Get off the elliptical and hit the HIITs to maximize your reading.
What am I talking about?
The elliptical machine is an invention that wastes time, burns very little calories, and yet people spend hours a week on the machine. You use the machine, and you expend very little additional calories and as soon as you step off the machine, your body stops burning that more calories than normal (little to no metabolic effect). Huge time dedication minimal output.
HIITs are high intensity interval training. They are short bursts of activities done in a timed session with breaks in between each activity that usually consists of full body or compound movements. Maximum metabolic effect that lasts hours after the workout, burns more calories and requires a fraction of the time. Minimal time dedication, maximum output. But it’s hard….that’s how it’s supposed to be.
I can’t tell you how to workout nor how to read. But if you want maximum results, I say, choose HIITs.
Speedreading has a few quick tricks that many books recommend:
1. Use a visual pacer (like your left pointer finger or a pen): physically trace each word in the book to pace your reading and prevent re-reading of words. Why? Because your eye is attracted to movement and often jumps around and re-reads entries. Advanced skills recommend you start the pacer a few words in from the margin and end a few words out from the end of the line so that your pacer is not going the full width of the page as your peripheral vision can pick up the words on either side of the start and end point.
2. Reduce sub-vocalization: you don’t have to say each word in your mind to comprehend it, just absorb it. This requires practice and breaking your belief that you have to say each word to “read” it.
3. Push your speed with intervals: read a book employing points 1 and 2 as comfortably quickly as you can for 4 minutes marking your starting and stopping point. Now repeat reading those pages but do it in 3 minutes. Comprehension can and most likely will go down, but that’s okay, just get to the end in 3 minutes no matter what–by increasing your pace, sometimes if paced incorrectly having to skim through a few lines. Now do those pages in 2 minutes. Now do in 1. That’s 4x your original reading speed. Now, continue reading on in your book at as comfortably quickly as possible for 1 minute and test how much faster you’ve gone–on average you will have increased a few lines/words per minute. Repeat for 30 days and track your progress. You will be amazed at how much quicker you are (just one extra line a day adds up fast).
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Now what’s the point of reading? For fiction, it may be to get carried off into another world. For non-fiction, it’s most likely to absorb the knowledge of the book. Notice I used the word “absorb” not “read.”
Look at reading for non-fiction in a new manner. Look at reading differently. It’s not about going through and processing each word in the short term, but comprehending and applying each concept in the long term.
You can go slowly and steadily through each page, sentence, word. You can step on an elliptical machine and go. You can even “speed” through each word just like you can “go fast” on an elliptical. But what happens when you’ve reached the last word on the last page. You stop, close the book, and move on. What happens to all those words? Chapters? Knowledge? They quickly are lost as the brain fails to see their importance and are knocked off before going through long term potentiation (Short Term to Long Term memory processing). You have a forgetting curve, and within 48 hours you will have forgotten 80-90% of what you read in the short term.
So…
Choose to do HIITs. They’re harder, but this method understands the process of memory and learning. It understands the difference between “reading” and “understanding.” The exercise is just the beginning of the process, it’s the connections your mind makes that reap the results. So what is Reading’s HIIT?
This is what my exercise HIIT looks like:
10% warm up –> 40% on/explosive –> 40% off/recovery –> 10% cool-down
2.5 minutes bike –> [2 minute exercise –> 2 minutes rest] repeat 5x –> 2.5 minutes bike/stretch
What does my reading HIIT look like?
10% skim –> 40% read chapter–> 40% review/synthesize chapter –> 10% connect it all
10 minutes get a feel for the book: read the table of contents, flip through EVERY page, read the back, get a sense for some topics/themes you will learn
4 minutes active read with underlining [this length is the “speed read” time of a chapter, this is for if your pace is 2 pages a minute, and chapter is 8 pages. If it were 20 pages, it’d be 10 minutes. If you get the gist of the chapter you can move on. You don’t need to read every word.]
4 minutes review/synthesize [review what you underlined, type up notes and thoughts on the chapter, fill in any missing gaps, try to explain quickly the main points. This length of time should match the minutes you read]
Repeat reading and reviewing for ~50 minutes [moving to next part after a full cycle, aka a review session]
Connect it all by talking for 4 straight minutes to a person/waterbottle/object about what you read this past hour without the use of your notes. If you have gaps, quickly jot down what those gaps are and look them up, after the 4 minutes of talking ends. You’ll notice that after 2-3 minutes, your brain will start to search and be forced to recall more than what it can on “auto-pilot” so talking non-stop for 4+ minutes is crucial
Stop. Because of the recency and primacy effect, along with focus, breathing, and other physiological factors, taking breaks helps retention, attention, energy, and chunking things which helps with long term potentiation.
Repeat the HIIT. Everything is the same except now your warmup skim entails reviewing/skimming what you underlined and wrote, allowing you to search for missing gaps identified in the monologue, reviewing what you think you know, and preparing for what you are about to know.
Track your progress and analyze your results. I think you’ll be amazed at the speed in which you consume the book and absorb the information.
Review your notes in a week, month, quarter, and year, and you’ll be in a far better position than you ever imagined.
Tech apps to use: I use the timer Tabata pro to allow me to time the intervals of my HIITS in a very unobtrusive manner and I listen to Brainwaves, Focus@Will or Quietude from Holosync to tap into a superlearning/focused state. For my speed reading drills (4 minutes, 3, 2, 1) I use the app Metronome playing softly in the background to get me used to the increase in speed.