How Easy They Are To Do In Everyday Life x How Good They Are = Worthiness Of Inclusion

So have at it. And if you already know all this, bear with me: there’s a new post about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mozart coming up later in the week.

Stair Running
Sometimes, when I’m sprinting up the escalator in Angel Islington tube station – the longest in the Western hemisphere, fact fans – I wonder how many of the people standing motionless on the right complain that they don’t have time to go to the gym. Unless you’ve done heavy squats this week, there’s no excuse not to walk/leap up every flight of stairs you need to ascend, especially if there’s a lift nearby. It burns fat, strengthens your legs, works your cardio, won’t make you too sore and gets you where you’re going anyway. Start doing it today.

Bodyweight Almost Anything
If you haven’t got a gym membership, that doesn’t mean you need to do biceps curls with tins of soup or anything equally ridiculous. If all you ever did was circuits of pressups, squats, lunges and planks then you’d be in better shape than, ooh, let’s say 50 percent of everyone.* Throw in a pullup bar – the Powerbar can be put up or down in seconds and will work on almost any doorframe with minimal damage – and you can work your pulling muscles as well. You don’t even need to leave your house. Just starting out? Do Chad Waterbury’s PLP programme – do one pressup, one lunge on each leg, and one pullup. Tomorrow, do two of everything. Carry on for two months until you’re doing 60 of everything, preferably with as few breaks as possible. Congratulations: you’re now stronger than most people who go to the gym.

Loaded Carries
If I somehow ended up in an Orwellian dictatorship that would only let me do one exercise, I’d do these. Carrying something heavy works basically every muscle in your body, definitely including your abs. Farmer’s walks are good and can be done with shopping, but I also like Zercher walks and fireman’s carries, both of which can be practised with a crate of beer, child (preferably your own) or romantic partner. And remember, go heavy: a good goal in the farmer’s walk is your own bodyweight split between two dumbbells for sets of 30m.

Running Quite Fast
I don’t like jogging all that much. Although it requires minimal kit and can be done in most places, it’s not as good for fat loss as most people think, terrible for muscle, and is not much fun if you live in an area where arseholes think that hooting out of cars is an acceptable way to spend an evening. If you’re going to run, at least run fast – assuming you can cover a decent distance, do some intervals where you speed up, or just some sprints. People seem to have a weird aversion to resting during runs, but doing half a dozen 400m sprints with 90 seconds of rest between them did my cardio, body composition and speed more good than any amount of 8-mile plods, back when I cared about running. These days I stick to hill sprints, but only do them if you promise not to hate me afterwards.

Squats and Deadlifts
If you go to the gym and aren’t horribly injured from something else, these should absolutely be the core of your programme – they release growth hormone, strengthen dozens of muscles and will help you lift a fridge or get off the toilet when you’re 80. Everyone in your gym is probably doing them wrong, so get a reliable source to teach you. I’d recommend Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength, although some personal trainers will be able to give you the hands-on version. Protip: look for someone who can squats at least 1.5x their own bodyweight – until the crease their hip makes goes below the line of their knee – and deadlifts double their bodyweight. These are pretty easy standards for most professionals to hit, so anyone else hasn’t practised it enough. If you don’t go to the gym but have a dumbbell, do Dan John’s Goblet squat, which is excellent and will teach you the movement better than most trainers as a bonus.

Everything Else
If you’re already doing most of the above, feel free to start doing concentration curls, Klokov presses, or whatever else you like. Until then, stick to the basics.

HOMEWORK: Add one of the above to your weekly regime. And help someone with a pram.

*This stat is made up.

Please note, I’m not using the Hollywood-shorthand version of badass – shades, leather jacket, doesn’t say please to waitresses – I’m talking about being a badass in terms of having a double-bodyweight deadlift, being able to run a six-minute mile and sprint up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath. These are useful abilities to have, and these things will help you to be nicer.

Here’s an example. At the tube (Americans, that’s a subway) near my house, there is no escalator, just stairs. Because it’s a residential area, there are always people with prams, or pushchairs, or massive bags, many of whom are incapable of carrying their stuff themselves. Because Londoners are often in a rush and sometimes just dreadful people, you’ll often see huge crowds pushing past these people, without an offer of help in sight.

