Why My Practice Regimen Sucks

Those who know me know my "other" hobby is fitness, though the details concerning my long history along those lines are probably best left to some other forum.  The two worlds do collide however, and most significantly at the level of procrastination and apathy - the constant war against the inertia preventing productivity in either endeavour.  As a scientist by profession and training I love gathering information, though the sick irony is that the very act of "researching" (gear, guitars, bodyweight workout regimens, etc etc etc) is an escape from actually "doing".  Verdict is still out on the opportunity:cost equation in my life overall but I do get some value out of meandering beyond simple entertainment, occasionally.  Case in point:  I'm a fan of Arizona fitness expert Charles Staley, who has written many sensible articles on facets of fitness and has also devised the Escalated Density (EDT) system.  I sat through a 7 part seminar series he has on his site entitled "Why Your Workout Sucks", in which he makes a case for why those who engage in "exercise" programs are greatly disadvantaged compared to those who train as "athletes". The idea is that to simply work out for the sake of it, with no application, is a set up for poor results, dissapointment and failure:
http://www.staleytraining.com/articles/charles-staley/2009/summit-videos.htm
In one segment CS mentioned one of my most favourite books on this topic, "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield.  This is a book I should read once a month, it is such a blunt and unapologetic slap in the head to all the excuses, lies and twisted bullshit my mind can create to stop me from the "doing".  SP terms the procrastination enemy "Resistance", and describes its origins, how to recognize it, how he beats it down.   It's easy to see how Staley's exerciser vs athlete concept directly applies to guitar playing and music, at least to me.  It is so easy to lapse into a mechanical mentality with the guitar, eg. playing tons of scales and patterns  with no goals or focused plan except perhaps a quest for speed.  Practice becomes a painful and dreary thing to be avoided, exactly like the "exercise" mentality described by Staley.  I was confronted with a similar idea some years ago now in the excellent article by Chris Juergensen "Where Do You Go From Here?" (http://chrisjuergensen.com/where_do_you_go_from_here_article.htm).  You could make yourself busy for life just "playing" (ie. "exercising") and in the end have done nothing of value in terms of actual songs and created music you can share, and in fact be unable to actually play anything at all.  The Staley seminar really brought it home though, just how much of my practice time is unbalanced to things that help me the least (dexterity, single line improv) and how little to what would make me a better musician ("athlete"); learning entire songs, bringing what I know to performance standard, comping, and most importantly developing the translation of an inner voice, songwriting, and just getting out to play with other people.
In defiance of the Resistance sucking me down, I made a feeble but significant effort last night to act on one of those items on my "Someday" list.  I took out Wayne Krantz"s "Improviser's OS" and picked off the first 3-note structure that I fixated on (1, 3, b3) and took took a crack at his suggested practice plan, which is to play just (ONLY) those notes in one key in a given 4-5 fret span and improvise music.  In C that's C, E, and Eb....kind of 2/3rds of a C cowboy chord in first position, right? Minus the 5?  So you have 2 open strings at least.  It was a wierd experience, but in a short time I had the looper on playing an eerie atonal (C, E Eb containing) ambient backdrop, and was deep into hypnotic wierdness - and what's funny is after I dropped it and went back to playing "regularly", what I had been through affected me.  I was certainly more aware of "other" non-tonal elements like dynamics, bending, vibrato, etc which you really need to make music of THOSE few notes.  It was really worth it and I ended up feeling like I had tapped into myself and learned something.  
OK, no resolutions, I just need to try to apply myself more like an athlete and fight the Resistance, one small step at a time - as Steven Pressfield puts it "Most of us have two lives.  The life we live, and the unlived life within us,"