💪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

Share the FF5 and get TREMENDOUS STUFF:  1 SHARE = Enters you into a raffle to win a free copy of one of the books I mention here in the FF5. I'll do a drawing every 10 issues, but you have to forward the FF5 to a friend to enter.  3 SHARES = 1 Abe Lincoln as Tyler Durden Fight Club Sticker - perfect for your laptop, office, fridge or on your squat rack like Tommy John  10 SHARES = 1 Official Finkel's Fast Five Coffee Mug like this one that my man Marlin won last year  25 SHARES = If you share Finkel's Fast Five with 25 friends who you think would like it, I will take you to the movies... (well, not literally) ...but I will Venmo you money for a ticket to your next movie, on me. We'll cap this at 4 people for now.  FORWARD TO A FRIEND RIGHT HERE  DID SOMEONE FORWARD YOU THIS E-MAIL? GET MY FREE STARTER LIBRARY HERE  FYI: The sharing of the FF5 is cumulative... You don't have to share this e-mail 10 times if you don't want to. It can be 10 issues over 10 weeks or 10 months, whatever... The point is, please share it. We've grown from less than a hundred to a few hundred to a few thousand readers in under two years... Let's see how fast we can get to 10,000! - Jon

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