Survival of the fittest exists in 2015. Just ask my chicken.
If you’ve been following this blog, it may come as a surprise that I used the singular of chicken. I started a few months ago with 5. Today, I have a lone survivor.
About two weeks ago, I awoke to tragedy (extreme dramatization). Upon rubbing the sleep from my eyes, there was a monster dog on my property. This is far from unusual. I went down to check and sure enough, both sides of my newly constructed coop were demolished; the ramp for the chickens to hop to safety had been displaced. I approached the coop and found three thrashed birds, sprawled and freshly deceased. A few days later, my son sent me this text.
The last standing bird is a badass. She’s big, strong, agile and independent. From howstuffworks.com:
Natural selection is the engine that drives evolution. The organisms best suited to survive in their particular circumstances have a greater chance of passing their traits on to the next generation.
I want to eat this sort of bird.
Instead of crushing multiple fresh eggs daily, I may be looking at far fewer. That said, I trust that these eggs will be of a special variety. These will be championship caliber, with nutritionally dense yolks. Their mother will have the traits necessary to pass to me, the eater, the healthiest bad-boys available.
Darwin taught me gratitude in this regard. Rather than not noticing, my mind will be mentally primed to receive the health benefits of eating elite eggs.
I love squats. I truly believe that they are the most important weight training move we can perform. If there was only one lift you could do, I wouldn’t hesitate to make it the squat. Far beyond simply improving your power, squats have a beneficial effect on your hormones. Testosterone levels are also influenced by the amount of muscle mass activated in response to exercise. … [Read more…]
Every Thursday and Sunday for the last year, I’ve gone through the same sprint workout. This time, I find myself dreading following that routine. A warm-up followed by four 100s, four 60s and four 40s…I can’t do it today. I need something different. From business2community.com: Ask anyone who fell off the bandwagon with their New Year’s fitness resolutions: boring workouts … [Read more…]
Jumping is a great way to build power, explosiveness and athleticism.I’m of Eastern European descent (sounds more interesting than white, right?), but I used to be able to leap. I swear. You don’t believe me and that’s what video is for.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq_KIe9Rh3sEarly in my career, I trained with a Zen master. Okay, he was really just a trainer who … [Read more…]
Neck stretches under running water are relaxing, particularly to the nervous system.From yogajournal.com: Many studies, including biofeedback and other disciplines, have shown that relaxation of the muscles in the neck, jaws, and face can have powerful calming effects on the entire nervous system. Fine, it doesn’t have to be in the shower, but that’s where I perform them, … [Read more…]
Hello, I’m Kap, and I have skinny calves.Over the course of my MLB career, my teammates often busted my balls about my lower legs. Perhaps their ribbing came because I showed my little guys off by going socks up with my baseball pants, but more likely, it’s because they don’t quite match the rest of my physique.For many years, I tried to build them up. I worked on … [Read more…]
Our job as parents is not to establish relationships with our children where they depend on us and we depend on them. Our job is to create a learning environment powerful enough to allow our children to venture out in the world, independent from us, where they can survive and thrive.
How many times have you heard someone say that we bring children into the world because we have a lot of love to give? From a strictly biological perspective, this is untrue. Sperm can fertilize an egg with or without love. But, as we always talk about here, we should challenge this assumption further. From drdavidhamilton.com:
Much of the reason for this seems to lie in the development of the brain. The brain grows rapidly in the first few years after birth but, contrary to most people’s assumptions, this is not entirely according to a genetic program. The program runs in the context of the child’s environment. If the environment is rich in love, affection, attention and positive emotion, then the brain receives the emotional nourishment it needs and grows according to plan. But where the child doesn’t receive this emotional nourishment, the program runs differently and brain growth in some key areas (as well as whole-body growth) slows down.
