As Many Reps as Possible

by Jason Khalipa

  Not Just for The Gym

  Let’s take a couple of steps back for a moment, so you can see how this applies beyond fitness. It’s obvious that the AMRAP workout lives naturally in the gym. But what about outside the gym? What about the boardroom, the class room…and the hospital room?

  It isn’t hard to see how people from all walks of life can benefit from some version of this type of training. Another way to phrase the main idea might be, “performance on demand,” or, “performance under pressure.” Consider this brief office example: you are assigned a project in which you must produce an important sales presentation targeting a big potential client. Management was surprised that they were able to land this opportunity…and now you only have a few hours to do it! You need to AMRAP those slides! And just like the push-ups, you better not do them recklessly! You must act quickly but maintain control.

  There are all sorts of high-pressure situations like this that happen in life. They happen in school, in relationships, and when launching a new business. But in every case, the basic principal of the AMRAP Mentality can be applied. And there’s so much more!

  Back to our workout example. Do you see how the clock on the wall transformed a fairly exercise routine into a competition? How much more work is going to get done in a mere ten minutes? How much sweat and discomfort? As anyone who has done their fair share of these workouts knows, even simple bodyweight exercises can become nightmarishly challenging when you go all out.

  Consider the effect: it’s easy to burn through twenty minutes by wandering around the gym, or swiping around on Facebook, or engaging in any other time waster that is at our fingertips on the Internet. But within the AMRAP Mentality—combining a deadline, a focused work goal, competition with others, and competition with yourself—it’s astounding what you can accomplish in five, ten, or twenty minutes. Imagine an hour?

  How do you perform under pressure? Do you procrastinate, or do you hone the skills to maximize your output? More importantly, how does one or the other move you toward or away from your goals and serving your purpose?

  The AMRAP Mentality is what I have long counted on as an athlete and an entrepreneur. It’s broken into five parts which I’ve outlined below:

  Know Your Why

  Your why is the foundation and fuel of the AMRAP Mentality. Hard work and focus are the heart of it, but the why builds the base. This basic structure, in which we establish work capacity goals within small chunks of time and add the pressure of deadlines and competition, is a powerful tool. It makes focus not just a skill, but a necessity. Focus is automatic when you set up the right conditions. And having a strong why will help refine your focus.

  Knowing what you want and why you want it fuels the entire process. Commitment to your why will propel you towards it like a heat-seeking missile. The AMRAP Mentality is a toolset for getting hard, serious work done well and done quickly, but if you aren’t really sure why you are doing something or you really don’t want it badly enough, it won’t work. Without a strong why it is challenging to succeed.

  I’ll give you an example in which I have some experience. If your goal is to become a CrossFit Games champion—great, I love it! That’s a great goal that demands years of hard, focused work and stressful competition. Are you ready to give up nearly everything in your life to win? Are you ready to train early, train late, train sick, train on vacation, train on holidays? Does it pull at your soul when you’re not training? Does it make you ill that someone, somewhere is working harder than you? My point is that your why has to be so immense that you not only do all the hard, painful work, day after day, but are also willing to make sacrifices on a routine basis. If you don’t have a strong why in place, one day you will find yourself in the middle of a severe workout or agony-filled competition, and a voice is going to start whispering in your head. Why are you doing this to yourself? You don’t really want this, it will say. If you don’t have an immediate, unshakable answer, then it’s over. You have just lost.

  The same principle applies to nearly every goal and challenge. A lot of what I learned about starting a business came from…well, starting a business! Any entrepreneur will tell you that the path toward success when building a new business is never a smooth one. It demands around-the-clock work and attention. There are no days off. But there are constant lessons. You have to be willing to learn often and learn hard. Again, the source of your strength and focus, the fuel that powers your actions, is a strong why. For me, the why was a simple one: I had to succeed because I wanted to take care of my family. I had no other choice. Simply being able to put food on the table for my wife and kids and provide good health insurance were just a few of the many reasons I had to make it work.

  Focus On What You Can Control

  When you have a strong why and choose meaningful goals to pursue, you will eventually need to develop skills that keep your attention on the things within your control. Without being able to identify what you can control, you can become your worst enemy. If you’re not careful, your mind will draw you into areas that you can’t control. Left undisciplined—and I speak from experience on this—the imagination can come up with all sorts of things for you to fret about. You will quickly find yourself facing a black hole.

  To achieve next-level focus, you must tune out the noise of things you can’t control and dial in to what really matters. Guess what sorts of people tend to worry about things they can’t control? People who often lose.

  Think about it this way. Imagine you are back in high school biology class. It’s time for the midterm. What can you control? You have complete control over your preparation, your mental state, your attitude, arrival time, whether you brought an extra pencil, whether you ate a good breakfast…you control all that and more. Now, what don’t you control? You don’t control the questions, the super smart kid next to you, how fast someone else finishes the test…you have no influence on any of those things. So why worry about them? If you get distracted by those things and end up worrying about them, you will likely have a less than stellar outcome. Instead, focus on what you can control.

