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By Edmund Adu Asamoah
September 12 2025
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5 min read
I used to think the gym was for athletes and the terminal was for engineers. Then I trained consistently and realized they are basically the same game with different weights. I now train 5 to 6 times a week. Some mornings are for cardio, some evenings for weights. The results showed up in my health, my focus, and my pull requests.
Ghana raised me, Scotland shaped me, and training glued it together. When projects got noisy, routine kept me steady. Tiny boring reps beat heroic sprints. That idea flipped a switch for me at work too.
The same way progressive overload builds strength, small daily commits build products. Add a little, keep form, repeat.
Training gave me structure and a feedback loop. It taught me how to show up when motivation is low. The habits below crossed over directly into my work and made me a calmer builder.
In the gym you add a little weight, hold form, and repeat. In code that means one tougher ticket each sprint, one cleaner interface, one flaky test retired. I level up like this: add a useful metric, reduce a slow query, tighten a runbook. Small upgrades. Compounding wins.
Random workouts give random results. Same with commits. I keep simple programs: push or pull in the gym, plan or build or review at work. When my calendar reflects a plan, my output looks calm, not chaotic.
Sleep, water, and rest days separate progress from burnout. Production needs the same care: alerts that matter, dashboards you trust, and humane on call rotations. If you never cool down, you are just collecting errors with a smile.
Rest is not a reward. It is an input.
I log reps and pace. At work I log deploys, latency, and failure counts. Numbers remove drama and reveal direction. Dropping a Spark job from hours to minutes feels like new 5K personal best energy.
I tried OMAD and ADF in different seasons. Both taught me limits and tradeoffs. In engineering, scope is your nutrition. Feed a sprint with everything and nothing digests. Choose a target. Fuel for that target.
If this nudges you toward one extra walk, one tidy refactor, or one early night, that is a win. If you want my training template or a simple sheet to track reps and commits together, ping me and I will share it.
If you are reading this, you already care about your craft. Start tiny today. A ten minute walk. A small refactor. A glass of water. Momentum is quiet at first, then it compounds. That is how I went from stops and starts to a routine that changed my work and my life.