What is the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto?

Hello, hello, my fantastic listeners, welcome back to the 2% solution, where we're all about making small changes for huge impact. I'm Dai Manuel, your guide on this journey to a more fulfilling, joyful and happy life. Today, we're diving deep into something that's close to my heart the whole life fitness manifestos, 5s philosophy. Now, trust me, this isn't your average fitness talk. We're going beyond the gym and into the realm of holistic well-being. Now you might be thinking what in the world are the 5S? Well, fasten your seat belts because we're about to explore fitness, family, faith, finances and fun, which are the five pillars that can balance and enrich your life in ways you've never imagined. Many years ago, I wrote a book called the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto.

Do you think that people get physically fit without taking care of your mental and spiritual self? Sure, but it's harder to get going. It's less fun along the way. The Whole Life Fitness Power Third I designed the whole life fitness power-thirteenth in such a way that you don't have to reinvent your lifestyle or comedy. Instead, you can plug this 30 minute ritual into your busy day. Literally, 30 minutes is 2% of 24 hours. Each 30 minute session breaks down like this 15 minutes for your workout, or the day, or, as we say, the wad. It's not going to work out. Or, if you want call it movement with purpose, following that with 5 minutes for meditation or mindfulness and then, for the last 10 minutes, concentrated personal development. Think about this 30 minutes makes up just 2% of your 24 hour day. This time is just for you, no excuses.

All right, my friends, I told you before that I was releasing the whole life fitness manifesto, the book I wrote many years ago, which teaches people how to optimize body, mind and spirit with just 2% of every 24 hours. That's 30 minutes a day. And here it is. This is the introduction chapter, so make sure you can listen to this one first. This is going to set the stage, and then the following episodes, immediately after this will be chapter one, all the way through to the end of the book Lots of information. I know you're going to love it because it's all going to just open your mind's eye to just a different perspective for yourself as it relates to whole life well-being. Think about fitness not like going to the gym and working out, but fitness as being the actions or activities that we do to see certain characteristics within ourselves improve.

Chapter 7, the Basic Moves. And before I get into the actual reading of this chapter, I want you to understand that a lot of the exercises, as well as some of the visuals, that really make this book special and it's one of the aspects that my wife and I are extremely proud about is we went full color. We really put a lot of love into making this book what it is, and we have to really throw a lot of special thanks out to a lot of friends and people that have actually been living the whole life fitness manifesto philosophy for themselves and embarked on this journey with us many, many years ago, and so, for those that have the book, you'll see the pictures of the exercises and the instructions on how to do the workouts. Those are all real people. These are our friends.

Even worse, if we're not careful, we can burn out both mentally and physically. When that happens, we not only let ourselves down, we also let down those who depend on us. My goal in creating the whole-life fitness manifesto is to sweep away the negative energies, accentuate the positive ones and ultimately empower you to radiate your own awesomeness along with the greatness of those around you. In a nutshell, the whole-life fitness manifesto is putting yourself first, which will ultimately benefit you and those you care about. We all have people in our lives that matter to us. It's time we begin to matter to ourselves so that we can enjoy an incredible life with each other. So welcome to a new kind of fitness book. We're not just talking about physical fitness here.

I'm going to just read a few of them that are highlighted in the book. I stumbled onto Dai Manuel's blog from deep in my couch and got the chance to be a member of the whole life fitness manifesto community. Sometimes it's hard to find the motivations to do anything, but dive pushes, cajoles and encourage you to take a step than another and another. It's never more than you can handle, but it reminds you that there is always room for improvement, catherine. The next one's from Amanda. Unlike other programs that focus on drastic changes in a short amount of time, the whole life fitness power 30 provides practical and realistic strategies to increase your health, happiness and gratitude, and they all flow into each other aspects of my daily life.

Enjoy this book. I know I had a lot of fun writing it, even though there was a lot of sleepless nights trying to be deadlined, so my publisher would be happy. But I'm super honored to now be able to share this with you through this new podcast. Again, my name is Diamond. Well, I'm your host as well, as I aid on this journey to leveling up in all areas of your whole life. With that, I'm going to say adieu and let you dive into the introductory chapter of the whole life fitness manifesto. This is your journey to physical, mental and emotional fitness. Enjoy Introduction. Do you want to live a life of total awesomeness? Some years ago, I asked myself that same question. I realized that, while I had a lot to be thankful for in my life, I was falling short of my own potential. Don't get me wrong. I was doing the best I could and life had been trucking along just fine.

In the coming… Coming minutes, I'm going to share with you some of the wisdom I've stumbled upon over the past 30 years as I've explored the four big life questions. My stories may be uniquely my own, but the themes I'll share often plague others, and maybe you too. Big Life Question Number One who am I? From the day we can comprehend its existential meaning, the question who am I torments us Like an exam stress student, afraid that we'll compromise our future. If we are answering correctly, we may not get into the school we want, have our dream career or achieve the idealized life we've envisioned for ourselves. Until about 15 years ago, I was afraid of the perceived finality of answering this question and I was afraid of the fact that I was not able to understand it.