Sharing love with a child is undoubtedly critical. I buy into attention and certainly physical touch. However, we’ve been brainwashed about what we think love means. In many ways, parenting to most Americans looks like a heart-to-heart sit down with our kids, one where we lecture about good and bad, right and wrong. That’s less necessary than what our kids witness in us as we navigate our own lives. From Wisc.edu:
In the world of the social sciences, this phenomenon is known as modeling. And it is one of the most fundamental dimensions of raising a moral, prosocial child. Children pay more attention to what an adult does than to what an adult merely says. As psychologist Nancy Eisenberg reports, “socializers who preach…but do not model…may have little positive effect on children’s prosocial development.” This, of course, is a common and simple insight, yet it opens up a profound perspective on modern society and its effects on children. For in order to determine what values children are learning as they grow up, we must look first at what adults are doing, not what they are saying; at the way things appear to children, not the way things appear to us.
This is the very simple “monkey see, monkey do” argument…except it’s not so simple. Our brains have actually evolved to copy behaviors more strongly than other primates, and that evolution is key to our shared experience as human beings. From psychcentral.com:
Scientists “have been finding this odd effect where children will copy everything that they see an adult demonstrate to them, even if there are clear or obvious reasons why those actions would be irrelevant,” says psychologist Mark Nielsen, of the University of Queensland in Australia. “It’s something that we know that other primates don’t do.” If a chimpanzee is shown an irrelevant action, they won’t copy it — they’ll skip right to the action that makes something happen…“Perhaps not a game, but certainly, when I demonstrate the action, it’s purposeful. So from the mind of a child, perhaps there’s a reason why I’m doing this…Really, we see these sorts of behaviors as being a core part of developing this human cultural mind, where we’re so motivated to do things like those around us and be like those around us.”
Throughout adolescence, this modeling takes on increased importance. As my kids become more men and less kids, they are venturing off on their own more. They are becoming more independent, which is the goal of every parent. The natural consequence is that I am less physically present to deliver lectures. It doesn’t diminish my involvement, but what they really need is trust and modeling powerful behavior.
Over the past 9 months, I have operationalized this philosophy. My decision to return to baseball was not one I made lightly, or on my own. I shared this with them bluntly and presented explicitly what the immediate future held.
“For the next few years, I’m going to be working…a lot. You’ll see me in the kitchen, on the phone, staring at a computer much of the time. It’s going to be more difficult for us to spend extended periods of time together. I’m going to be traveling quite a bit. It’s going to be tough.”
I then, of course, presented what I’d be doing, what I’d be invested in and why I’d be choosing to spend my time in that fashion. I had considered the upside/downside of the proposition and was convinced that I’d be able to set examples appropriately along the way. In some ways, this was the best of both worlds. They don’t need their dad to chaperone times with their friends, and I’d be provided with endless opportunities to demonstrate the critical skills they’re developing. I would be responding to pressure in their presence, illustrating what it means to be resourceful, to extinguish fires and to manage relationships.
In the meantime, they were and are doing more and more alone and in their own space and time. In the months to come, Dane will be turning 14 and Chase 16. They are men and are exploring the world independent of their father’s work. They are learning through their own personal experiences and through the osmosis that occurs when they spend time with Lisa and me. They don’t need lectures, they don’t need arbitrary rules; they need to subconsciously sponge their respective atmospheres.
First impressions matter, but the body of your work matters substantially more.
From the Guardian:
“First impressions are the fundamental drivers of our relationships,” says Professor Frank Bernieri of Oregon State University, who supervised Prickett’s study. “In a sense, it’s a little like the principle of chaos theory, where the initial conditions can have a profound impact on the eventual outcome. A first impression is your initial condition for analysing another human being.
We’ve all heard the clichés about never getting a second chance to make a first impression. It’s certainly true, and studies have borne this out. Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink, argues that this “thin-slicing” is a necessary and vital part of being human.
It is a central part of what it means to be human…We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.
Generally, however, those first impressions tend to matter more in a negative context. If you form a poor first impression of someone, that may be unlikely to change. A positive first impression doesn’t necessarily result in continued positive feelings, however. This makes sense if our ability to thin-slice is an evolutionary holdover from when we needed to determine very quickly if someone was a threat or not. Determining that someone is not in the “foe” category doesn’t necessarily make them a friend.
