Physical Transformation

This is everything I have ever learned when it comes to priming your body to have a healthy agile mind.

These ideas, steps, strategies or whatever you want to call it, is what I found to be effective for me to stay mentally agile to learn quickly, identify the toxic individuals in workplaces to stay clear or limit/manage their influence over my mind.

Now, is it possible to be mentally agile when you are fat and out of shape.

Yes, totally, but its going to be too physically taxing.

Table of Contents

Your brain wouldn’t get enough blood to receive the nutrients you eat in the form food, even if you eat healthy.

Besides, being a cognitive athlete with an agile mind, you’ll also look good, feel good in your skin to present yourself in a confident manner to others.

So, lets look at what you need to do to prime your body to become a cognitive athlete.

This is the first thing that I wish I did, since the beginning of my fitness journey.

I used to not care about what I ate and I focused 100% on working out and becoming fit.

However, later in life, I educated myself on macronutrients and micronutrients which greatly helped me improve the way I felt, the way I had improved when working out.

It had a domino effect on many areas of my life that I had to put this as the #1 step to get sorted.

Truth be told, this is not the easiest step.

These days, the food manufacturing process reduces the nutrient content in natural foods, such that you have to rely on supplements to make for it.

Fast food has completely altered the way we look at food because of the right amounts of preservatives, fats and other chemicals to spike our brains with enough dopamine to associate that “good feelings” with the fast food you eat.

Read that line again, so you get the idea clearly.

The easiest and quickest way to get your nutrition sorted is to use a meal prep service like My Muscle Chef, or Macros etc, to have them deliver the meals to you.

Or, like most dudes these days, if you are someone who likes to spend time in the kitchen, then I think you have what it takes to read up on micro and macronutrients and you probably know a decent about this subject.

Personally, I do not cook, unless you consider heating leftover and slapping some peanut butter of a toast with honey and bananas as “cooking”.

I use My Muscle Chef, so my food prep is taken care of, as they are dietitian approved and reduces the mental stress of preparing chicken that is either too spicy or too salty or just taste so bland like depression during my lunch time at work.

That being said, since you are anyway going to monitor what you eat and choose to eat healthy, you might as well do it properly with some guidance.

I have built a tool called TDEE Calculator, which enables you to determine how many calories you should be having inorder to achieve your fitness goals.

These days, I use the calories determined based on my need to maintain my weight.

You can find this tool at tdeecalculator.pro, its free and takes only a few seconds to spit out it’s numbers.

I think its a really cool tool, it helped me save time on figuring out my calories on Google Sheets.

and for the next step…

So, by now you hopefully started looking into getting your nutrition right.

You have hopefully, used my app to determine your target calories.

Next, is the fun part. Training for Strength and Endurance.

Lets talk about training for strength.

Training for strength, requires you to lift heavy.

When it comes to lifting, you don’t have to lift like Ronnie Coleman or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

All you need to do is to lift to the point it is becoming challenging for you to lift. This challenging point is different for different people.

For me personally, for example, deadlifts its 100kg for 5 sets of 5 reps with 3 min rest in between at 67kg body weight.

As you consistent lifting, these numbers will go up.

If you are wondering what workout to do, the most easiest place to start is to do the StrongLifts workout.

Its a simple 5×5 workout that would work your entire body 3 times a week.

If you are looking for something more, like a bit more variety, you can’t go wrong with BoostCamp, the best workout tracking app in the world, in my opinion.

That being said, it doesn’t matter what tools you use, how fast or slow you progress.

All that matters is consistency.

By working out consistently, you are forcing your body to push more blood to your brain, so it remains in peak condition to perform at it’s best.

This is especially true as you get older and get busy with more life stress.

Besides, lifting heavy is one way of simulating physical hardship in a controlled environment, where you are forced to overcome a physical challenge after some reps of doing an exercise.

The more challenging it gets, the more it rewires your brain to face and overcome hardships in life.

It is the reason, I consider working out almost equivalent to therapy for me. It helps me with mindfulness and being focused on one task.

This brings to the next aspect of this step, cardio hard.

I used to ignore cardio because, I felt that lifting heavy and being strong was enough, until I tried muay thai.

Boy was I breathing hard real quick, despite being strong, lifting heavy.

Over the years, I have found that the more muscle you carry, the more your heart has to pump blood to all these muscle groups so that you can function well in a combat situation.

Hence, the reason why fighters are lean and agile.

In my early 20s, I used to do 8 to 12 rep ranges when lifting, because of which I gained some size.

However these days and for a long time I only do 5 reps max with heavy weights, which is great for strength and power.

For cardio, I usually rely on HIIT cardio, where you go 1 min hard and then 30 secs or 1 min slow on a treadmill for about 5 rounds etc.

My personal favourite is to join a local boxing gym and they’ll sort it out.

The more sadistic (well, kind of) the trainer, the more harder the workout, the greater the results. I know that from experience.

Besides, whats the point of looking like a powerful guy and not knowing how to use all that power, effectively in a combat situation.

I get it, none of this is related to being a cognitive athlete, but having good cardio vascular fitness is important for blood flow to the brain, staying sharp and agile.

The added bonus, the ladies love it, both on the streets and under the sheets 😉

Most people, consider taking a day off and playing video games as recovery, some consider playing football as recovery.

Its all great, they are not wrong in following those activities.

Although, it has it’s own pros and cons. it would be out of scope for this article to talk about the pros and cons of each of those activities.

To me recovering both mentally and physically is to be able to rest and recover effectively, using practices like deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness.

It is not something that you do only one day a week.

Its a daily practice, which has compounding effect on your mind over time.