The book goes deeper. This page is the version I still hand to men on a first call, because it fits in their life today. The 2% Solution. Play it here, with the full transcript on the page. The earliest written record of the two percent framework. The least exercise that actually does something, and the part everyone leaves out. Most men over forty who feel exhausted are not sleep deprived. What is actually going on.

That choice to say no more, enough is enough, let's do this, helped me shape myself into who I am today. The story and then some is shared in my book, the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto. My why, which I share often, is all about connection. I am enthralled with connecting with people, whether it is my family, my friends, or my tribe. This drive for connection to others underscores my very being. It is a vital, addictive source of enjoyment in my life. I get a huge kick out of being able to help others become healthier and happier; this gives me my joie de vivre that makes me jump out of bed every morning. The more people I reach, the greater the impact on my online community, as other leaders invariably emerge to carry forward this fitness movement, like ripples on a pond. This is why the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto came to be.

Sit down and do nothing on purpose. Breathe. No phone, no input, no optimisation. Five minutes of letting the noise settle is the part men skip and the part they feel first. Ten minutes of something that makes you better. A book, not a feed. The mind gets trained the same way the body does, in small regular doses, and this is the dose. Every day means every day, but a bad thirty minutes counts. A walk and three pages counts. The streak matters more than the session. You do not earn rest from it and you do not owe it anything. It is not a transaction. It is two percent of your day spent on the man you are supposed to be for the other ninety-eight. That is the whole manifesto. It is short on purpose, because anything longer would give you something to hide behind. This framework did not arrive finished.

I had a lot of excuses, also known as bad habits, running through my head daily. What made me feel worse, here I was a fitness professional and I was earning an income helping people overcome their excuses to get back on a path of optimized health. And then one day, I drew a line in the sand 7 years ago and finally accepted a friend's invite to try an up and coming style of training called CrossFit. I think back to my first day of CrossFit and what seems like eons ago is only but a flash in the pan as it relates to the span of my 39 years on this planet. That fateful day was the first day of the rest of my life and acted as a catalyst which put me on a whole new, exciting trajectory in life.

Training is one third of it. The framework is thirty minutes a day split between movement, stillness and reading, held inside a small cohort with real accountability. The body changes because the days change. What is a dad bod, and is the project about getting rid of one? The dad bod is a body shaped by a decade of putting everything else first, and it gets treated as a joke or a life sentence. It is neither. The project is not about chasing the body you had at 25. It is about rebuilding the energy, strength and self-respect to be useful for the next forty years. The original 2019 #DadBodyProject post is archived here unedited . The framework it describes is written up on the Whole Life Fitness Manifesto page. The 2% Solution. Play it here, with the full transcript on the page. The post that started all of this. Republished unedited.

Thirty minutes a day. That is two percent of it. Fifteen minutes of movement, five of stillness, ten of reading something that makes you better. I wrote this down in February 2016, turned it into a book, and have not changed the shape of it since, because the size is what makes it work. FIG. 01 Two percent of the day, every day. Most fitness plans fail at the negotiation stage. An hour a day is a real argument against a career, a marriage, and kids, and it is an argument you will lose the first week everything goes wrong. So the plan has to be small enough that a man cannot argue with it. Thirty minutes is that size. It survives the worst week of your year. It survives travel, sick kids, and a quarter you are behind on. And because it survives, it compounds. The men I coach do not get fit in thirty-minute sessions.

In 2018 a coach asked me what I wanted for my life. I had made a career out of asking other men that question, and I could not answer it. FIG. 01 Two nights, three days, one notebook. In 2018 one of my coaches asked me what I wanted. Not for dinner. Not which series to put on. What I wanted for my life, and from it. I had nothing. I sat there, a man who had made a career out of asking other people that exact question, and I could not answer it. It was the first time in about five years I had not been sure. That is the part I want you to sit with, because it is the part men get wrong. I was not lost. My businesses were fine. My marriage was good. My kids were healthy. I was in decent shape. By every external measure I was doing well, and I still could not tell you what I was aiming at. You can run a long way on momentum before you notice you have stopped steering.

I started using that framing in February 2016 and it has not changed, because the size is what makes it work. It is small enough that a man cannot argue with it, and small enough to survive a week where everything goes wrong. I wrote a book about it, The Whole Life Fitness Manifesto . I ran it as free 28-day cohorts for years. In 2019 I built a version specifically for dads over 40 and called it the #DadBodyProject , and went looking for four men to test it. That work turned into what I run today. I also had to take my own advice, twice. Once as a morbidly obese fourteen-year-old, which is where all of this started. And again at 44, when I looked in a mirror while shaving and did not recognise the eyes looking back, which is roughly what John had described to me a decade earlier. There is no version of me that is above this.