When you first walk into a group as a new teammate, presenting a polished version of yourself is an essential part of kicking off a solid relationship. Predictable, consistent, positive behavior over time is far more valuable than any single instant, however. To be considered exceptional teammates, we must build trust over months and years. Psychology Today:
Gaining awareness about our actions and whether they build or diminish trust is an essential skill in a work-world where trust has become the new currency.
We have our science for proof, but sometimes we can relate best to anecdotes. I’m going to tell you about Peter and his awareness about his actions.
I’ve learned a ton through the writing and building of this blog. It’s taken a long time, but we are developing a team here at KL. We’ve moved from two of us working on the site to an expanded group of guest bloggers and our extended family producing their own exceptional material. Our tight inner circle has expanded as well. Our team is, by necessity, built on trust and communication.
Just over a year ago, when we first chose to expand our team, Peter Summerville reached out. He forced the initial interaction and made a tremendous first impression with his ambition, drive and energy. His attitude was welcome in a vacuum, and certainly influenced our decision to give him a chance, but I didn’t trust him.
Peter showed extraordinary dedication and a willingness to go above and beyond on a consistent basis. He continually reached out and pushed himself and us to be better every day. In month one, we knew we had a contributor. Over the past year, he has become an integral part of the Kaplifestyle team. He demonstrates the willingness to go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of others through our daily posts. Today, Steph and I can close our eyes and know that he’s perpetually hunting ways to make our team stronger with little or no directive.
We don’t acquire lasting trust in our first encounters. Rather, our actions over time are responsible for proving dependability. Peter is dependable. We know that now. He proved it every day for more than a year.
When you become part of a team, you are being observed and judged every moment, fair or not. The more critical you are to the team, the more likely people are to be monitoring and evaluating your actions. Being not only a dependable teammate over time, but an exemplary one builds the critical trust for relationship building and unit success.
Food labels purposefully mislead us. They spin the truth and con us into believing that what we are about to consume is elite level grub. With full awareness of our lack of education, they reel us in with false promises. Don’t bite the hook, fresh fish.
Come to my place for breakfast this Sunday. I’ll be whipping up omelets made from farm fresh eggs. Inside, you’ll discover hormone and antibiotic free chicken (diced), local bell peppers and natural sharp cheddar cheese. I’ll have a pot of premium coffee on standby. You in? Thought so.
I have another question for you. Did you know that federal law prohibits the use of hormones in our chickens? From foodandwaterwatch.org:
The labels “Raised Without Added Hormones“, “No Hormones Administered” or “No Synthetic Hormones” indicate that no synthetic hormones were given to animals. Federal law prohibits the use of hormones on hogs and poultry. The use of any hormone free label on pork and poultry products is intended to mislead consumers into thinking that the product is different and therefore worthy of a higher price.
Hahaha. I’m laughing at you…wait, I’m laughing at me, too. I’ve fallen victim to every imaginable label. All things being equal, we inherently choose the one that sounds healthier and of higher quality. Our clear aim, then, is to become well versed in the lies we’re being fed. We should wean ourselves off the phrases we’ve believed have been keeping us safe.
Now that you’re savvier about one of our Sunday items, let’s get to another, the glorious “all natural” cheese.
“Natural” does not tell us how the animals were raised, what they were fed, if antibiotics or hormones were used, or other aspects of production that consumers might logically expect from something labeled “natural.”
Okay, so natural tells us little, how about my “premium” coffee? From wisegeek.com:
Premium coffee is coffee made from uniquely flavored beans that are processed with special care.
Could that be any more vague? What the hell is a “uniquely flavored bean”? Don’t they all have a unique taste? Hmmmm. “Special care” is rather nebulous. What constitutes special is beyond subjective. I’m feeling duped and now “premium” means nothing to me.
Surely the farmer wouldn’t spin me an untruth. I can count on him. Those overalls and straw hat scream fresh. Et tu, Old Mac? From ohsnapletseat.com:
Unfortunately, unless you are literally buying the eggs from a farm or a local super market that actually sells genuine eggs from a farm, the label “farm fresh” means nothing other than it is just eggs… picked from chickens in battery cages.
