Choosing Habits Over Hustle

Reading time: approx. 6 minutes

Hey Brothers! 

Welcome to LenDentonThrive Letter #66!

I write the LenDentonThrive Letter to provide Over-50 Guys with practical, science-backed information and strategies that help you lose weight, get fit, and live longer… all in a smarter, not harder way. 

In this week’s edition of the Letter, I want to talk to you about hustle as a component of fitness. We’ll look at what’s good about hustle… its limitations… and perhaps a better way to create long-term fitness. 

Let’s get to it!

America’s Hustle Culture

If you live in America, you know about Hustle Culture! It’s all around us. It’s the work ethic that drives us to go beyond our limits to achieve something we want. We see it in our favorite athletes, who have pushed hustle to the point of a warrior mentality. If you played organized sports, you probably got a healthy dose of hustle from your coaches.

Just as it is in sports, hustle is pervasive throughout fitness today. We’re encouraged to lift harder, run farther, and do reps to exhaustion. And then, do it again! 

I experienced this personally in my 40s in the CrossFit and gym communities. In both cases, I pushed too hard and injured myself to the point of requiring long, slow, and painful recoveries. 

Hustle didn’t help me improve my fitness. It delayed it.

I’m wiser now.

Two Problems With Hustle

I believe that the fitness industry’s focus on hustle culture is more aspirational than practical. There is nothing wrong with working hard to improve your fitness. Persistence, discipline, and effort are all part of the process. But, the over-emphasis on hustle has its limits. Here are two big ones:

Sustainability - for most of us Over-50 Guys, our goal is long-term fitness. We’re trying to improve and maintain our health and fitness for years to come. The best way to do that is to choose fitness activities that are both effective and sustainable. 

A fitness program works only as long as you keep doing it. The benefits end when you stop. 

An over-emphasis on hustle can lead to burnout, injury, or both. Overly challenging activities that demand excessive amounts of willpower will eventually tap out. (Remember, willpower is not an unlimited resource!)

Physiology - rigorous exercise helps you burn calories, lose weight, and build muscle, but it has limits. Those limits are related to how our bodies actually burn calories. 

Our bodies burn calories in four significant ways:

1. Base Metabolic Rate (BMR): Basically, this is our internal biological processes (breathing, blood pumping, digestion, tissue generation, thinking, etc.). It’s the majority of your daily calorie burn.

2. Thermic Effect of Food (TEF): The energy required to digest the foods we consume.

3. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): The calories burned in routine, non-exercise movements like walking, balancing, fidgeting, etc.

4. Exercise Energy Thermogenesis (EET): calories burned in purposeful exercise (like at the gym).

Figure 1 below shows how these four factors add up to what nutrition scientists refer to as our TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).

Note that EET (the exercise or hustle component of our TDEE) actually has the lowest impact on our total daily calorie burn. This is why so many guys experience a plateau in their results when they focus only on hard exercise. 

So remember, while exercise is good, it has limits imposed by our biology and can be difficult to sustain over a long time. 

Habits Over Hustle

I’m now ten years into my ThriveLife journey, and I’ve found that the best way to develop and sustain long-term fitness is to follow two general principles:

1. Choose activities that I actually enjoy doing

2. Focus on activities that I can do every day for the rest of my life.

I think of this as a Habits over Hustle approach to fitness, and it’s been really effective for me to lose weight and stay fit for the last ten years. 

We’re more likely to do activities that we enjoy doing, versus activities that we don’t enjoy. And, creating a set of daily habits or practices helps ensure that these healthy activities become a part of your personal operating system. 

My Habits

My habits have evolved over time as I’ve learned more and found what works best for me. Today, I have a set of six daily habits that I call my daily practices. Here’s a quick overview of all six:

1. Eat Smarter - our nutrition is the single most important aspect of our health and fitness. We can literally change the way we look, the way we feel, and how long we’ll live by changing the way we eat. We can make food work for us, but to do that we must eat intentionally. That means choosing foods that support our health and avoiding foods that can wreck our health. I began by eliminating sugars from the foods I chose, and ate more wholesome foods. I call this Eating Smarter, and I’ve written about this extensively here, here, and here. Change your food, change your life!

2. Meal Planning - I learned early on that it’s easier to avoid calories than to burn them off through exercise. A quick meal planning session in the morning (5 minutes or less) allows me to plan healthy meals and snacks so I don’t get caught later with only bad choices. Just 5 minutes of planning can save you 500 calories every day. 

3. Daily Weigh-ins - a very smart guy (Peter Drucker) once said: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” He was initially talking about business practices, but it turns out to be almost universally true. It’s especially true for losing weight and getting fit. I do a quick weigh-in every morning and record the weight in my Fitbit app to track it. There is some real mind-magic (neuroscience) behind watching the trends in your weight. See what I mean here. This might be the most important 1 minute of my ThriveLife!

4. Get My Steps - exercise is an important element of any fit lifestyle. Walking is my primary form of exercise. In the early days of my ThriveLife, it was my only form of exercise. (Yes, I lost 70+ pounds without running or lifting!) I call this Moving Smarter. Learn more about Moving Smarter here, and here.

5. Build Muscle -  (Training Smarter) - as I learned more about building and maintaining lifelong health, I added muscle-building to my daily practices. Maintaining muscle mass is important, especially for Over-50 Guys like me. Sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass due to aging, is a real issue. Weight lifting and strength training are effective ways to build muscle mass and counter this natural loss. Today, I use bodyweight exercises and barbells to do daily strength training at home. Learn more about Training Smarter here.

6. Sleep Better - getting more and better sleep is the newest addition to my smart daily practices. Today, it is a work in progress and is my #1 health and fitness goal. In recent years, I’ve learned a lot about the importance of getting at least 7-9 hours of quality sleep every night. Memory, cognition, stress management, and even weight loss are affected negatively by poor sleep practices. Today, I’m focused on getting 7 hours of sleep every night. Read more about the importance of sleep here.

These six daily practices are the key to my ongoing, long-term fitness success. A similar habits over hustle approach can work for you, too.  

In the long run, it’s habits over hustle!

If you want to put this approach to work for you in a way that fits your specific needs and preferences, you can accelerate your learning curve by subscribing to the LenDentonThrive Letter at the link below. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Smarter, not harder.

When you’re ready for your transformation, here are two ways I can help…

1. For the Do It Yourself approach, you can download your free copy of my new ebook: 6 Smart Moves To Your ThriveLife here.

2. When you’re ready to join a community of other busy Over-50 Guys building their ThriveLives together, check out my new ThriveLife Transformation course here. The ThriveLife Transformation guides you through a 30-day transformation process that includes online video training and daily support and assistance through our online community. Join alone or bring your friends. To learn more about the ThriveLife Transformation, click here.

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