Month: May 2007

  • How to Strength Train Anywhere

    Strength training is associated with muscle heads, but it’s smart for everyone. We know that muscle tissue burns calories, so strength training not only makes you stronger and look better, it helps you avoid weight gain when you’re not exercising.

    In general:

    • Do total-body workouts 3 days a week, resting one day between workout days.
    • Do abs exercises every workout, or every day.
    • Exercise muscle groups in rotation (“circuits”) so the muscles have time to recover. This allows you to do more exercises overall in less time.

    A sample routine you can do anywhere without equipment:

    1. Bulgarian Split Squat, 12-15 repetitions with each leg
    2. Rest for 60 seconds
    3. Inverted Shoulder Press, 8-10 repetitions
    4. Rest for 60 seconds
    5. Repeat the above 2 more times
    6. Single-Leg Deadlift, 5-6 repetitions with each leg
    7. Rest for 60 seconds
    8. T Pushup, 10-15 repetitions
    9. Rest for 60 seconds
    10. Repeat the above 2 more times
    11. Plank, hold for 60 seconds
    12. Rest for 60 seconds
    13. Repeat the above

    Too easy? Make it harder:

    • Raise your hands above your head — so your arms are straight and in line with your body — during a lunge, squat, crunch, or situp. If that’s too hard, split the distance by placing your hands behind your head.
    • Move the floor farther away. For many body-weight exercises — lunges, pushups, situps — your range of motion ends at the floor. The solution: Try placing your front or back foot on a step when doing lunges; position your hands on books or your feet on a chair when doing pushups; and place a rolled-up towel under the arch in your lower back when doing situps.
    • Use the 4-second pause in any exercise. And give yourself an extra challenge by adding an explosive component, forcefully pushing your body off the floor — into the air as high as you can — during a pushup, lunge, or squat.
    • Simply twist your torso to the right or left in exercises such as the lunge, situp, and pushup. You can also rotate your hips during movements such as the reverse crunch.
    • Hold one foot in the air during virtually any exercise, including pushups, squats, and deadlifts. You can also do pushups on your fingertips or your fists.

    Aside: Why, at age 37, am I just learning all this now? I realize the physical education classes in American schools are mostly intended to give the students exercise, but don’t necessarily teach them how to continue that exercise themselves beyond school. I’d like to see gym teachers teach kids a basic 15 minute routine they could continue their entire lives.

  • How to Delegate

    The four-step process for delegation:

    1. Train
    2. Enable
    3. Delegate
    4. Let Go

    Danke to Ulrike for this one.

  • How to Run

    One thing blogging has given me is a place to put summaries of good stuff. I find books increasingly too long and boring to read through, I crave the gist.

    Much of what we know about fitness can be boiled down into relatively simple processes. Here’s the common formula for increasing your running endurance:

    1. Run for as long as is comfortable
    2. Walk for 1 minute
    3. Repeat the above for 30 minutes
    4. Each day, increase your running time 1 minute
    5. Gradually decrease your walking breaks, to one about 2/3 through the
      workout, and eventually to none
  • Blue Oceans for Little Fish

    I recently finished my first three-week session at Stacy’s Boot Camp, a calisthenics-based workout class held for one hour, three times a week, for three weeks. Sometime during the class when I was trying to avoid thinking about the pain I was in, it occured to me this is a wonderful example of a Blue Ocean strategy on a small scale.

    • The classes take place in New York City parks, so the costs and kept low and the savings are passed to the student
    • The unique offering requires no gym, and therefore no knowledge of equipment, no signup fee, no long obligatory memberships, etc.
    • It’s a very intense workout, using the latest understanding of body-weight strength training, three times-a-week whole-body workouts, and circuit training. Some simple content expertise makes this possible, and there’s no doubt that at the end of the session one is in better shape than at the beginning.

    The kicker is that this doesn’t have to be a small business; Stacy could expand to parks all over the world, much faster than a gym chain could.

  • Frog Design Groks SmartEx

    Ian Curry, design analyst at Frog Design, pens an interesting look at the current state of design education in The Known Unknowns: Exploring the evolution of design education in response to the industry’s expanding role. We’re honored he includes SmartEx alongside the Institute of Design and Stanford’s d.school, two schools for which we have great respect.

    Curry writes…

    Lombardi’s current project is designing a design school. Yes, a design school, but not as we know it. He hopes to close the gap between what schools teach and what the industry requires. As a web guy, Lombardi sees this gap as the result of a classic coordination cost problem. Traditional schools are beholden to administrative tasks, which lessen their agility when it comes to changes in the field. Lombardi’s answer is a new kind of school, coordinated over the web but with meetings in real classrooms around Manhattan. Launched recently, Smart Experience is essentially an experiment in bottom-up design education. Using a wiki-like format, students request topics they want to learn about and instructors pitch classes they want to teach.

  • Props from Lou Rosenfeld

    Lou Rosenfeld, who helped create the field of information architecture with the “Polar Bear Book” blogged his reaction to Smart Experience

    …Smart Experience is essentially a broker of dialogues between teachers and learners at different levels, starting with sharing thoughts on rough topics, and ending with an actual course (with students, a teacher, course materials, and a venue).

    Victor, whether he realizes is or not, is now officially an infrastructuralist… Best wishes, Victor; I’m really looking forward to watching Smart Experience grow!

    Thanks Lou!

  • Anton Chekhov on Powerpoint

    I’m not convinced the MFA is the new MBA, though I like this use of Chekhov’s technique for talking to clients: “One of Chekhov’s more famous quotes was “Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out”. His simple philosophies come through in his stories, which were not noted for their intricate plots. Rather, Chekhov found emotion and drama in ordinary, everyday events…. How Does Chekhov’s Model Work? First, Anton tees up a messy situation. Second, he describes the impact the situation is having on his characters – then delights us with an ending.

  • Talking vs. Doing and My New Project

    If there’s still anyone out there who follows this blog I’m sure you’re wondering why the post frequency has dropped off and why it consists mostly of quoting the New York Times. I’ve been busy slowly creating my latest passion, a school of continuing education called Smart Experience. I could write a lot about it, but hopefully the website explains what’s going on.

    One fun part about building a business again is the opportunity to design a business as a deep dive, rather than on a project basis as a consultant. While I have a lot of new thoughts about how that happens (and doesn’t happen), mostly I’m trying to write less and do more, so I’ll skip that for now.

  • Blow Open the Social Media Doors

    David Pogue with some good ideas from everyday life:

    It seems to me, though, that we haven’t even scratched the surface [of social media potential]… I was thinking about this — a LOT — as I lay in bed last week, sicker than I’d been in years. I hadn’t eaten for two days, and I was nervous about being well enough to travel to a speaking engagement the next day. (Is it just my imagination, or are the bugs getting a lot nastier these days?)

    I kept thinking: Surely I caught this from somebody — somebody who now knows what this virus’s course will be.

    When my kids come down with various horrible flu variations, and it gets bad enough to see a doctor, we often hear from the pediatrician: “Oh, yes, it’s going around. You’ll have vomiting for two days, and then you’ll get better.”

    Well, gosh darn it, why couldn’t someone have told us?

  • Bad News Should Travel Fast

    Another reason I like agile management is because when something bad happens, you should know as soon as you can. If you only check project status every week or longer, that can be way too late. It’s like what Robert Duvall says in The Godfather: “I have to go to the airport. The Godfather is a man who likes to hear bad news immediately.’

  • Funniest Comment on Today’s Conference Call

    Woman from Marketing: “Well, since we’re all going to hell anyway…”