The Busy Dad Blueprint

Hello busy dads and busy people everywhere. In today's video, I want to share with you the busy dad blueprint. Many of you have asked me to speak more expansively about the background practices that I have built to promote, to protect, to sustain my burpee practice. And in today's video, I'm going to tell you exactly what I do each and every day as a way of doing exactly that.

This is a daily blueprint, a series of practices that I have crafted over the last 5 and a half years as I have gotten deeper and deeper into my burpee training practice. And I have found that if I live by these habits and practices, and if I make sure that whatever else happens in a day, I check off every item on the checklist that I'm about to share with you, I thrive in my training, I thrive in my personal and professional life, and I get into the best shape available to me.

Everyone's blueprint should be tailored to them. In this video, I'm going to tell you what I do. I'm not going to tell you to do anything and the likelihood is you won't be able to just copy and paste my blueprint into your life. You will need to make modifications. But I have found that the list of practices that I am about to share with you have been revolutionary. So let's jump straight in.

When I am thinking about robust physical health, soundness of body as a promotion of soundness of mind and spirit, I am thinking in terms of three fundamental categories, three areas where you need to apply the practitioner's mindset and use discipline to make sure that you excel in those three areas. And those three, this is nothing revolutionary, are sleep, nutrition, and training. We are burpee practitioners and so we've already used the practitioner mindset in the context of training. But I try to cultivate that mindset in all three of those domains. And I find that when I am excelling across all three, that is when I tap into that deep powerful vein of energy, productivity, of joy, of power. A lot of people don't have even one out of those three areas mastered. But really, two out of three is not good enough. You need three out of three if you want to truly thrive. And I'm going to share with you the list of practices that I try to implement on a daily basis as a way of ensuring that I am able to excel across all three of those domains. And I'm going to start with sleep.

Sleep is absolutely foundational for performance. And some of you are working through sleeping problems. I've had sleeping problems in the past. Very, very many of us in the modern world do. What I'm about to say might not work as a prescription for you. But I want to share with you what I do on a daily basis to maximize my chances of sleeping well. So that if I have a bad night's sleep, I can at least say to myself, I'm not having a bad night's sleep because of something that I failed to do. My preparation for sleep begins first thing in the morning. This, of course, is not original to me. This is something that we all know from Andrew Huberman, but even years before I'd heard of Andrew Huberman, friends of mine who studied circadian biology all said the same thing. First thing in the morning, get yourself outside of your house directly exposed to natural light.

So, here is the first practice on the checklist. Within 30 minutes, you will see me in the front of my house for at least 5 minutes getting direct exposure to natural light. I'm usually sitting in a deep squat. We'll cover that a bit later when we talk about ways of preparing yourself for your training practice. So, the first sleep practice in the busy dad blueprint is get yourself exposed to natural light within 30 minutes of waking up.

The second daily sleep practice kicks in a couple of hours later. I have a strict daily caffeine cut off of 10 a.m. Caffeine lingers in your system for a long time. And if you are pushing your caffeine consumption deep into the afternoon, then you have very often the equivalent caffeine in your body of a shot or two of espresso right before you're going to bed. That is suicidal if you care about sleep quality. Caffeine can make it harder to get to sleep. It can also impede the quality of the sleep once you are asleep. For years, I thought I was drinking coffee late into the day, but I was falling asleep just fine. And so I thought, hey, I'm getting away with it. But the sleep quality was compromised. And I discovered that when I brought that cut off way, way way earlier in the day. I sleep better as a result.

The next sleep practice. For years, I used to wake up in the middle of the night once, twice, three times to go for a pee. I thought that was just me. I had a weak bladder. I'm famous among my friends and family for having a weak bladder. I thought that's just me. If you're one of those people, let me tell you, it has changed my life to make sure that my hydration needs are all met within 10 hours of waking. Every day, I will consume around about 3 L of water, but I will consume that within the first 10 hours of waking. If I'm out of bed at 5:00 in the morning, okay, by 3:00 p.m. I'm basically done with fluid intake. Later in the evening, if I'm feeling just a little bit dry mouth, dry throatated, a bit claustrophobic at the thought that I can't drink any more water, I might have a sip to just wet my lips, but I'm not drinking water later in the day. I'm meeting my hydration needs early, and now I'm not waking up at night for a pee.

