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Most of my co-workers liked to ease into their workday. They stopped and chatted on their way to their office. Once there, they put down their stuff, turned around, and headed to the break room for coffee. When they finally drifted back, they checked a few news sites (why do that at home when you could do it at work?), glanced at their emailin athletic terms, they warmed up for 20 or 30 minutes. I don’t work that way, at least not effectively. My elapsed time from bed to desk is usually about 10 minutes: make the bed, brush my teeth, grab a protein bar and a glass of water, sit down, start working. That’s not because I’m Mr. Productivity. That’s because whenever I do dawdle, whenever I do let myself settle into work, I rarely manage to work very hard the rest of the day. Hit the ground running? I stay running. Hit the ground walking, though, and I rarely can do more than jog. (I know I should be better than that, but I’m not.) Turns out there’s a little science to back up how I approach the morning. According to a study just published in The Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies (h/t to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter), warming up with heavier rather than lighter weights improves overall weight training workout performance. Participants who warmed up by doing five reps at 80 percent of their 10-rep max were able to lift more weight, and perform more reps during their workouts, than people who warmed up doing 15 reps at 40 percent of their 10-rep max. For example, say you can just barely squeeze out 10 reps of 150 pounds doing bench presses. Warmup up with five 120-pound reps will result in “significantly greater total training volume” than warming up with 15 60-pound reps. Sounds counterintuitive? After all, the goal of a warmup is to get your blood flowing, get your heart pumping a little faster, to limber and loosen your muscles. A warmup is supposed to be easy, so it doesn’t negatively impact the real work to come. Nope. As you can guess by the results, the researchers determined there was no difference in overall fatigue. Harder warmups didn’t affect stamina; even though the heavy warmup group lifted more weight overall, they weren’t more exhausted at the end of their workouts. In part, that’s because of the dose-response effect: heavier weights activate more muscle tissue and more rapidly increase body temperature, both of which lead to higher levels of strength and performance. Plus, heavier warmups may change your perception, making the weight you use for working sets seem less heavy by comparison. If you warm up with 60 pounds, shifting to 150 pounds feels like a lot. If you warm up with 120 pounds, the difference doesn’t seem nearly so great. That’s what happens to me. If I tackle easier tasks first, I tend to want to stick with easy tasks; shifting to something difficult seems daunting. But if I start my day by diving right in, that builds a sense of momentum that carries me through the rest of the day. Once I check off one hard thing, I’m eager to check off another. And another. Starting my day with a productive bang creates natural momentum, and provides the boost of motivation and energy I need to move on to the next difficult task on my to-do list. Granted, working is different than working out: muscle recruitment, body temperature, and post-activation performance enhancement don’t necessarily apply to the average person’s workday. But the principle still broadly applies. Hit the ground runningespecially if you tackle the most important task on your to-do list firstand whatever you do next won’t feel so difficult. Both by comparison and because the sense of accomplishment will make you eager to tackle something else. So you can earn that feeling again. By Jeff Haden This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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Leave it to Deion Sanders to come up with an idea for the College Football Playoff that nobody has really mentioned yet: Pay the players for making the tournament, and pay them more when their teams win.If they do that, then “now it’s equality, now it’s even and every player is making the same amount of money,” the Colorado coach said.Sanders and former Alabama coach Nick Saban talked to The Associated Press as part of their unveiling of a new Aflac commercial that rolls out this week with a storyboard ripped from today’s headlines: It opens with Sanders complaining: “This game has gotten out of control. All the money. All the unpredictability.”He is talking about health insurance, of course, and the commissioner he wants to see run it isn’t Saban, but that kooky duck who wears the same powder-blue sportscoat as the two football legends.It’s an endorsement that Sanders says hits home after his recent diagnosis with bladder cancer, from which he says he is fully recovered.“I’ve been walking with my coaches over a mile” after practice, he said ahead of Friday night’s season opener against Georgia Tech.. “Exercising, lifting.”Saban will be back on the set with ESPN in his second year of “retirement” after leaving the Crimson Tide, where he won six national titles. He insists he wants to help college sports find its footing, but not via a commissioner job that was floated last year with his name coming up as the ideal fit.“I don’t want to be in that briar patch of being a commissioner, but I do want to do everything I can to make it right,” he said.He and Sanders agreed that there needs to be more structure around deals players sign. Since July 1, schools have been able to start paying up to $20.5 million each to their athletes over the next year under the House settlement alongside third-party NIL deals that have turned some players into millionaires.Saban said he believes that forgotten amidst all the hype about name, image, likeness deals deals Sanders says are a joke because “there are only three or four guys who you might know their NIL, and the rest you’re just giving money to” is what happens to the vast majority of these players after they leave school.“For years and years and years as coaches, and when we were players, we learned this, we’re trying to create value for our future,” Saban said. “That’s why we’re going to college. It’s not just to see how much money we can make while we’re in college. It’s, how does that impact your future as far as our ability to create value for ourselves?”Currently, conferences whose schools advance to the 12-team playoff receive $4 million for making the bracket, with payments increasing for every round they win.Saban said Sanders’ idea about spreading the wealth with an NFL-style playoff bonus structure for players (winners of the Super Bowl got $171,000 last year) sounded like a good idea to him. He also had no love for proposals coming out of the Big Ten that would give that league and the Southeastern Conference multiple automatic bids.“The NFC East has the Cowboys, Eagles and Giants, they have the biggest fan bases of anyone and they have to play their way in,” Saban said. “Everyone should play their way in. One year, a conference might get five teams in, another it might get three. But there’s no (scenario) in any competitive venue where you get a guaranteed playoff spot.” Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football Eddie Pells, AP National Writer
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China’s Alibaba has developed a new chip that is more versatile than its older chips and is meant to serve a broader range of AI inference tasks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The chip, now in testing, is manufactured by a Chinese company, in contrast to an earlier Alibaba AI processor that was fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the report said. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Chinese tech and AI companies have been focusing heavily on homegrown technology at a time when leading AI chip giant Nvidia has faced regulatory issues in selling its products in the country. Nvidia’s H20 chip, the most powerful AI processor it is allowed to sell in China, was effectively blocked from sale in the market earlier this year by the Trump administration. While the U.S. last month allowed Nvidia to resume sales of H20 to China, Chinese firms have been working on processors that could substitute H20. Beijing has also put pressure on tech giants, including Alibaba and ByteDance, over purchases of the H20 chip. Nvidia developed the H20 specifically for China following U.S. export restrictions on its other AI processors in 2023. The H20 does not have as much computing power as Nvidia’s H100 or its Blackwell series. Alibaba is China’s biggest cloud-computing company and is among the top customers of Nvidia. Separately, on Friday, the company reported a 26% jump in revenue in its cloud computing segment for the April-June quarter, beating market estimates, on the back of solid demand. Deborah Sophia, Reuters
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