  After my daughter’s diagnosis, my ability as a father and as a professional to focus on what I could control was truly tested. I couldn’t control when a blood test was going to come back—but I could control whether my daughter had the blanket or toy that she wanted. It isn’t easy to admit there are things outside our control, but we need to do it anyway. This step is where the AMRAP Mentality can help you hone your ability to identify the things you can affect and separate them from the things you can’t. Before we can apply the next steps, we need to be able to fiercely and intelligently assess what we can control.

  Work Hard

  Good ol’ reliable, old-school hard work is the currency of the AMRAP Mentality. It’s a blue-collar type of attitude. There’s a job to be done—so do it. It’s not about searching out secret hacks and shortcuts. It’s about being focused and putting in your best effort to accomplish the things that need to be accomplished. There’s no mystery about hard work. It’s work and it’s hard. The important thing to realize is that with a strong why, you will have the energy, determination, and reason to put in the daily hard work required to get where you want to go. When your why is right…the work is actually enjoyable and undeniably satisfying.

  This isn’t to say that the work won’t be tough, and that you won’t get discouraged. It is natural to have days where you feel less motivated than others. The trick on those days is to rely on your why, and on the momentum from the good days. Your bigger vision will power you, so that you continue to the necessary hard work. If you ever feel discouraged or overly tired, just takes a few days. Re-set and go back to your goals. Getting burnt out in the first few days of embracing the AMRAP Mentality will do you no good—you are in this for the long haul. In a way, that was what that nurse was telling us, way back on day one: take time for yourself. You will need it!

  Switch Gears

  Being able to survey your progre
ss and toggle between gears is the fourth key aspect of the AMRAP Mentality. I have found it almost impossible to remain truly focused on one thing for an entire day—your brain and body need time to recharge and switch things up. Just like how a bike or a car need to switch gears in certain circumstances, so too in our daily lives do we need to switch focuses throughout the day.

  From family time to business time to workout time, switching between these gears keeps you focused and present. At work, be at work…at home, be at home with your family. Shift between gears and remain focused during that time, once the gear is shifted you are no longer worried about the past gear or future gear…focus is on the current gear. From my experience, most people have three gears. The first is maintaining good relationships with family and close friends; the second is aimed at some way to provide for yourself and your loved ones; and third is usually a hobby and/or passion to pursue.

  These steps are intertwined, which I’m sure you noticed. For example, switching gears can be a great way to fight against discouragement, like we just talked about. Focus, our second aspect, is essential if we are going to switch between gears and continue to stay on task. It's a waste of energy to jump back and forth between things you can't control.

  Re-Evaluate

  Throughout your life there will be moments when you need to re-evaluate. Particularly before or after a significant event like having a child, getting married, or losing or gaining a job. These moments are inevitable, and they are a great time to completely deconstruct your why.

  Re-evaluating is about being methodical in paying attention to where you are in your life, what your values are, and how well you’re being true to those values. It’s my belief that by checking in with yourself in this way, you can avoid going off course. I’ll talk about this later, but for me it was this re-evaluation that led to the decision that I had to let go of competing as a professional athlete and focus elsewhere.

  By taking time to think about where I was in life and reflecting on my responsibilities, I realized that my priorities had to be my family and rapidly growing business. It was not realistic to expect that I could perform well across the board. I could not win the CrossFit Games, build a global business, and keep my family together. Others might be able to; however, I knew I could not. When I made this evaluation, I also realized that I had finally matured. I was ready for a different challenge in life, and ready to enter a new phase—one less demanding physically but challenging and fulfilling in its own way. That’s why re-evaluating is an invaluable part of the AMRAP Mentality.

  Making the Jump

  Let’s jump into this. We’ve gone over the basics of AMRAP-style workouts and familiarized ourselves with the cornerstone of the AMRAP Mentality: knowing your why. This is the critical piece of my approach, and I urge you examine your own why throughout the time you spend reading this book.

  My hope is that you walk away from each chapter armed with one more actionable item that you can apply directly to your own life. It doesn’t matter if your goals are personal or professional. The AMRAP Mentality will teach you that no matter your goal, every decision is an opportunity crucial to your pursuit of success. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if you’re just starting your journey or already well on your way. The AMRAP Mentality will guide you along the path you’re supposed to be on. No matter if you’ve never done a push-up, never worn a tie, or never stepped into the arena—the time is now.

  I am excited to share the entire AMRAP Mentality with you, and some of the many stories from my life that helped develop it. Financially, professionally, emotionally, and personally, we are going to turn you into an independent force, ready for any curveball life might throw your way. And with that, let’s get to it. My own path in understanding and becoming proficient in the AMRAP Mentality began with a sort of wakeup call, one that led to me knowing and embracing a stronger purpose…

  Reader Exercise

  Mindfulness AMRAP – 10 minutes:

  Set a clock for ten minutes. Write down three things that you either have always wanted to achieve, have been putting off, or have tried to achieve but fallen short. As you will find out later, AMRAP is a scalable system; don’t be afraid to start small if you have to.