Screen cut off. Going into the evening, preparing myself for sleep. It should be a much longer cut off, but hey, you've got to make trade-offs. My wife and I will sometimes watch something on TV, but there's a 1-hour cut off before sleep where I am not going near a screen. That is non-negotiable. If I can make it a longer cut off, I will. But 1 hour, that is the daily practice.

Breath work as a preparation for sleep. We're going to talk about breath work a bunch in today's video. One kind of breath work is designed to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and calm yourself down. This kind of breath work focuses around long slow exhalations. It is a wonderful way of preparing the body and the nervous system for sound sleep. And I will share a follow-along video in this description that I have found immeasurably valuable as a way of preparing myself for sleep.

Final and perhaps most important sleeping practice, rigid bedtimes, rigid wake up times. I know if you're a busy dad and you've got a newborn baby, this might not be applicable. You have to adapt your blueprint to your life circumstances. But I'm in a in a place in my life where my daughter sleeps soundly through the night. So I'm not just taking sleep where I can get it. I'm able to be to forward plan when I'm going to sleep. And so my sleeping window is 9:30 through 5:00 a.m. And very important to me is that I only allow 30 minutes of variability on either side. So that means that on any given day, I am aiming to go to go get into bed within between 9:15 and 9:45 and get out of bed between 4:45 and 5:15. It is unbelievably good for your testosterone to have regular sleep times, regular wake up times. So, if you're sleeping 8 hours a night, but your sleep is all over the place, you're effectively putting yourself into jet leg conditions. You're effectively moving between time zones. Don't do that to yourself. The body loves routine. The body loves predictability. So, I'm very strict about that sleeping window.

So there, my friends, are the daily list of practices that I am trying to implement as a sleep practitioner. You might not have heard that concept before, but when I have a good night's sleep, I'm not thankful. I mean, I am thankful, but I'm also proud of myself. I'm pleased with the way that my practices are unlocking new benefits and goods in my life. I'm taking responsibility for my sleep. I think being a practitioner really is all about taking responsibility and choosing discipline over short-term distractions. And I really think of myself as a sleep practitioner.

Let's move to nutrition. Of course, we could make an entire playlist about nutrition. I'm going to share the fundamentals of my approach. Take what you find useful out of this. Leave what you don't find useful. I'm not here to tell you what to eat, but I do want to tell you how I approach it. When you are thinking about your nutrition and about your calories, you really need to be thinking about three things. Quality, quantity, and timing. You get those three things right. And as a nutrition practitioner, you will be eating perfectly.

So for me, let's start with quantity. I have a daily practice of tracking my calories. Sometimes I use an app, sometimes I just have a running total in my head. But for the last 5 and a half years, I have done that. At this point, I can eyeball a plate of food. I know almost instantaneously the calorie count of that plate of food to within a certain margin of error. And every day, I am keeping track of my calories. I am always year round trying to eat in a very subtle calorie deficit allowing for the possibility that occasionally I will go over but for me where I am in my training with my activity levels and my metabolism as I have trained my metabolism over the years I'm eating around 2 and a half thousand calories every day year in year out and I'm tracking it to make sure that that quantity is roughly on point.

Quality. Quality. What does quality nutrition look like? There's all kinds of disagreement, but there is convergence on certain things. I don't eat junk food. No refined sugar. No foods with ingredients you can't pronounce. Simple whole foods combined with each other if you cook them, but very, very simple paired back whole foods. A focus for me on cultivating gut health through a high-fiber diet because gut health equals metabolic health. So for me, a minimum of five portions of vegetables per day, typically orienting towards 10. In addition, I'm looking for around about 100 grams of protein a day. I'm roughly keeping track of my protein targets. It's very easy for me to hit that number. And that's about all I impose on myself when it comes to food quality. Whole foods, no junk, tons of fiber through at least five, but typically 10 portions of vegetables and 100 grams of protein. That takes care of quality.

