat, or just in relationships with our fellow human beings.

Archaic terms such as Ki, prana, and the like are just symbolic representations of the ideas that breath, energy, and life are tied together in an unbreakable way that penetrates deep into what it means to be a human being. These words are symbols that express root ideas so that we can communicate more clearly with one another and remind us of the fundamental importance that this understated aspect of our physiology holds. Knowing this is the first step to knowing yourself through breath.

 

*Kundalini, The Arousal of the Inner Energy, Ajit Moorkerjee

You may have seen the announcements for our upcoming Art of Breath clinics. As we finalize details for spreading the benefits of breath training worldwide, we’d like to share our journey and what we’ve learned along the way.

We’ve spent the past several years focused on training our muscular and cardiovascular systems, but have paid little to no attention to our pulmonary system. The potential health benefits are numerous, starting with an improvement in overall health simply by breathing in more oxygen and expelling more carbon dioxide.

The Importance of Breathing in Sport and Overall Wellness

Our emphasis on the importance of breathing in sport and for overall wellness has evolved over the past four years. Through our work with Training Mask we gained better motor control and access to the diaphragm. Any resistance breathing device like the Training Mask or Expand-a-Lung can help, especially during warm-ups and when used alone for breathing exercises (full inhales and full exhales for 2–3 minutes). We combined that work with the teachings of Wim Hof and realized that breathing was the missing piece; the link between our body of work and the goals we set for ourselves as athletes and coaches. This led to many other practices, including Yoga (Prana), the Freediving and Big Wave Riding communities, and even Brain Training. From the education and experiences, we developed a trove of breathing techniques specifically for our athletes who are looking for better athletic performance and improved overall health, as there is not one method that fits all.

Most of the athletes with whom we worked, including ourselves, did not know or understand how to take in a full breath of air. We were shallow chest breathers. And the more we worked with it, the more we realized that not taking in enough air comes down to issues with position, which is the foundation of our Shift training philosophy. In a good position you move well. Well guess what – in a good position you also breathe well.

Humans only use 15% of our lung capacity, but 70% of our toxins are removed through respiration, which poses a problem when we aren’t using our pulmonary system to its full capacity. Look at our lives, at our movement. If we aren’t moving well we aren’t breathing well, and if we aren’t breathing well we aren’t reaping the full health benefits.

Start Your Own Breathing Practice

Start your own breath practice by learning how to access your diaphragm. Usually by just using a straw, you can mimic diaphragmatic breathing by fully inhaling and fully exhaling for 5 to 10 minutes a day (this supplies enough resistance to engage the diaphragm and gets us to make positional changes). That’s all it will take to change your physiology. To make you feel better. Don’t hold your breath – just inhale a smooth, long deep breath with a full smooth exhale.

Once you have the mechanics down, use the Breath Test + Calculator to help dial in your own Breathing Protocol to help increase your capacity and practice your consciousness of breath.  Use the Apnea Breathing for down regulation to help you recover and get a good night’s sleep. And use the Cadence Breathing Protocol for up regulation to help warm up your respiratory system for a workout or just to get up and going in the morning.

If you want to further your practice, keep an eye for an Art of Breath Clinic coming your way.  These clinics will offer a much more refined and fundamental approach to breathing methods and how they benefit sport performance and overall wellness. The clinics will be experiential, and will introduce the physiology, anatomy and practical uses of many traditional breathing methods and resistance breathing devices, along with some of the newer hyperventilating techniques.  

What does it take to build a habit?

Short answer: celebrate yourself.

Long answer: in order to build a beneficial sequence of habits, a few things are necessary:

• find a direction
• create a plan for travel to the destination
• celebrate the little victories along the way.

To break things down, think of any plan that you’ve ever executed. It first starts with a vision, execution, and then, often celebrating over pizza and beers. This will be no different (maybe no pizza or beer this time).

To give an example, imagine yourself setting the lifetime goal of running the Boston Marathon. After establishing the goal, what do you do? Your first action should be to find out what it’s going to take to make this goal attainable. How many daily hours are you willing to put in? What sacrifices are you willing to make? The things that become unimportant and unnecessary in your life are quickly flagged in this step of the process.

Now, between starting and completing the roadmap that you have established, there are surely things that you have done both correctly and incorrectly. I want to emphasize on the positive side of things here — if every decision you make from day 1 has been in a direction to help yourself get to Boston, that’s worth celebrating. Whether it’s getting up at the scheduled training time every day, PRing your 5k, or even sticking to a clean meal plan, celebrate it. Nothing is too small for celebration. In my opinion, building the habit of celebration for small victories might be the most important ritual for success.

Before you know it, you’ve reached the destination. Now what? 

It’s important to realize that you are a creature with endless potential. That said, with your most recent goal attained, find a new one. In a very traditional progression, maybe you’re after a longer race? Or maybe you want to go faster or re-qualify? Either way, make sure that your next step is in a positive direction. Get into the habit of continuously establishing and connecting goals for yourself. You are never NOT good enough for something… reach for the lofty goals. Go out and prove everyone who may have ever doubted you or your abilities wrong. Including yourself. 

By Brian MacKenzie and Rachael Colacino

It’s holiday time. Responsibilities mount, travel devours free time, good habits slip. With the start of the new year close, it can be tempting to deny good habits and practices until after the holidays. But no matter when you begin or resume beneficial, purposeful habits, keep in mind constant learning and openness, or what we like to call the White Belt Mentality.

