The Interval Lifestyle: Leveraging Recovery to Maximize Your Life's Performance

By Michael MacNair

What I call an “Interval Lifestyle” leverages planned recovery and inspired sprints, taking you to a more clearly defined quality of life that is more fulfilling, more rewarding, more productive, and less stressful. Like a high performing athlete who uses interval training to take their performance level one step further, the "Interval Lifestyle" will be your very own personal trainer to help achieve a higher level of performance in your daily life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781631925368

Book preview

Tips

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him.

— Thoreau

PREFACE

Aim high. Climb high. Be high.

While writing most of this book, I was traveling to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, a three-week trip. Getting away for so long while running a company and having a family is not easy for most, but people like me are not average. Most of the business people I know can’t (or won’t) get away and disconnect for three minutes, nevertheless three weeks. Trips like this take planning and commitment to the concept of recovery as a tool for success and not simply a possible reward for success. I found energy and focus in the months leading up to the trip. I became more physically fit, more creative, more productive, and more decisive. I found amazing energy and confidence while preparing. I was fortifying parts of my body and mind that needed strength and recovery. My preparations allowed the people around me to become more empowered because I had to prepare them for the upcoming long periods we would have without communication; doing this made them more productive in their roles, which is something they will sustain moving forward.

I carried this energy and confidence home with me ready to renew my life with passion and perspective. In this book, you will find some new—and not so new—concepts that will direct you to what I call an Interval Lifestyle that leverages planned recovery and inspired sprints, taking you to a more clearly defined quality of life that is more fulfilling, more rewarding, more productive, and less stressful.

From Fat Man to Ironman

I am passionate about the concepts I have learned, utilized, and shared in this book. I am self-publishing this book because I want others to benefit from these powerful concepts. But why should anyone listen to me? It is important to share with you where I started because this is not a good-to-great story. It is not the story of a Donald Trump-like figure who took his family’s millions and, with a few new ideas, made them billions. This is not a story of a natural born athlete whose self-discipline and physical stature allowed him or her to realize a dream. It is not the story of an inventor of amazing new ideas that changed the world. This is my story. The story of a fat, unpopular kid who shopped in the husky aisle, grew up in a trailer, had inserts for flat feet, struggled with ADD and didn’t know it, was the first in his family to go to college, and who was not very good at many things.

This is the story of a kid who learned a few tricks from smart and insightful people and grew up to compete in four Ironman triathlons (so far). A