optimal fitness for the entrepreneur, your biggest competitive advantage

Summary

fitness is the entrepreneur’s biggest competitive advantage and almost nobody treats it that way. it’s not about looking good. it’s about how your brain works for the next 30 years.

1. I used to chase competitive CrossFit. then I realized the goal isn’t being the fittest. the goal is being fit enough to perform at the top of business for decades. different optimization function entirely.

2. 20 to 30 minutes of moderate intensity, most days. aerobic or strength, heart rate elevated, not destroyed. the goal is daily availability, not occasional peaks.

3. the brain books. Younger Brain Sharper Mind, and Spark by John Ratey. exercise is the single best intervention for cognitive performance, decision speed, and resistance to decline.

4. AI is going to make critical thinking rarer, not more common. people will outsource thought to the model. the people who can still think long, deep, and clearly will run circles around them. fitness is part of how you stay one of those people.

5. don’t crush yourself at the gym. that costs you the rest of the day. moderate, consistent, repeatable. the workout serves the life, the life doesn’t serve the workout.

your competitors will outsource fitness too. that’s good news. you don’t have to be that. try harder.

Transcript

intro to fitness as a competitive advantage

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. I 100% believe that fitness is your greatest competitive advantage as an entrepreneur. And I’m going to talk about why I want to talk about how to exercise things to think about. But before we do that, be sure to go subscribe to the Try Harder newsletter.

You can go to jerred.com that’s J-E-R-R-E-D.com and be a part of the newsletter. I would love to have you there and for everyone who’s already joined, hundreds of you. We’re not at the thousand mark yet, but we’re getting closer and closer every single day. That’s the goal. Go subscribe if you aren’t already, but let’s get into fitness for the entrepreneur.

my shift away from competitive crossfit

A big part of why I do everything that I do in fitness and health has to do with my performance as an entrepreneur. A lot of people don’t know that. What I’m not trying to do is be a competitive athlete. A long time ago, a pretty long time ago, I was into CrossFit and I thought I wanted to be a CrossFit competitor.

You know, whether or not that would have been possible doesn’t matter. I was pretty fit. I had done some local competitions. I had won those competitions. I thought, you know what, maybe I do want to take a run at doing the CrossFit games or something like that. And over time, I really got disenfranchised with CrossFit.

I didn’t like it anymore. That happened over the course of one to two years, but initially I thought that it was something I wanted to do, but this was right around the time when my military career was ending. CrossFit wasn’t a very big deal. It was probably a little bit easier to be a competitor back then.

why i focus on overall performance

And I had to decide. Do you want to spend all your time trying to be this pseudo-professional athlete or do you want to build a business? That’s really what it came down to for me. Now I’m not saying you can’t do both, but I don’t think that you can do both well. Typically how it works for athletes is they’re a successful athlete first, then they create a business afterwards on the back end of their fame or notoriety.

And I decided, you know what, I want to go all in on business. I don’t think I want to do this professional athlete thing because to be a professional athlete, you have to be the best in the world. And so once I made that decision a long time ago, everything for me has been really about performance but performance of my brain.

Performance of how I feel on a daily basis, how I can show up as a father, as a husband, as an entrepreneur. That’s why I do everything with my diet. That’s why I do everything, how I train, all of these things. And even though I have a performance-based company, Garage Gym Athlete, like a training performance-based company, people think that maybe I do want to take a run or take a shot at being some sort of athlete.

the science of brain speed decline & the book “younger brain sharper mind”

I don’t. I like maintaining a high level of fitness, but it has nothing to do with being competitive anywhere other than in my personal life and in business. So let’s talk about performance for the entrepreneur, what your fitness style should look like. I’m going to mention a couple of books here. I recommend you check them out.

Now the first book I’m going to mention is Younger Brain, Sharper Mind. This is not a super popular book. Not a ton of people know about it, but he talks about how you can have a sharper mind. And I honestly believe if you’re reading the newsletter, I mentioned this in a recent edition about mental acuity.

A lot of brands out there are talking about mental acuity now. From supplements to red light therapy to saunas, everything is talking about mental acuity. And someone who’s been in the industry for a long time, this is odd. This is weird. That’s not how people led their marketing. They wouldn’t lead with mental acuity.

”spark: the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain” & optimal exercise dose

They’d lead with get a six pack or lose 30 pounds. They wouldn’t lead with mental acuity. And I think it has to do with our brains being a little less sharp. I think we’re so fragmented and everyone has this incredibly busy lifestyle. You’re jumping from one app to the next app. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

I do think our brains are less sharp than they once were, depending on how you live your daily life. Now in this book, he talks about how we lose about 10 milliseconds of brain speed per decade. And that starts at age 20. It’s not like this is starting at 45 or something like that. It starts at 20.