Children who practice martial arts early in life learn the beneficial habits of structure. For adults who begin martial arts later in life, the practice of martial arts offers a developed system where the habits of respect and honor are part of a time-honored tradition.

Starting a new sport as an adult means starting at the beginning, as a literal or figurative white belt. This is where the superior mental training inherent in martial arts gets it right by requiring a mentality of openness to learning whether you’re a black belt or not. That’s what’s missing in other sports these days: there’s no humility, we’re not open to newer thinking or other ideas. This can lead to a dangerous place whether you’re an elite athlete or a weekend warrior. If we stop learning, if we halt the learning process; we may overlook valuable information, including why we’re broken or injured.

Consider then the habits you establish along the way. Are you training no matter what? Or are you listening to your body? Training is essential; we need to move and that’s why we train. One-thousand years ago, we didn’t need to train because life didn’t provide a level of comfort that muted movement. We moved all the time because we had to; we needed food or shelter, or we needed to hide, or we were at war. It wasn’t an Amazon Prime world, an iPhone world. Now we have conveniences in a world we’ve developed to remove us from what nature absolutely provides.

Which is not to say that you need to shun convenience. But what you do need to do is create habits that allow you to evolve to a more well-rounded, constantly learning human. Whether you’re dealing with movement issues or chronic pain or unhealthy eating habits, it’s no one’s fault or responsibility but your own. That’s what habits are – your pattern for dealing with pain, for understanding your own pain. Pain can force motivation for many of us, but not until it’s unbearable enough to force those changed habits. If the pain isn’t pervasive enough, we don’t make the lifestyle changes because we’re comfortable. Use the White Belt Mentality to learn what you need.

There’s substance in creating consistent habits in a daily movement routine. Are you tumbling, running, jumping? Are you engaging in fundamental human movements? The same ideas apply to food and your habits and relationship to what you eat. If you seek out carby, sugary foods at night, what will it take to create a new habit? And when will you be in enough pain or discomfort to make changes?

By Jeff Ford

Six Steps When Adding Strength for Your Sport

The first time you witness someone put ketchup on their eggs, you might be taken aback. Or maybe it requires observing peanut butter placed on a hamburger to really throw you for a loop. No matter the subject discussed, weird combinations are always slow to acceptance. It takes time for others to dip their feet in the cold water before a number of people dive into the experience.

In the triathlon world, you receive very little exposure to new training methods. It is usually the same four phases of training touted in a season that’s per iodized: preparation, base, build and peak/race. Most of the ingredients are comprised of swim, bike and run with very little strength in the later parts of the year. Now by no means do I believe that strength training will take the place of sport nor should it take over, but I’m asking you to look at strength for your sport in two ways: as a diagnostic tool and an activity to build your ideal positions.

By Jeff Ford

A training plan with less time & more varied intensity can achieve great results

By Brian MacKenzie and Rachael Colacino

The call for prioritized strength and conditioning in endurance sports has amplified as more athletes see that uninterrupted training and victorious races require healthy and strong bodies. However, the method behind the strength and conditioning prescription for endurance athletes is not the same for all endurance sports. To create more resilient and durable sport athletes, we follow a methodology at Shift that creates a foundation of stability and professional loading to solidify the fundamental positions of each sport.

Two Distinct Approaches
The largest misconception in endurance sports is that running, swimming, biking and rowing are solely aerobic activities. Aerobic capacity is only part of the training equation. At issue is tissue-related degeneration, a breakdown of the tissues impacted most by repetitive motions in a singular plane. You land around 300 times in 400m. Now multiply that by how much distance you cover in a week. That’s a lot of eccentric loading, which causes the tissue breakdown. There are two ways to rectify that breakdown. One approach requires the higher volume – perform your sport with more volume, or longer time on feet. Tissue damage occurs inevitably; the tissue repairs itself and builds up. The recovery process here, requires a lot of time. The second approach prescribes specific conditioning exercises to mitigate tissue damage, and develop stronger (not to be confused with bigger) tissue so we don’t need to spend as much of our precious energy on volume, but can instead develop better positioning through strength and conditioning for stronger and more resilient tissues. This process does not require as much time to recover once adaptation has occurred. Guess which approach we favor?

Sport-Specific Strength Training
When we have an adaptation that occurs with one specific repeated movement, such as running, we neglect other areas. A conjugate system, however, keeps the body guessing as we tax it in similar, but slightly varied ways. For example, back, front and overhead squats are all squats, but all work to stress the system in different ways. A runner spends much of their sport time anteriorly loaded (knee bent or knee forward). That runner may want to mitigate tissue degradation in that position by focusing on a front squat, which will reinforce a stronger, more upright torso.

Isometric holds are another important member of our strength matrix. Every athlete passes through very specific positions when body weight is connected to a point of support. For runners, that happens when our foot contacts the ground beneath our body weight. For cyclists, when our feet are at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock pedal positions. For a rower it’s at the catch and a swimmer it’s when the hand enters the water, the catch phase as well. Training isometric holds in those static positions ingrains a lot of the proper positioning and stability for movements we expect from our bodies for hours on end as long as fundamentals are applied.

This type of training — complete, conjugate, and sport-specific — allows for greater understanding through body awareness when we start to break down and toe the line on our power, speed or endurance thresholds. Strength training for your sports positions and movements allows for the tissue to hold up in ways it had no way of navigating before.