Self-Improvement

The Daily Man-Up: Things I Wish I Knew 8 Years Ago About Lifting Weights

October 29, 2020 Leave a Comment

There have been many times where I was dead-set on being right about things, only to later find out I was wrong.

That’s the beauty of exercise and strength training: continuing to learn and grow. You should never be complacent with what you know. Buy books, read articles, ask around your gym. You can only benefit from this. You can add to what you already have in your arsenal and become a complete package. Here are some things I wish I knew when I started 8 years ago. (Disclaimer: this is mainly directed at beginners, but some of these things may be new to you even if you’ve been lifting for some time)

The Daily Man-Up: Take 100% Responsibility For The Way Your Life Is Now

October 16, 2020 Leave a Comment

(photo: @michaelhardy)

Take 100% responsibility for the way your life is now. The good, the bad and the ugly. Accept that it’s all you. No one else to blame. It was your fault. And forgive yourself completely. You will see that the process of self improvement will become much easier.

The Daily Man-Up: Why You Should Meditate

October 12, 2020 Leave a Comment

meditation

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom – Viktor E. Frankl

Meditation is a great way to make that “space” bigger, as are several kinds of self reflection. Watching yourself in the moment, seeing where your thoughts take you without judgement, helps you to understand your own mind. It isn’t easy, and it takes time to develop this awareness of your own response, but over time your ability to change your response (in this case steer away from certain thoughts and toward better ones) does get better.

The Daily Man-Up

October 8, 2020 Leave a Comment

8 Uncomfortable lessons that we all need to learn

1. Your self-love must be stronger than your desire to be loved

If you’re not happy now, there’s no amount of followers, positive social media comments, or Instagram likes that will change that. External validation isn’t happiness – it’s a hamster wheel. Validation is an inside job. The most convincing sign that someone is truly living their “best life”, is their lack of desire to show the world that they’re living their best life. Your “best life” won’t seek external validation, but insecurity continually will.

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14 Indisputable Benefits of Learning How to Fight

October 7, 2020 Leave a Comment

(photo: @svkj)

Everybody knows the benefits of lifting weights but it isn’t the only game in town that can build your body and mind. Learning how to fight also has a place as one of the key things all men (and wo

men) should do to get the most out of their life experience. Sound like an exaggeration? It’s really not, especially when you consider learning how to fight has been a rite of passage since the beginning of time in many dominant cultures. It is only in recent times that the practice of channeled aggression has been given a bad rap.

The Daily Man-Up

September 30, 2020 Leave a Comment

(photo: @arnelhasanovic)

Life isn’t fair.

Get the fuck over it.

Complaining has zero positive impact on your life.

You waste valuable time, you put yourself in a negative state of mind, make yourself really unattractive, and repel people like magnets because frankly…

No one else cares, nobody wants to hear about it.

Not your best friends. Not your mom. Not your girlfriend. No one.

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The Daily Man-Up

September 15, 2020 Leave a Comment

I think that learning how to fight and knowing how to fight gives you real confidence and security. Because when you know how to fight, all of a sudden you don’t have anything to prove anymore. If we actually knew how to fight, we wouldn’t how to prove that all the time. And that’s why I’m constantly trying to get people to get into jiu-jitsu. Get your kids and get your 13 year old boy, your 10 year old boy, get him into jiu-jitsu. Your girl, too. I mean, your girl, too, because your girl is going to use it for defense.

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The Daily Man-Up

September 10, 2020 Leave a Comment

The best way to ensure your future is close or exactly the way you want it to be, it will require you to set goals and get clear about what exactly you want to experience. You need to create a blueprint for your life which is like a life map.

This exercise greatly changed my life. Creating my life blueprint has helped me become less anxious about my future because I knew what I wanted in each area of my life and what I needed to do to get those results.

When we don’t have life goals, we feel lost. I’ve found that by setting goals for each area of my life, I feel like I have something important to work towards and I feel great with the more progress I make.

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The Daily Man-Up

September 9, 2020 Leave a Comment

(Photo: Tamar Willoughby)

Any progress is good progress.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. You can’t edit a blank page etc. Don’t expect to go from a lazy, unstructured layabout to Mr efficient marathon running supersoldier overnight, over a week, over a month, hell even over a year – this is setting (often deliberately) unrealistic expectations for yourself and setting yourself up for disappointment.

Deeply ingrained negative thought loops and harmful habits take time to overcome and redirect into positive ones. Our brains are adaptable and It will happen eventually, but it’s done incrementally, and it takes time, consistency and resolve.

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The Daily Man-Up

August 21, 2020 Leave a Comment

(photo: @kylo8)

When I think of all the things that are responsible for lack of achievement and abject failure, I can point the finger at a lot of things. Inability to manage time. Inability to plan. Not having the right set of skills. A ton of things. But there’s something a lot of people don’t consider. And that is the sheer amount of enjoyment and novelty available at our fingertips. I don’t even mean from a distraction sense (though it very well could be), I mean from a perspective of absolute satiation.

As human beings, our physical hardware, our physical body is a product of millions of years of evolution. In particular, the human brain by far is the most complex organ on the planet bar none. Our physiology and psychology was designed for and evolved from an environment of extreme scarcity and shortage of opportunities and resources. A prime outcome of this lineage is a well-known molecule/neurotransmitter called dopamine. Many people think dopamine is responsible for pleasure, but is responsible for motivation. It is the chemical that is mainly responsible for reward-based learning.

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