You’re losing 10 milliseconds of brain speed. You’re like, what’s 10 milliseconds? Does it matter? A healthy, resourceful brain and a senile brain, there is a 100 millisecond difference. 100 milliseconds between an awesome brain and not awesome brain. So we’re not talking in terms of all these seconds, like five seconds slow or something like that.

why entrepreneurs shouldn’t crush themselves at the gym

10 milliseconds is an awesome, the difference between an awesome brain and an absolutely awful brain, 100 milliseconds. So if you’re losing 10 milliseconds every single decade, if you are 40, if you lost it in 20, you lost in 30 and you lost it in your 40s, that would be 30 milliseconds slower. If you’re not doing anything to combat it, your brain is actually getting slower.

And brain speed is important. Now there are also studies out there saying that we can have a good impactful brain recall vocabulary, all these things for longer periods of time. It’s not that you’re getting dumber necessarily, but you might be losing some brain speed. And he talks about ways in the book, how you can maintain this brain speed.

And I’m not going to go over all these in detail. Read the book if you want to get it. But he mentions mental exercises. So actually doing something, I think focusing for long periods of time, deep work, something I talk about all the time is a great way for mental exercise. He goes over a ton of vitamins and supplements that you can take to improve your brain health.

tech, the future of work, and why being a high performer will be easier than ever

A big one that’s more popular today, that wasn’t as popular when he wrote the book is magnesium threonate, which is something I do take. He mentions coffee, mentions your diet. He mentions stress management. He mentioned sleep, weight management, and also, of course, physical exercise. Which leads me to another book I read, and I actually had the opportunity to interview this author on this podcast.

You’d have to scroll back quite a ways, but the name of the book is Spark the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain by John Rady. Really good book. He goes over a lot of things. He also talks a lot about kids and exercise and how it makes them smarter. He specifically points out this study where one group of kids could sleep in, come in and do their work.

The other kids had to do exercise before, and they have a 17% improvement over the group that didn’t. He really gets into the weeds of what types of exercise to do. He says that you should be doing 20 to 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at a pace you can maintain for an hour. Not 20 to 30 minutes of all out.

It would be, can I maintain this for an hour? Cool, I’m only going to do it for 30 minutes. It should be with a sustained feeling of somewhat hard. We’re going to say moderate intensity. That is the framework. That is the framework for your fitness each and every single day. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve decided you’re not looking to be a professional or competitive athlete in anything, which is probably everybody listening to this podcast, you do not need to burn it to the ground when you step into the gym.

And the reason I’m talking about this as opposed to talking about the people who don’t exercise trying to get you to exercise, I’m sick of that game. To be honest, I’ve been doing fitness forever. There are going to be the people who work out. They’re going to be the people who don’t. I try, I try, I try to help the people who don’t try to get them to exercise, but it’s incredibly hard.

So let me focus on the people who are already exercising. If you are already exercising 20 to 30 minutes a day, it can be an honesty. New research has come out since he wrote this book. He says aerobic exercise, it can also be strength training, but I think that there should be heart rate elevation to your strength training, not just boring lifting every single day.

Like you got to have some mixed modality in there, but 20 to 30 minutes of that at a pace you can maintain for an hour and it needs to be somewhat hard. And the reason I say you don’t need to burn it down to the ground every time you work and you walk into a training session, because if you are type a go getter, ambitious entrepreneur, you might have that mentality of let’s bring it to the gym, but you don’t need to.

You don’t need to go that hard each and every single day. You need to have more in the tank mentally and physically to be able to pour into your life, into your relationships, into your business. So we’re looking for the dose that works, the dose that helps the entrepreneur. And I would say what I went over that short little formula, that framework, that is the minimum effective dose.

I don’t work out for 20 to 30 minutes a day. I work out for 60 plus minutes a day, probably six days a week. But I’ve also built up to that over a very long period of time. I don’t burn it to the ground. I might go really hard once every other week, like really, really hard. Other than that, I’m keeping it to that somewhat hard, moderate to somewhere between moderate and high intensity, making sure that I get the blood flowing, that I get a really good workout, get to a point where it is challenging, not just going through the motions.

I try to get to that point almost every single day, and that is going to help you maintain your mental acuity. You can do all the other things from the book, Younger Brain, Sharper Mind, but I think if you’re exercising, you are doing all the things you need to maintain your competitive advantage.

Because look, here’s what’s going to happen over the next five years. Everyone is using AI. I think AI can greatly augment what you’re doing, but I think we’ve already seen our phones make people dumber. AI is going to make people dumber. We’ll have robots living in our house that do most everything for us.

Critical thinking is going to go way down, and all this, I’m not being negative about. I think it’s awesome. You know why? Because it’s going to be so freaking easy to be a high performer in the world that’s coming. It’s going to be so easy. All you have to do, exercise regularly, use your brain, write, journal, all these simple things that have been around forever.

Everyone’s going to forget about them, and if you want to be a high performer for the rest of your life, have a business that surpasses all your competitors, you just need to be a better human. You just need to try harder.