Keep those cages far, far away. From now on, I’m sourcing local. I can trust the retailers. There is no chance they would mislead me. From USAtoday:
Wal-Mart, the nation’s biggest retailer, considers anything local if it’s grown in the same state as it’s sold, even if that’s a state as big as Texas and the food comes from a farm half the size of Manhattan, as in the case of the 7,000-acre Ham Produce in North Carolina.
When I was in the minor leagues, I’d drive from California to Florida for spring training. Inevitably, I’d drive across Texas. If I picked up spinach in El Paso and brought it to a friend in Beaumont, he might not be thrilled with the gift. Just a hunch.
There are some surefire ways to know the source of your food. Grow it, hunt it, raise it or catch it. Remember, it’s easier to label if it comes in a package.
I miss the days when bagels were healthy. Ignorance is bliss.
I worked with a nutritionist in the early part of my playing career. I had a meal plan which I was to diligently follow. One of my breakfast options was two bagels with low fat cream cheese, smoked salmon, onions and capers.
At this point, I was 24 years old with a newborn son living in my first property, a kick-ass condo on Dickens St. in Sherman Oaks, CA. In the off season, I’d wake up, throw on sweats and a baseball cap, grab Chase, pop him in the stroller, and the two of us would roll to Noah’s Bagels a few blocks away. The San Fernando Valley was filled with sunshine and crisp in December. I’d grab the darkest, hottest coffee I could, the Los Angeles Times and go to town while my little man slept.
I had nowhere to be, and my cell phone didn’t buzz. I assumed that because this meal was prescribed by an expert, it was healthy. While my bagels weren’t optimal for my body, the peaceful state of mind was unequivocally ideal.
Although we’re constantly striving to be at our peaks nutritionally and from a training perspective, there are other contributing variables to well-being. Health is about feeling good. It’s about pleasure. No rules.
Friends and loved ones often ask for advice. Whether it’s to lose body fat, get stronger physically or mentally, most folks are working toward a goal. I often ask them to start logging their behaviors and activities. Understanding our practices is critical when trying to understand ourselves. Matt Paré developed his mind’s strength when he didn’t expect to. He’s been taking a deep dive into quantifying his own development. Check it out and see for yourself.
I didn’t discover my thirst for a strong mind until my sophomore year at Boston College. It was as if I had opened a benevolent Pandora’s box that required a key of inspiration.
I got lucky with my college roommate, Sam. He became a lifelong friend. More importantly, he taught me several lessons. My freshman year, I put more of an emphasis on my baseball goals than my academics. I wasn’t a bad student by any means, but school was just a means to an end. Three years and I’ll be drafted…
Sam wasn’t a D1 athlete, but but man, did he train like one. He got after it so hard that the fitness center attendant demanded he stop doing power cleans because olympic lifts weren’t allowed. This was clearly marked on the mirror in front of where Sam was lifting, but better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, right?
Sam taught me that I could train AND study at the same time. We lived in a traditional dorm room with bunk beds, so I saw first hand how driven and passionate he was about education. He was in the Honors Program, majoring in International Studies and Economics. He opened my eyes to how my classes could benefit all areas of my life, including baseball.
I changed my major from Communication to Human Development, an area that truly inspired me. The curriculum had a heavy focus on optimizing the mind. I was on a quest at that point – how can I optimize my (human) development and performance?
This is when I stumbled upon the quantified self movement, also known as self-tracking. From Wikipedia:
The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).
I’m certain most of you have done it in some shape or form. Whether it’s tracking your food intake on Myfitnesspal, logging the weight and reps working towards your back squat PR or even just counting your steps to be more active, most of us are measuring something.
What gets measured, gets managed. – Peter Drucker
This isn’t about obsessing over numbers, though. The ultimate goal is to bring self-awareness to areas that need attention and make an action plan to change the necessary habits.
Self-tracking can be overwhelming if you try to do it all at once, so starting small is key. For example, sleep is easily quantifiable with the SleepCycle app and takes little added effort as most nights you are setting an alarm anyway.