Finally, timing. 16:8. I don't know what the science says anymore. I remember when I first started fasting, there were all kinds of excited pronouncements about what fasting could do for your weight loss, for your health, for your longevity. Even if fasting is nothing more than an effective instrument of calorie control, for me it works to go 16:8. And just as with your sleep, it's not just enough that you sleep a certain number of hours per night, but that you are regular with those hours. So with when you are putting food into your body, the body craves predictability and routine. And so I am orienting towards a 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. eating window and then I'm fasting for the rest of the night.

I want to just briefly mention I think three capacities and skills that you need to cultivate as someone who orients towards eating according to these three principles. According to the demands of good quality, good quantity and good timing for your food. The first thing is to just come to terms with the fact that in any given day there will be pockets of time when you are a little bit hungry. During the fast, when you break the fast, when you're going to bed, when you wake up in the morning, there will be hunger pangs throughout the day. And just calmly enduring and forebearing through those pangs. This is the same kind of skill that we cultivate as burpee practitioners when we're in no man's land and we want to get out and just calmly staying in, sending your attention away from the from your stomach, distracting yourself, being patient, forbearing, admitting peaceably that there will be hunger built into your day and just being fine with that. That is the first skill that I have learned to cultivate.

The second skill, and this for me is the harder one, really, really a lot harder, has been the skill of exercising discipline when I break the fast. If you're fasting, it's very tempting to think by the time the fast is broken, all of the discipline has been has is done with and it's time to eat and you can eat whatever you want and there's a tendency to go into feast mode. I have found that learning to as the Japanese do when I'm feel like I'm at about 80% fullness to back off and wait and then of course 10 minutes later I feel like I'm at 100% fullness learning to stop eating before I feel bloated. That is the second skill that you cultivate.

And the final skill that you cultivate is learning to eat the foods that you have to chew. You have to coax out the deliciousness cuz it's not just the food isn't wearing its deliciousness on its sleeve every day. Just as I feel a disinclination to train that mounts every day, I feel a disinclination to eat those 10 portions of vegetables. I don't want to eat a raw carrot. I want to inhale a burger on a brioche bun. That's what I want. But learning to see the fork in the roads and orient towards the good. Orient towards what will benefit my body, not towards what is easiest. The same skill that I use when I'm blasting myself with cold water when I am jumping into a training session that I don't want to do. Putting discipline over inclination. That is how you will ensure that you eat good quality food. A very good hack that I have cultivated is before any meal I have to get through a whole kind of um a whole series of raw vegetables that I will eat as a preparation for the meal. It slows me down. It puts me into the right mindset. So that is the blueprint when it comes to nutrition.

Now let's move to training. As you know the busy dad program, the burpee practice is deep at the core of what I am doing. But there are some other background practices that I have developed and that I try to implement on a daily basis. I do not do very much mobility work. However, I will sit in a deep squat for a minimum of 5 minutes per day. I'm timing it on my watch. Usually, I'm stacking that habit with the habit of getting exposure to natural light first thing in the morning. So, it's 5 minutes looking out at the sun, sitting in a deep squat. Very often, I will sit there for longer.

The second daily practice, 10 pull-ups every day, 365 days of a year. And when I say pull-ups, what I mean is a dead hang for two or 3 seconds, pull myself up slowly, at least chin above the bar, but usually try to get the bar to my collarbone, slow down, 3 seconds, back in. It is not a problem at all. If you cannot yet do 10 of those, what I tell my coaching clients is, let's do 10 pull-ups over the course of the day. Break it down however you want, but I strongly recommend that you get yourself a pull-up bar so that you don't need to go to the gym so that it is very easy for you just in the course of your day to get in a daily quota of pull-ups. Tremendously valuable. And slowing them down will give you real benefits for grip strength as well.

I'm sitting down as I'm making this video, but a practice that I've been building in of late is only to sit down for meals and in the last hour of the day when I am spending time having a conversation with my wife. If I'm in a meeting where I have no option, it will be socially odd for me to to stand up. Fine, I will sit down. But throughout my working day, I am standing or I am walking. When I am teaching, I am standing and I am walking. Throughout my day, I am minimizing sitting to the point that I am sitting for probably an hour a day at most. Okay? But making sure that I am standing as much as I possibly can. And in terms of the training blueprint, that's about it. Sometimes I will add in 10 very slow, very controlled push-ups. That comes and goes, but the practices I've just shared with you are in the blueprint. They are their non-negotiables every day, year round.