I always help these people. Not because I’m much nicer than the average Londoner (I definitely am), but because carrying a pram or a gigantic bag isn’t a hassle for me, and it makes me feel like Eliot Ness in The Untouchables. And that’s the key. When you’re in decent shape from lifting heavy stuff, things that are an imposition to other people are…nothing. Significant other’s tired? Do the big shop yourself, it’s not like you can’t carry six bags of veg on your own. Someone needs help moving house or trimming their hedges? Get it done and count it as a training session. Someone needs directions but you’re already late for something else? Give them the directions, then sprint wherever you need to go. Let’s hope you never have to get involved in a more unpleasant or threatening situation, but if you do, then being able to run 400m in under 1:20 and power-clean the average mugger (apparently they’re usually in the 70-75kg range) really won’t hurt.

Bottom line: being strong and quick makes things easier, and that makes it easier to be nicer. And since you’re already a nice person, you owe it to yourself to be a badass as well. Now go to the gym.

HOMEWORK: In one of your workouts this week, do a move that translates to real-life badassery. Loaded carries like the farmer’s walk and zercher carry are good examples – so are 400m sprints. Oh, and if you see someone in need of help, help them. But let’s be honest, you should be doing that every week.

I used to think I had a natural talent for writing, but then I ran the numbers. Years of being read to, taken to the library, bought books and – on a couple of memorable occasions – being giving merciless punctuation pop-quizzes by my parents. More years of writing thousands of words that I never sent to anyone, followed by a year of sending out scattergun on-spec features to a variety of magazines, with something like a 1:10 success ratio, to magazines while I was at university. Then a few more years writing for videogames magazines – traditionally more tolerant of interesting/ridiculous ‘concept’ pieces than more established media – which, I figured out once, totalled more than a million words. All of it accompanied by relentless self-criticism, and loads of it was terrible. Some of it is still terrible. Conclusion: I might be pretty decent at writing, but I’m not naturally talented at it. I spent a long time getting here. 

The idea that constant, deliberate practice is both necessary and sufficient to succeed in almost anything is pretty well-established these days. Anders Ericsson was the first man to popularise what’s now known as The 10,000 Hour rule, which suggests that nobody at the top level of chess, music, business or fighting has got there without putting in roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice…and that anyone who puts in that much practice will definitely be able to compete at the very highest of levels (in the absence of some genuine non-arguable setback, like being 5’0 if you want a career in the NBA). Even if you haven’t got 10,000 hours – a long time, considering how demanding ‘deliberate’ practice is – this should reassure you that you aren’t wasting your time, no matter how futile your early attempts at anything are. Books like The Talent Code, Outliers, Bounce and Talent Is Overrated all tackle the same body of research from different directions, and you should definitely read one/all of them.

What they won’t do, though, is make you believe it.

Understanding the theory is important, maybe even essential, but you’ll never know – instinctively know, like you know that gravity happens and fire is hot – that you can improve at anything without improving at one thing you think you’re bad at. The key is picking the right thing.

Writing is a terrible choice for your ‘thing’. You could ‘fail’ at writing for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with your writing talent – maybe you pitch to the wrong people, the market isn’t there for what whatever you’re doing, you’re too self-critical to let anyone see anything, and so on. You can ‘succeed’ with shitty writing for almost as many. Fighting is better, but only just. So what’s the best ‘thing’? Easy.

Weight training.

Weight training is great because the numbers don’t lie. However ‘talented’ you are, however strong or weak you are when you start, if you do the work the numbers will go up. They’ll go up quickly at first, then you’ll hit a brick wall. At that point you’ll need to find a programme, make a plan, put it into practice, tweak things, experiment, work harder…and ultimately, watch your lifts go up. There: you’ve improved, thanks to your own efforts. After you’ve done that, maybe you take up climbing, and go from a V2 to a V4 – because, again, you’ve put in the time, done the work, and improved. Then maybe you read up on some basic science, even though you thought you weren’t ‘talented’ at it at school, and realise that it wasn’t actually that hard after all. Then you learn Japanese, or take up ballroom dancing, or do another one of the hundred things you thought you weren’t good at, when actually what happened was that you just never put the time in. When you work this out, it feels miraculous – but you have to start somewhere.  

I’m not naturally talented at anything. But I know that I can do anything I want. Do you know the same?

HOMEWORK: Read either The Talent Code, Outliers or Talent Is Overrated. Pick something you think you’re ‘bad’ at – preferably with easy-to-quantify results. Get good at it. Repeat until you’re Lex Luthor.