By tracking what we’re actually trying to change about ourselves, we can customize the plan for our bodies. We all have unique needs and challenges, but many people just skim the headlines of magazines in the grocery store checkout, see a new superfood and decide that’s the cure to all their problems.
We all have different genetic predispositions. We have different vitamin and mineral deficiencies, personal and heavily influenced by our specific environment and diet. Self-reflection and analysis are key — it’s an N of 1 study of yourself. In order to conduct the study, I needed to understand the base I was starting from. In May, I decided I wanted to venture into blood analysis. This meant that I was measuring particular biomarkers, such as testosterone or sodium, that are important for optimal health and performance.
The full results can be overwhelming. Trying to change a ton of habits at once usually leads to making no progress at all. Luckily, I didn’t need to. From The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss:
Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs.
Using the 80-20 Principle, I focused on the 20% of the red zone biomarkers that would give me 80% of the biomarkers changes I wanted. In my case, I found that vitamin D was the force multiplier. That is, it was the biomarker that could correct multiple areas that were suboptimal.
I’ve now done the study and know what I needed to change. Add more vitamin D into my diet. It’s a small change that goes a long way and is simple enough for me to stick with. Unfortunately, Kind of over the smell of fish since I’ve been carrying a backpack around that had a D3-fish oil capsule explode in it. I guess that’s karma for using supplements.
Got any suggestions, Kap?
First, I would challenge your assumption. Baseball players may not be getting as much sun as we think. In a hat, with long pants, you may only be getting a little bit of sun on your forearms and neck. If you slather sunscreen on in addition to that, you’re cutting your exposure down even further. I’d consider spending a few minutes soaking up Augusta’s natural sunlight, sans sunscreen. Additionally, I know my daily egg consumption goes beyond anything reasonable. I’m not suggesting you eat 7 a day, but a combination of 3 or 4 eggs and a few minutes more of sun daily may raise those levels naturally. Of course, you could learn to appreciate a plate of buttery sashimi. That would be an equally optimal outcome.
Part of the Quantified Self movement is taking charge of optimizing our own health and well-being instead of blindly following general trends. In part 2, I’ll share the specifics of how I studied my own body and blood, narrowed down my focus to center on vitamin D and the action plan I’m taking. Take a look on Homeless Minor Leaguer.
If you’re exhausted at the end of a long day and are running on less than optimal sleep, don’t make tough decisions.
We know that sleep deprivation can be serious. It was cited as a factor in the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, the Exxon Valdez disaster and the Challenger explosion. While you’re probably not likely to have control over projects of this magnitude, simply getting behind the wheel while sleepy can be dangerous. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cites that 100,000 car accidents are directly related to fatigue.
While we mostly understand that exhaustion can affect our reaction times, we don’t always consider the impact on our decision making abilities. We should. You’re essentially drunk. From medscape.org:
Alarmingly, though, studies show that when an individual has been awake for as few as 17 hours straight, their cognitive and psychomotor performance deteriorates to equal that of someone with a blood alcohol level of .05% (about 1-2 alcoholic drinks, depending on body weight and speed of consumption).
After 24 hours of sustained wakefulness, one’s impairment mirrors that of someone who has had 2-3 alcoholic drinks and whose blood alcohol is 0.1%, a level that is considered legally drunk in the United States. The finding that moderate levels of fatigue produce performance decrements that are greater than those induced by alcohol intoxication has been confirmed in other investigations.
We all know that people make bad decisions under the influence of a few drinks. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A human walks into a bar and throws back a few shots of Patron. That human catches the eye of another human, who has been crushing vodka sodas. The next morning, the humans wake up and can’t believe they slept together. Sleep deprivation works similarly. From a study published in the Psychonomic bulletin and review:
The results showed that sleep deprivation affects multiple components of cognitive processing, ranging from stimulus processing to peripheral nondecision processes. Thus, sleep deprivation appears to have wide-ranging effects: Reduced attentional arousal and impaired central processing combine to produce an overall decline in cognitive functioning.
