Watch this if you’re having an “off day”

so my dad once taught me a lesson that i will never forget i was probably 12 or 13 at the time and it was a saturday morning i was down in the basement with my brother my dad and my dad had built an entire gym down there and he had us work out with him most saturdays we also had to work out a few times a week he was kind of a strict dad and he made us lift weights but i remember that saturday morning i was telling him dad i'm not really feeling into it today i feel like i'm having an off day and i'll never forget what he said to me he said sometimes you have an off day and then you hit a personal record anyway so don't give me that bad attitude do your warm-up sets and let's get going now around this time i had been lifting for maybe a year it was pretty casual but i was struggling with the first big milestone that a lot of people have when they're lifting weights which is bench pressing 135 pounds that's the big 45 pound plate on each side of the bar i had tried to hit it a few different times failed each time i had this i guess mental block really but i thought i couldn't hit it so i was warming up i was working up to what i thought was gonna be my working set and my dad said thomas i want you to go into a different room i'm gonna put weights on the bar and i don't want you to look at what's on the bar so i go out of the room and then i come back a few seconds later and at a little glance couldn't help but look a little bit i realized that there's a ton of random weights in the bar a bunch of little 2. 5 5 pounders 10 pounders but i can't tell what's in the bar i get under it he unracks it for me i hit one rep put it right back and he says congratulations you just hit 135 pounds on the day that i had told my dad hey it's an off day i don't think i'm gonna do well i did in fact hit that personal record and that i think is the best possible illustration that i could have ever gotten for the lesson he was trying to teach me some days you think you're having an off day and then you hit a pr anyway and i have now reinterpreted that to realize that some days you think you're having an off day but you really aren't what is happening instead is you have not yet given your body and your mind time to properly warm up to get ready for the challenge that you are throwing yourself into and when you do you can take what feels like an off day and turn it into a day where you perform your absolute peak and that is because there is a two-way relationship between your perception of your capabilities your perception of how you're feeling and the actions you actually take and unfortunately a lot of people think that this road is actually a one-way road where i perceive that i have a certain level of energy today and they let that dictate the actions they take in reality that road is two-way and when you spend some time getting into the flow of things spend some time if you're a writer just writing gibberish on a page that you know is going to be garbage or if you're a lifter spend some time actually doing warm-up sets like you're supposed to sometimes the actions you take get you into a different frame of mind and it's not just a cerebral change it's not just oh i guess i was actually capable of more than i thought i was today it's a more emotional change too you start to feel better you feel more capable because of the actions you took it is a two-way road between how you feel and how you act now some days you really are having an off day some days you're sick some days you just aren't feeling it and that's okay but i truly believe at least for me but you as well that more than 50 of the time you think you're having an off day it's just a day where you have not yet warmed up enough so let me now talk a little bit about the art of warming up i want to share two principles that will help you warm up more intelligently and more successfully for whatever it is you're trying to do number one stop trying to perform during your warm-ups this is something that i have to remind myself of all the time when i get into the gym and right now the working set that i'm working on right now is three reps of 275 so i've got several different warm-up sets that i'm gonna do before i get up to that and when i'm doing those warm-ups i often go through this little mental exercise where i first think why not get a little bit of extra work while i'm doing the warm-ups huh so i'll throw the 135 on there and i'll be tempted to do like 20 reps but that's not the point of the warm-up sense the point isn't to perform there the point is to simply get your body warmed up and in exercise science there's this principle of effective reps if you do a set of 10 squats say maybe only the last three reps are effective they are actually challenging you and causing your body to prompt a growth response in your muscles the other reps are just sort of getting you to that effective rep range you shouldn't be using your warm-up sets to try to generate effective reps and the same thing applies to non-physical work if i sit down to write and i realize that i'm not in a writing mood and i need to warm up i shouldn't be trying to edit my writing right away that's a big principle for writing or for art or any kind of creative work when you're warming up when you're trying to get into the flow state turn off that editing brain just let yourself get whatever's in your head onto the page even if it is complete garbage and you know it because the point isn't to

perform during the warm-up the point is to warm up the second principle that i want to share for you that will make your warmups more successful is to give yourself the time you need to warm up a lot of us have more off days than we would like to because what we're doing is shoving our day full of so many different tasks and schedule activities that we have this anxiety that we're not going to be able to perform in them because we have to do this and then go to this and i'm guilty of this as well even though i've talked about rule of three and all kinds of principles around giving yourself the time to do a proper job i'm still guilty of thinking i can shove just one or two more things onto the to-do list for the day a little bit of compression with your schedule is good but if there's not time to warm up you're not going to be able to do it you need some time to warm up so schedule less in your day and give each task the time it properly needs for you to get into the flow state and then for you to perform you need a little bit more time to properly carry out the task but most importantly when you feel like you're having an off day ask yourself have i warmed up have i given myself that opportunity because if you haven't then there is a high probability that this actually isn't an off day and you have the potential to turn it around if today is feeling like an on day you're looking for a creative outlet for your energy and a way to become a more innovative and capable problem solver than you my friend should check out brilliant who have kindly sponsored today's video brilliant is learning library for math science and computer science if you want to increase your expertise in any of these areas brilliant is an absolutely amazing resource to check out they have more than 60 in-depth courses covering things like number theory calculus probability statistics algorithm fundamentals data structures even a course on how to build your own search engine and understand how the big search engines like google work and the great thing about brilliant is that unlike sitting in a lecture or reading a book you are engaged actively the entire time you go through one of their courses because active learning is their central tenet for designing all their materials which means that as you're going through their courses you're going to find yourself engaged in interactive and challenging problems that you have to solve you are in the driver's seat you have to warm up a bit and get into that learning state of mind and if you're ready to do that you can go over to brilliant. org thomasfrank or click right there and be one of the first 200 people to do so to get 20 off their annual premium subscription thanks as always for watching thanks for brilliant for sponsoring and being a big supporter of my channel hopefully you found this video helpful if you did hit that like button for ye old algorithm and i'll have a couple of other videos on screen if you want to check those out today but if you feel like today has been an off day so far and you feel like you haven't warmed up yet go do that and then go do whatever it is you're supposed to be doing see the next one