Transformation coach Chief Brabon reveals the secrets to training smarter and living stronger and longer.
2 min
Chief Brabon, Australia’s original transformation coach and co-founder of The Sweat & Social Club, has spent more than two decades reshaping how people approach fitness and ageing.
Known for training everyone from elite athletes to busy executives, he champions a longevity-first approach, focussing on strength, mobility and stability to help clients not just live longer, but live better.
Kanebridge Quarterly Magazine sat down with Chief Brabon to talk about his longevity-based training philosophy, the mistakes people make as they age, and the daily habits that keep him sharp.
What are the core principles behind your longevity-based training?
Firstly, it is important to define what “longevity” really is. To some people, it is “to live as long as possible”. In my personal (and professional) opinion, longevity is “to live as well as possible, for as long as possible”. Who really wants to live to 100 if they weren’t physically able to enjoy their last 30 years?
It’s for this reason that our focus is on improving our clients’ current overall health & fitness, and laying the groundwork for maintaining it long term.
What do most people get wrong about ageing well?
They don’t adjust their fitness priorities as they age. In our 20s and 30s, it’s all about building muscle, staying lean, lifting heavy and moving fast – structure, strength and speed come first. But by our late 40s, that order should flip. Mobility and stability need to move to the top of the list, with strength and stamina still in the mix, but with a different approach.
How is functional training different from standard fitness routines?
Functional training attempts to combine three or more of the 6 Pillars of Fitness (listed above) into each exercise. For example, a standard fitness routine may see you performing a two-legged press on a machine where your body is entirely supported – the focus here is strength. A functional alternative might see you doing a single arm/single leg dead lift to target strength, mobility, and stability all at the same time.
What bad habits do you commonly see in high-achievers, and how do you fix them?
Most high achievers have often made their businesses/ careers and their families their priorities for years (if not decades), but have neglected their health and fitness. As they near 50, they often realise that without their health, they are not going to be able to truly appreciate, or enjoy everything that they have built, or at least not for as long as they would like.
What’s one daily habit you swear by for staying sharp, both physically and mentally?
Find one thing that you can do every single day, no matter what you’ve got on, or where you are. My personal suggestion is a quick 5-minute mobility flow that you can literally do beside your bed, in your pyjamas, before you do anything else for the day.
When not at the gym, how do you relax?
My wife and business partner, Emilie, and I are real foodies. As we work, train, and race together, we have made a pact to take one another out at least three times a week. This allows us to focus on each other while enjoying great food. It’s an added bonus that we train many of Australia’s best chefs and restaurateurs.
Porsche has revealed a one-off 911 GT2 RS that brings the extraordinary silhouette of its 935/78 “Moby Dick” racing car onto the road. Created by Porsche Sonderwunsch with Manthey, the commission began with a near-new GT2 RS. The owner requested greater performance, a Slantnose profile and a rear wing influenced by the limited 911 GT3 …
Continue reading “Porsche Builds a Road-Going “Moby Dick” From a 911 GT2 RS”
The 1860s Darlinghurst mansion Stoneleigh could become Sydney’s most expensive home ever sold under the hammer when it goes to auction. Clint Ballard is giving buyers a $28 million guide for the heritage-listed mansion on Darley Street, opposite Iona, the former home of Hollywood royalty Baz Luhrmann. Stoneleigh is being offered for sale for the …
As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
From mud baths to herbal massages, Fiji’s heat rituals turned one winter escape into a soul-deep reset.
MAISON de SABRÉ’s new Spring Harvest Collection turns everyday produce into collectible leather charms and introduces fresh silhouettes in its cult Bucket bag family.
