💪Finkel's Fast Five - Issue 105 - January 31, 2020

FINKEL'S FAST FIVE - ISSUE #105 - January 31st, 2020

Hey! Thank you so much for reading and subscribing. Here are 5 tremendous things I came across this week. Enjoy! - Jon

ONE

TOUGH GUY OF THE WEEK - Lewis Pugh

What have you been up to the last few weeks? Anything challenging? Anything like Lewis Pugh who has been swimming under ice sheets and inside glaciers in Antarctica while wearing nothing but a Speedo? The water is zero degrees. The air temp is negative. It's absolute insanity... But the pictures are stunning and beautiful and his blog entries are mesmerizing. His post about swimming in an inner-glacier tunnel and hearing the ice crack and shift while almost killing him is worth a few minutes.

TWO

MUSCLES - I'd say over the last five years the exercise I've incorporated most into my workouts is the pull-up (with all different grips). One thing I've learned is that if you want to get to the point where you can bang out 15-20 pull-ups at a clip, you need a plan.

I've tried a few of them, with varying results, but the method described in this video is something I stumbled upon a bit through trial and error, and a bit through Googling and finding workouts similar to this. It's an 8-minute video, but if you're serious about jacking your body up and down on a bar a lot (and really, who isn't???) then it's worth watching.

THREE

DOCUMENTARY - If I had to rank the sport that I'm the worst at, but that I'm simultaneously the most fascinated by, the runaway #1 choice would be surfing. I love everything about it. When I lived in LA and had a board and was walking distance from the ocean, I put a lot of effort into learning how to do it...but...I just sucked. And yet, even a session where I'd catch one wave was amazing...

This is why I love to live vicariously through big time, legit surfers via books, magazines, movies and documentaries. This week I watched Heavy Water about Nathan Fletcher, who comes from a long line of surfers and was one of the pioneers of the North Shore. The film touches on Jay Adams, the Iron Brothers and all the legends you'd want to hear about. Here's a link and it's on Prime right now.

FOUR

BOOKS - I keep a list of books that I'd like to read and I try to rotate between buying new books that come out and old ones on my list. A book that has been sitting on that list since 2014 is Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson. With the recent stunning and heartbreaking Kobe Bryant tragedy, this week felt like the right time to finally dive in.

The book covers more than Kobe, obviously, going back to Jackson's days as a player for the Knicks, his childhood in North Dakota, his time with the Bulls and anecdotes/lessons about Jordan, Rodman, Shaq and all the legends he coached. You can check it out here.

FIVE

A great quote about big wave surfing that probably applies to other things in life:

"Waves are not measured in feet and inches, they are measured in increments of fear."

- Buzzy Trent

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And if you haven't yet, you can buy my new book, Jocks in Chief, which ranks every president athletically, below.