Two final practices that benefit all three of these, but are kind of miscellaneous. One is energizing breath work. I'm going to share with you another excellent breath work follow-along. I want to shout out to my friend Sam who put me back into breath work after years of um not going there. Whereas we use calming breath work with the long slow exhalation as a way of preparing the body for sleep. We use energizing breath work which focuses on inhalations and breath retentions as a way of preparing the body for action and the mind. I have found that as a way of preparing for teaching as a way of preparing for burpee training. This kind of breathing really puts me into the right mind space. It is exhilarating and when I am holding those long retentions, I find that I am tapping into the same part of myself that comes forth in a burpee session and gets me through no man's land. I found there's been a beautiful synergy between the breath work and the burpee training. And that as I have improved as a burpee practitioner, I have improved as a breath work practitioner and vice versa. That is there every day. A minimum of 10 minutes of energizing breath work each day as well as um calming breath work in the evening. It's been a tremendously valuable practice. I'm going to talk more about breath work in future videos, in future newsletters, but man, if you haven't tried it, there is no natural high like it except the natural high that you can get from cold water.

I right now do not have my cold plunge set up. I'm going to need to think about how to make that setup work in my house. And so for me right now, the second best, and it is a very distant second best, is daily cold shower, minimum of 5 minutes in the cold shower each day. And there is something symbolic about that practice. Excuse my cats. They're running around chasing each other. The practice of standing looking at the shower, feeling a strong impulse to make it warm, but blasting yourself with the cold instead, and then entering into the cold shower and finding a way of staying there, transcending disinclination, having discipline orient you towards what you know will benefit your body and your mind. That is emblematic of everything we're doing here. And so for me that is one of the practices that I think of as a kind of symbol of what I am trying to cultivate as a practitioner.

So there you have it my friends the blueprint of daily habits that I have found have taken my burpee practice and my life energy to another level. I have found that through my practices I have been able to tap into a vein of energy that I never knew existed in me. I have found that I am able to give more to the people around me and to do so with a sense of joy. I have found that I am resilient in the face of pressures that used to be insurmountable for me. I've leveled up as a human being through these practices and I think that you can do the same. What will your daily blueprint look like? I can't say, but I hope that it will at least incorporate some of the principles that I have been through in this video. And if you find any of the specific practices that I use worth trying, I suspect that you are going to love them.

Do I hit 10 out of 10 every day? I wish I did. I don't. Frank confession, I don't. Very often I am hitting 10 out of 10. I'm hitting every practice. But there are periods where I start to lose track of a handful of those practices. And I'm coming to the end of well, I'm at the end of one of those periods right now. There's been upheaval in my life and certain of my practices have slipped through my fingers. When I get to a place like that, it is time for a course correction and that is when it is time for what I call a blizzard. A blizzard is an extended period of perfect adherence to your blueprint. What I invite you to do is create a blueprint and then send yourself out into the blizzard. Instead of incrementally trying to build each practice, working on one at a time, set up a blueprint and just expose yourself to the whole system of practices right away. Enter this new way of living, this new way of being. It will be very difficult at first. Perhaps not all the practices will stick, but if you're able to implement enough of them in your blueprint, you will find that you tap into that same deep vein of energy. And once you've been there, you start to reconceptualize your own path, your own mission in life as serving and harnessing and protecting that energy. That energy that feels like it has something divine about it. And that your duty is to serve it. That is how I am conceptualizing the ultimate point of everything that I am doing here. It is a way of serving what is good in me and disinclining myself away from what is toxic, what is poisonous, what is um decaying and entropying. I want to be a force for good, for integrity, for coherence. And that means I want to harness the power that is given to me. These sets of practices the way that I do exactly that. So there is a seriousness, a vein of seriousness running through everything that I do. But you know, I find that I am never more cheerful, more light on my feet, more generous and kind than when I am deep into a blizzard and I'm so happy to be in one right now.

All right, my friends. I hope this video was helpful. I hope you are taking notes and um I strongly invite you to create your own blueprint and start living by it. We'll speak again soon.