When I was at University of Iowa, one of the habits I observed about Dan Gable, our lean and mean Olympic champion wrestling coach, was this:

He earned his meals.

How did he earn his meals? By working out.

This explains, in part, why so many Gable-trained athletes have a three-times-per-day workout mentality.

The more often you train, the better you get.

Meanwhile, your average human doing doesn’t train at all.

It’s….

Get up – eat.

Go to work for a few hours. Eat.

Go to work for a few more hours. Eat yet again.

Holy blubber. What a failing formula.

Three high-starch meals a day is what most people are consuming, and serves as part of the reason why the wandering masses are left wondering where their svelte physique or figure went.

Don’t know about you, but the way I see it, all those people on social media who cannot wait to tell you how “blessed” they are – they’re telling the truth. They are blessed with a big belly and rigor mortis in the limbs.

Meanwhile the true blessings in life go to those who move their body away from the food, until after they’ve worked out.

You might think that getting three workouts in per day is excessive or overly time consuming. It’s not.

Your workouts needn’t be long. Short, quick workouts are often best for your body.

With Combat Conditioning, you can get a vigorous fat-burning, muscle-molding workout done in five minutes or less.

You get up in the morning and skip rope for a few minutes, then you knock out a set of Fure-cat pushups and squats, and you’re wide awake, clear-headed and relaxed, feeling good in every way.

Later in the day, you can go for a quick 2-mile walk or run. Better yet, you do a series of sprints. Either way your training is over within 20-30 minutes.

And before bedtime, you can do the joint loosening exercises from Combat Stretching to calm and relax your mind-body.

Here in Florida, the best time of day for a vigorous workout is late in the evening, when most people are already sleeping. I have found that after the sun settles and you feel a gentle breeze, it’s easy to crank out a good workout.

Oftentimes, I spend 30 minutes on the exercises in Combat Conditioning.  Then I practice martial arts.

Evening workouts are also great because, even though you earned a meal, you typically don’t eat afterward. This means you get the double-benefit of growth hormone release from the workout as well as from your sleep.

Three quick workouts a day are also formulaic for staying in a feel-good emotional state, all day long. If you begin to feel down about all the crap going on in the whirld at this time, you can take charge of your emotional state by focusing on movement.

Move more – feel bad less – and if you want to drop some pounds, weigh less.

Gable nailed it. And so can you.

Follow the formula that creates champions.

Here endeth the lesson.

Matt Furey