Working out, eating healthy and especially working at a toxic workplace, puts an insane amount of stress on the body and mind.

Our parasympathetic nervous system, doesn’t even get a shot at being activated because of all these life stressors, which activates our sympathetic nervous system.

In more simple terms, our flight/fight hormones are so activated, such that our body’s rest/recovery hormones are not activated to the same degree, which has long term negative effects.

For mental recovery, I actually use the following as a daily practice

• long walks after work
• 15 meditation session first thing in the morning and last thing before sleep
• 4-4-4 and 4-7-8 boxed breathing

I found Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques to be helpful for managing the thoughts that contribute to the anxious responses in the body, but more on that in the Mental transformation section.

If you are an over-thinker battling anxious thoughts, you will find the Bloom app really useful to manage your anxious thoughts.

Since you have read so far into this article, here is a link to get 30 Days of FREE Self-Therapy with the Bloom app.

I found it useful to tame my monkey mind, I’m sure it will help you too.

Lets talk physical recovery, which is relatively easy compared to mental recovery.

By now, you should know that the mental and physical, i.e the body and the mind are well interconnected.

Alot of the mental recovery practices mentioned above primes your body to recover physically, however, you need the appropriate kind of macro and micro-nutrients to recover effectively.

If you have used my FREE TDEE Calculator app, you’ll know your caloric requirement based on your activity levels and your macro and micro-nutrient ratios specific to your goal.

If you get meet those requirements from food alone, you are all good.

However, most of us, or atleast in my case, I don’t get all of my caloric needs from food alone. Hence, I use supplements, to “supplement” my caloric/nutritional deficiencies.

I use whey protein, Omega-3s, almost religiously to meet my protein and fat needs.

Especially, being a cognitive athlete one needs and abundance of proteins, and fats to optimize the brain and give your body enough tools to produce the appropriate neurotransmitters for optimum performance.

Part of physical recovery is to get sound sleep. It is so important, such that it requires it’s own dedicated section.

“Get a…Deep REM Sleep”, should honestly be a slogan that needs to go in your head, when working at a toxic workplace.

Without this, you might as well, off yourself (metaphorically speaking).

When I started my, for lack of a better term, “fitness journey” in the past, when bodybuilding.com used to be free for all, I didn’t focus much on recovery.

In my defense, I was young. It just happened automatically. I was comfortably ignorant of the world, to be stressed.

However, as an adult the game changed quickly.

I started getting stressed about the job, the money, bills, credit, workplace shenanigans etc.

Overtime this started to took a toll on my productivity, add on top of it, the stress induced by a workout introduced more demand on focusing on recovering between workouts.

Our brain is a very delicate super computer, if there is a slight imbalance in the chemical in your brain, you’ll start to see it in your daily life.

It could be manifest in your lack of ability to recall a memory, certain words, mood swings, anxious thoughts etc.

There is nothing truly positive that a toxic workplace, can and ever will positively contribute towards lowering any of our anxieties.

It will only exacerbate these negative mental states because the habitat always has a grip over the habitus of an individual.

In my case, I had issues with recalling words, getting a deep sleep, until I “discovered” L-Tryptophan and experienced it’s positive effects.

I had digestive issues because of excessive stress, thyroid issues from stress and because of endocrine disruptors in my daily products.

If you’ve read my story here, you’ll know some parts of my journey, that I chose to make public.

Finding solutions to all of this led me on a rabbit hole exploring and learning about neurochemistry, nootropics etc, which I explain in the mental transformation section.

In my journey I have found 5-HTP, L-Tryptophan and Glycine to be really helpful to give me that deep restful sleep.

I try and stay away from melatonin, because of the potential dependency you tend to have from prolonged use.

Back when I was part of the mentorship group and working at a toxic workplace, I found it hard to go to sleep because of the abnormal thyroid function disrupted by the products suggested by the mentorship group organizers and life stress in general.

After I left the group, I was able to normalize my thyroid function, by getting my diet right and getting rid of all of the products I was using that was affecting my thyroid.

If you do not know what endocrine disruptor is, I highly recommend the book, Estrogeneration.

I listened to it on Audible and it confirmed what I found in the products that I was told to buy the “mentors”

If it scares you, it should.

Be mindful of what is in your daily products and eliminate them all.

Our water supply these days are infected with flouride, endocrine disruptors and other harmful elements that is socially unacceptable for me to write on a site publicly, although it is mentioned in the Estrogeneration book.

It is especially true for people who live in the urban city like areas.

I use a water filter like Waters Australia to eliminate the flouride from the water supply, and to purify the water I drink.

Congratu-f**king-lations! (I bet you’ve never been congratulated like that ever before, have you?)

In a dopamine hijacked TikTok world, you managed to read or atleast skim through an article that gave you actionable steps to improve your health to become a high performance individual, ie. a cognitive athlete!

I’m super pumped!

This is everything I have learned through life experiences, trial and error about transforming physically.

In each of these sections, if you’ve noticed, I didn’t pick sides, like Intermittent fasting is better than keto, or strength workouts are better than bodybuilding workouts etc.

The reason is there is no such thing as a perfect workout or a perfect nutrition plan.

We all come from different cultural backgrounds, different lived experiences, different dietary tolerances.

It would be stupid to say, that a specific nutrition or workout or a supplement is the perfect fit for the entire human race.

I have tried them all or atleast alot of them, and thankfully, lived to write this article, despite the health challenges I faced from my experiments.

I would like for you to take action and implement these steps in your life and let me know in the comments below about your progress.

If you are ready, lets talk more in detail about the mental transformation needed to become a cognitive athlete.