  Once you have your list, try to identify based on what you have read so far the step of the AMRAP Mentality that might have been helpful in achieving greater success.

  Physical AMRAP – 6 minutes:

  Set a clock for six minutes and do as many burpees as possible in the allotted time.

  To perform a burpee, start by standing straight up. Drop to the ground so that your knees and chest touch the ground. Once you have touched the ground, stand (or jump) back up. To complete the rep, jump and clap your hands above your head. Every time you clap, count one rep. Ready? Go!

  Jason’s Pro-Tip: If you are just starting out your fitness journey, simply crawl down to the ground and then crawl back up. Take this at whatever pace is manageable. If you are more advanced, try to increase the speed of your drop, jump, and clap. Start fast and try to hold on!

  CHAPTER 2

  UNLOCK YOUR WHY AND BUILD

  A PERSONAL POWERHOUSE

  I didn’t just cook up the AMRAP Mentality for the purposes of writing this book. Rather, it’s something that took shape over a period of years, as I did my best to be a better husband, father, athlete, and business owner. The AMRAP Mentality is a simple system based on knowing what you want, and even more critically, why you want it.

  Your why is the starting point of the AMRAP Mentality. It is a source of energy, and your driving passion in the long, difficult road ahead. It’s also your value structure and your code, which will help inform your decisions and guide your actions, both big and small.

  The Search

  Discovering your why is a big deal—it’s life changing. This might be easy for some people; their why might be obvious. For others, uncovering their true why may be a lifelong journey (and for some a struggle). If you find yourself searching for your why—that’s okay, as long as you stay genuinely invested in the search and don’t just wander off aimlessly because you’re afraid of commitment or afraid of failure.

  If you are having trouble finding your why, don’t get frustrated. You have already gotten past the first step, which is to be self-aware enough to identify you don’t currently have a strong why—and even more critically…that you need one. The process of finding your why is one of reflection and learning to understand the bigger picture.

  The next step is to realize that you aren’t as in touch as you should be. In many ways, the journey toward your why is one of self-discovery. Be vulnerable while searching for your why, and accept that it might not come immediately or easily. And remember that sometimes your why might be bigger than you had originally thought. For example, I’ve already talked about why I wrote this book. But a bigger why for the book would be to support families going through pediatric cancer, which you will find out more about later in this book.

  Your journey toward finding your why will eventually define your why. The way becomes the why (and vice versa). This isn’t to say you should rest easy and stop trying as hard as you can when you discover your why. At that point, the real work is just starting! But if you think you can just get by working as hard as you can without any particular direction…you are wrong, my friend. This is a recipe for recklessness and eventual (and inevitable) disaster. No matter what, without your why or without the journey toward your why, the energy needed to focus and the capacity for hard work are not going to be there for you long…if at all. You must identify your why.

  Identifying Your Why

  So how do you go about identifying your why? Where does this relentless drive come from? Are some people “just born with it”?

  Maybe a lucky few know their why from day one. I was not one of these lucky few. In fact, I don’t think this is something you can really be born with…at least not the type of why I am talking about. Knowing your deepest purpose is like paying
attention to yourself in a very honest and sincere way. You might figure some of that out early on, but there is still work required. There are some people who are incredibly gifted in this way—they are keenly self-aware. And then there are guys like me, who needed a kick in the head to wake up.

  The day I started down the path toward understanding my why and living the AMRAP Mentality was my first day of college. Before that day, I wouldn’t have characterized the way I had been living my life as very purpose-driven. I had dabbled in some ill-conceived business plans, half-heartedly played sports in high school, worked part-time at the gym, and had a good group of friends I liked to party with. I also had a good group of parties that I liked to be friends with (see what I did there?). In all seriousness, I wasn’t dedicated to any single purpose, but there was one thing I did take extremely seriously. My then-girlfriend and high school sweetheart, Ashley. As would happen in many other moments in my life, Ashley was surely the reason why that first day of college ended up being so significant.

  West Valley College is a community college located about twenty minutes southwest of downtown San Jose. Despite being a largely commuter school, it’s actually a very pretty campus—143 acres in the rolling foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  Despite the serene campus, West Valley wasn’t where I wanted to go to school. Ashley and most of my friends were going to Santa Clara University. Dating Ashley obviously meant I wanted to go to Santa Clara as well, but I wasn’t accepted because of my poor grades. Even though I’d been accepted to a few other schools, I opted to go the junior college route, so I could eventually meet back up with Ashley and the crew at Santa Clara U.

  Back to my first day at West Valley…let’s just say the whole thing was a humbling experience. To be honest, I was a little embarrassed to be there. Not that I was above West Valley, but that I had wasted a lot of my time, talent, and energy, and I had fallen short of my potential.