The EMOM Mentality

WHY am I writing this post?

Because I want to share some of my personal thoughts after hearing the story and beliefs of two completely different people who are yet fighting very similar challenges. One of them is a dear friend and former colleague, Erik Wijman, the other one is Jason Khalipa, a CrossFit Games athlete, who earned the title “Fittest Man on Earth” in 2008. Jason got interviewed in one of my favorite podcasts, where he talked about his daughter who got diagnosed with leukemia at the age of four. The way he and his family embraced this diagnosis and faced it with unyielding positivity is a life lesson on its own. I really suggest you should listen to the complete interview, where he explains about his AMRAP mentality in life, on which I based my EMOM mentality and the title of this post. [Read more about his story on: https://www.jasonkhalipa.com/about]

For me personally, this interview reminded me of my friend Erik, who got diagnosed with brain tumor last year. You should also know that his now eight year old daughter conquered cancer during her first four years of her life. Talking about a battle, I suggest you should definitely check out Erik's Battle website… Erik has now gone through a series of surgeries, chemo-therapy and is currently undergoing an immune therapy. His fighting spirit and positivity are truly unbelievable.

Both stories share the fact that they passed quite some time in oncology as a father and Erik told me a wise lesson that he picked up during that period. If a child feels sick, it will rest or go to sleep, but if it feels good, it will go all-in playing games and making fun. At this time, he is doing completely the same and I believe we should implement this strategy more often in our daily lives as well.

This leads to the title of this post, namely the EMOM Mentality. EMOM is an acronym derived from a common workout method, being “Every Minute On the Minute”, which means that you perform a certain number of repetitions of one exercise during one minute, which you continue for a certain amount of time. This way, you create a WORK time and a REST time, depending on the exercise and your overall fitness. It mostly comes down to 35-45 seconds of WORK time, with the remainder minute REST. This is seen as one of the most efficient training methods and you also see a similar pattern coming back in a lot of circuit trainings. When I do home workouts, I focus a lot on this type of exercising and I try to expand this mentality into my everyday life. It doesn’t literally mean living every minute on the minute, but creating ON time and OFF time within a similar pattern. While in your ON time, maintain your FOCUS in order to complete your tasks quicker AND mostly with less effort, especially because you don’t constantly switch attention! So why shouldn’t we rest properly and go all-in when it really counts – as Erik noticed doing the kids in oncology – instead of constantly stretching yourself and trying to perform at a constant level all the time. You don’t see athletes performing at the same level throughout the year neither, do you? It is simply not possible to maintain your performance without the proper resting periods. Furthermore, it can lead to a lot of frustrations and other negative side-effects.

You can also project the EMOM ON/OFF time perfectly to the office by just changing the Minute into an Hour. As studies have shown, your attention drops during the day, but by creating mini-pauses you can increase the overall attention level. I agree that you cannot implement this in any type of job, but most knowledge workers should be able to create at least some of these patterns to stimulate their productivity. Why don’t you try to create these type of mini-pauses together with your colleagues? Grab a coffee together, share some thoughts, this is where the magic of new creative ideas happen. And then go work on it during one of your next ON-zones. [You can find an interesting article about this topic at https://open.buffer.com/science-taking-breaks-at-work/].

I could continue writing about the ideal productivity or attention zones, which are actually different for every single person, but the main conclusion I want to make in this article is:

You can’t be 100% all the time, just accept it, but when you are in your ON-ZONE and you are LIVING / WORKING / EXERCISING / PLAYING with your kids / WHATEVER, go ALL-IN and enjoy it!