Newsletter #2: Exercise and Long Term thinking

Recently, I watched this interview of the 5 times CrossFit champion, Matt Fraser. I would recommend listening to the whole thing, but if you are crunched on time, check out the podcast from 52:45 onwards. Matt talks about how rowing is a tough workout for him but when he thinks about the total time he spends on it in a day, it’s only an hour or so, which he says is such a small fraction of his day. So the reason he pushes through it is that he feels proud of himself when he gets a good workout in for the whole day. Essentially he looks at it like an hour investment of feeling pain, for 23 hours of happiness and self-respect.

I think this mental model is useful for planning for any long-term decision. Any habit that will have long-term benefits like exercise, eating healthy, reading, etc. is painful to do at the moment and hence difficult to maintain. But if we remind ourselves of the mental model Matt uses, we can push through the perceived pain.

For example, the benefit of long-term exercise is having a healthy body when you are in your 40s and 50s. We are working out for an hour or half an hour today to save ourselves from years, maybe decades, of chronic pain that can happen due to sustained bad posture and weak muscles. Even though we have to work out every day, it is just 30 or 60 mins a day to avoid the pain, which if chronic, will be there for the full 24 hours.

I have found running to be an activity that helps me condense this model in my head. No matter how many times you go out for a 5K run, it never gets easier. For every run especially the last 800 meters or so, I feel like I want to stop. But if I push through and finish the run, I feel good about myself for the rest of the day. Even at an easy pace, 800m will not take more than 5 mins. I just have to endure those 5 mins and literally 2 mins after my run, physically, the pain is gone and mentally I feel rejuvenated.

This also translates to other areas of my life where I know the action I am taking now might seem painful, boring, uninteresting, etc. but the amount of benefit of the action outweighs the pain I am feeling now.

The reason why I feel that exercise in particular is useful to understand this model is simple because it is very easy to experience, not only short-term pain but also long-term gains and satisfaction. In other areas of life, however, this might not be so easy. Reading helps us to be a better writer, build a knowledge base, parse information quickly, etc. however, it will take years of reading different books to gain the benefits, so we can’t really co-relate a particular reading to output all the time. In a workout, however, we can feel the short-term pain while doing the exercise and also the rush that follows when we push through and complete it.

I hope you found this interesting. Until next time!

PS: I had my first root canal recently, this was my first ever dentist appointment, I think I found an exception to the above rule, even though extremely excruciating, I will argue that 30–40 mins of pain during the procedure and a few days of pain after is worth it for a lifetime of chocolate, ice cream, and desserts for a foodie like me :P

An article I found interesting: How scientist found a way to show imaginary numbers in a real experiment! A podcast I found interesting: Matt Fraser: 5 times CrossFit Champion

Originally published at https://prathmesh6.substack.com on August 18, 2022.