Exercising reasonable judgment while under the influence is monumentally more difficult. Would you make a decision about who should become your business partner before sobering up? Maybe you would, but you shouldn’t. Similarly, you’ll want to wait until you you’re well rested before working on your most meaningful tasks. From a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience:
A single night of sleep deprivation (SD) evoked a strategy shift during risky decision making such that healthy human volunteers moved from defending against losses to seeking increased gains.
In other words, you’re more likely to take chances you wouldn’t otherwise take if you’re tired. Your brain simply doesn’t evaluate rewards and consequences the same way. This makes sense; we all know we don’t feel our best when we’re tired. In fact, we tend to make poor choices without even thinking about it, especially with respect to our diets. From Matthew Walker, professor of psychology and neuroscience:
What we have discovered is that high-level brain regions required for complex judgments and decisions become blunted by a lack of sleep, while more primal brain structures that control motivation and desire are amplified… high-calorie foods also became significantly more desirable when participants were sleep-deprived. This combination of altered brain activity and decision-making may help explain why people who sleep less also tend to be overweight or obese.”
This often leads to a downward spiral. We make a D minus decision because we’re fatigued and wanting to feel better. But now we’re still tired, irritable and feeling guilty over that decision. So we begin examining the areas of our lives to make sweeping changes. We come up with drastic options that we can’t possibly adhere to.
Next time you find yourself in this cycle, wait until after a solid night’s sleep and work a coherent process.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your health today, there are countless posts on this site that will serve your purpose. This isn’t one of them. However, if you’re in search of a more efficient and pleasurable way to eat eggs, salads and more, keep reading. Let’s welcome the most under-appreciated utensil in the drawer, the spork.
Here’s a challenge that I often face when eating my giant, beautifully constructed salads. I’ve worked my way down to the end of the meal, and I’m nearly satisfied. I’ve stabbed at the greens, the chicken, the cauliflower and the jicama. Everything is just peachy, except my plate has tiny specs of quinoa still perfectly dressed with hummus and a few small blue cheese crumbles here and there. Will I let them go to waste? Of course not. Now I have to get up to grab a spoon, interrupting my flow, or I lick the plate.
Eggs and mushrooms? You want to stab the ‘shrooms and scoop the eggs. Even if you eat your huevos over medium and sans veggies, you can’t get all that delicious runny yolk with a fork and the slippery white will likely slide right off your spoon.
Why have we not embraced the spork as a society?
Change to one’s routine is among life’s scariest actions. The comfort zone is cushy and the idea that it can be improved isn’t easily embraced. I say, surrender to the spork. From psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein:
We can struggle, or we can surrender. Surrender is a frightening word for some people, because it might be interpreted as passivity, or timidity. Surrender means wisely accommodating ourselves to what is beyond our control. Getting old, getting sick, dying, losing what is dear to us…is beyond our control. I can either be frightened of life and mad at life—or not. I can be disappointed and still not be mad.
See? Dying is beyond your control. What is within your control, however, is the type of tool you select. Just like with your other utensils, no flimsy and shoddily designed poser will add to your dining experience. You want to spend a sheckel or two extra and purchase the model that’s built to last. I won’t endorse a brand, per se, but I use this one. Feel free to find your own titanium build. The spork is akin to art. What is lovely in my home may not work in yours.
Who wants to drop ten bucks on an eating utensil, you ask? I don’t blame you. But surely you’ll spend a buck or two extra on grub to have a quality dining experience. If your pleasure is incrementally enhanced over the course of your lifetime, you won’t remember the extra cost. Just to put your mind at ease though, I did the math.
If you spread the cost out over your next 995 meals, it will cost you a cent per. To be able to pick up your plate’s last bits, this is a bargain.
own more. They are becoming more independent, which is the goal of every parent. The natural consequence is that I am less physically present to deliver lectures. It doesn’t diminish my involvement, but what they really need is trust and modeling powerful behavior.
search of a more efficient and pleasurable way to eat eggs, salads and more, keep reading. Let’s welcome the most under-appreciated utensil in the drawer, the spork.