I made the conscious decision a few weeks ago to hire an online coach for my training and nutrition. Through trial and error and some inquisitive research, I feel like I have amassed a solid general knowledge of most things lifting and nutrition. I can write workout plans for myself all day, and I know how to work my way into figuring out my calories, macros, and staple meals to accomplish those.

In my golf days, I had a similar foundational knowledge. I knew how to swing a golf club. I knew what my bad tendencies were in the swing. I knew the cause of most poor results, yet I still continued to work with a coach on my game.

Sometimes having a second set of eyes is all you need to get across the hump to where you are trying to get to. While I know how to lift and eat, there’s something to be said about having that second opinion that can 1) switch things up for you 2) make adjustments on the fly as needed and 3) (maybe the most important) act as an accountability source for you to stay focused on the week-to-week work.

I am going through the next 90 days with a coach to attempt to get a little leaner (under 10% body fat), a little stronger (core strength movements), and a little faster (lighter on my feet, more speed work). Through the process, I want to learn some things that I can share here, while also talking about the process of having a coach, the ebbs and flows of a 90-day goal period, and other adjacent topics.

I’m fired up to get to work. Day 1 today - I want to make these next 90 days the most focused I have ever had. Let’s have a day -

Brain - A Habit Strategy from “Seinfeld”

We all unanimously agree that effective habits are good for our mental and physical well-being. Most of us have good intentions about engraining new habits so we can get to our desired destination or goal. What remains true for everyone is that over a long period, these habits are hard to keep up and automate.

Whether you believe in the old adage that it takes “21 days to create a habit” or some of the newer research that says maybe it’s closer to 66 days, the point remains the same that a new habit takes weeks to months of effort to instill to the point it’s automated. Even then, habits take continual work and focus, and sometimes it’s helpful to enlist some mental games with yourself to keep them rolling.

Enter this piece of advice from the one and only Jerry Seinfeld on his habit trick when pursuing becoming a better comedian. Jerry set a macro goal of “becoming a better comic.” He believed that the best way to become a better comic was to write better jokes and that writing jokes every day would yield the desired result over time.

Even for a comedian, sitting down to write jokes has it’s high days and low days. Sometimes they would flow off the top of his head, sometimes that dreaded writer’s block was an insurmountable wall. The important thing in Seinfeld’s mind was that he wrote every day - good or bad.

His trick was this - put a calendar on your wall (or somewhere routinely visible) and make a big red “X” through the day you completed the habit. Continue to do so for the next several days - complete the habit, make an X, complete the habit, make an X. After a few days, those individual X’s have formed a chain, and now your responsibility is to not break the chain.

This simple gamification can keep us engaged, even on our lowest days. If your goal is to read every day, use the calendar to not break the chain. If your goal is to work out 5 days a week - pre “x” some of your calendar slots for your 2 rest days, then again - don’t break the chain.

You will be successful with this method if your desire for the end result is strong enough and this system is in front of your face. And eventually, you might even fall off the wagon. The important thing is to get back onto starting to build the next chain you work not to break.

What can you start a chain of Xs for today?

Body - Track Your Nutrition with MyFitnessPal

If you’re like me and are looking to lean down into and through the summer, your ability to accurately track and monitor your nutrition will be a key driver for or against your success.

An honest fault of mine is that I have on-and-off tracked my calories and macros for several periods over the last decade or so. The area of fault often just occurs when I let my foot off the gas for an extended period and rely on eyeballing my food. I’ve weighed my protein for years - I have an idea of what 6 oz of chicken looks like. The problem is, if I am not making the exact progress I’d like to be making (which I am not), then chances are I am not 100% spot on with my calories through the eyeball method.

The science is simple - eat less than you burn, and you lose weight. Which is why over the next 90 days, I am going to be 100% on my food tracking through the app MyFitnessPal. If you are not familiar, I would say that it is the best tool I have found online so far for ease of use and feature sets for tracking your calories and macros.

It has most foods in there - it’s easy to adjust servings - and it will give you the ability to look at both your daily and weekly totals to make sure you are on track. There’s a neuro component as well to this - tracking your food has been shown to reduce the amount you eat. Think about it - no one when honest wants to enter in the desert they snuck in. That little friction is sometimes enough to prevent the act from taking place.

The app can be slightly overwhelming at first, so I am sharing this article on getting set up and some tips and tricks: Click Here

A couple of my favorite tips:

• If you see yourself using the app regularly, get the premium. It comes with the “Barcode Scanner” option (that used to be free!) which allows you to directly scan the barcode on foods both at home and in the store, pulling it its macros into your daily food log.

• Copying Meals - If you eat similar meals multiple days a week, when you go to log a meal, there are three little dots that you can click. “Copy From Date” will appear, allowing you to select a meal from a specific day. This eliminates the need to find every food

• Desktop - Use the desktop for entering in your food when possible. It is much faster to navigate when time allows

My macros to start these 90 days are 2265 Calories, 200g protein, 220g carbs, 60g fats. Let’s dial it in together -

Book - Chop Wood Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf

Once a year I find my way back to this short little motivational book - Chop Wood Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf. Utilizing a parable-like story of a kid working to achieve his lifelong dream of becoming a samurai warrior, the book centers around falling in love with the process of becoming great.

It’s 130 pages long - tiny chapters - a quick read, and an even quicker listen. Year after year though, I still pull a couple of things from the metaphorical reminders in the text.

Sometimes the everyday self-help title can read like a textbook. They’re scientific and pointed for a reason, but every once in a while it’s nice to mix in an off-speed pitch like this. It’s an easily comprehendible read, but one you’ll see mentioned in the locker rooms of pro sports teams and the board rooms of Fortune 500 companies.

A few good pulls from my highlights to get you started:

• “Patience and persistence are the keys to achieving greatness”

• “Everyone wants to be great, until it’s time to do what greatness requires.”

• “Dream BIG. Start small. Be ridiculously faithful.”

• “I know that it seems like life is unfair right now, and you want things to be easier, but the rough side of the mountain will actually prepare you for life much better than the smooth side. Believe it or not, the setbacks of today can quickly become the forging blades of greatness for tomorrow. In fact, a wise man once said, “hardship often prepares ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”