Fitness
This page is to share with you everything I have learned about health and fitness as well as resources and all of the supplements and equipement that I use.
The basics
When most people talk about getting healthy or in shape I think most people are usually primarily concerned with the end result of looking and also hopefully feeling better. Most people may not realize that improving health and fitness will indeed make them feel better as well as imporve areas of thier lives they may have yet to consider.
The fact that more Americans are out of shape and obese than ever means that the case for fitness still has either to be properly made, has yet to reach the masses, or people just don’t care. So I will attempt to make a brief, but concerted effort to make the case, for why you want to be healthy, and get in as great as shape as possible.
So why should you get in shape? The most superficial, yet usually the most motivating reason of getting healthier and in shape is what it does for making you more attractive to the opposite sex. Are you dissapointed in your current mate prospects? Have you considered if maybe you are being rejected because you look soft, look weak, a little pudgy, or flat out obese. So the first reason for getting fit, is to increase your sex appeal, and as that great sage, Derek the wise so eloquently put it, more plates, more dates.
Other reasons for increasing your fitness and getting healthy include increased strength, physical endurance, improved mental health. Depending on what your current state of unhealthyness will really determine what aspects of your life that can be improved. Maybe you smoke, drink too much (in doesnt take that much to be too much), partake in recreational drugs, which are almost never good for you, or your lifestyle is sedentary and you fitness is something that you don’t even think about on a regular basis.
Whatever your current state is, the benefits to improving your health are numerous. And the fitness journey is just a small part of the overall journey of self-imrpovement. Being “healthy” does’t really end with fitness and it’s really not limited to what we classicly think of what it means to be or look healthy, but for now we will focus primatily of a few key metrics, things we can measure. For our pusposes we will define the world of fitness as being measuered by a combination of your body fat, your cardiovascular potential, and strength. I will limit it there, because after that I belive the lines between the physical and the mental begin to get blurry. So whereas there are obvioulsy other componets to health and fitness, cardio, strength and body composition are the 3 areas we will seek to optimize here.
Cardiovascular fitness or cardio refers to the body’s ability, efficiently, and capacity to do sustained work. For the body to do work, it requires oxygen, and blood is how oxygen is distrubuted throughougt the body, the more work that we are doing the more oxygen our body will require. We breath oxygen in through our lungs, oxygen is then passed into the blood stream and then our blood delivers oxygen around the body. When our body can not deliver oxygen throughout our body at that rate that the work we are doing requires, this is when we get tired, and we have to slow down. Improving our cario, thus improves our bodies ability to do sustain work.
Most people understand fat, and why too much body fat can be a bad thing. The cost of too much fat is obvious. If you have more fat than you need, you are at an increased risk for heart disease, higher blood pressure, diebetes, high blood pressure, stroke, higher risks for certain cancers extra stress and pressure on joints and organs, decreased mobility and overal functionality. The more overweight someone is, the less good they are at doing normal human stuff.
Humans are generally pretty weak animals, but some humans are weaker than average, even if they are not fat. Whearas it’s possible to be healthy without excessive, muscle, how can you be complety healthy without a “healthy” amount of muscle. Additonally as a man, if sex appeal is your aim, women are not attracted too weak, or at least weak looking males. So for men, increased strength, not only helps ensure mate attraction, but also increases the chances that you will be successful in the case where a potential physical conflict ever presents itself. Either by avoiding the conflict throught posturing, or having the appearance of someone you don’t want to fight in the first place, and or by actually have the physical ability to actually defend yourself or those around you.
Physical strength has the parrellel component of martial ability or skill. The ability to use your body through marital arts, gymnastics, advanced calestenics or any skill work or movements. I would define this as the bodies ability to you
Exercise Principles
Fat Loss
Most peole may not care about building muscle, or even getting “fit”, they just want to lose weight, and for those people, just losing fat is a great place to start. However it should be understood that losing fat, but not caring about fitness is like wanting to get somewhere without wanting to travel there. Some people just want to teleport to that destination.
Principles for Fat Loss
Calories in, calories out, and your resting metabolic rate or RMR are the two the most important concepts when it comes to losing fat. We first need to understand that a colorie is simply a unit of energy. And the Firts Law of Themrodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So any calories you consume, will either be used by the body, or stored as fat. So if you are consuming more calories than you are expending, you will unavoidbaly accumulate fat. So how does the body use calories? Your body is constanly buring calories. You are burning calories just sitting there breathing. As you are likely aware of, humans are warm blooded creatures which means that we generate our own heat. Generating heat consumes energy, and remember calories are just a unit of measure of energy, breathing consumes energy, our heart beating burns energy, walking to the bathroom uses energy. Everything we do, uses energy and thus consumes energy. This is where the notion of resting metabolic rate, RMR, comes in. Your RMR is the rate at which your body consumes calories, just to sit there and exist, this is your metabolism. Think calories per day. Everyone’s RMR is going to be different based on body composition, genetics, enviorment and activity level. It should be noted that this number is usually just a rough approximation, but its still a good place to start. RMR is usually determined using an formula like the Harris-Benedict Equation, which was derived through experimentation. Once we have your RMR, from this number, remember calories per day, we now have the requisite infomration to build a diet and exercise plan. If the goal is simply to burn fat, than we can achieve this either by dieting, for our purposes we will define dieting simply as deliberate meal planning and with predetermined restrictions. So we can build our diet to keep our calories consumption under our predicted RMR.
Side note on tracking.
It is crucial that during any diet and training to track as much data as possbile. This means all calories consumed. Let me say this one more time for emphasis. Every calorie consumed will be recoreded to the highest degree of accuracy possible.
Make a rule. If you cannot record it, you cannot consume it. This rule alone might help you curb your calorie intake.
Track every calories, and log every workout. Fitness wearables can be very helpful, but if you don’t have a wearbable, try to record time started exercies, time completed, workouts completed, sets and reps, precieved exertion and your heart rate during and at the end of exercise, especially during cario workouts such as running, biking or on any cardio machine. Also tracking your weight at 2-3 times a day is important because it helps you develop an understanding for how your body weight fluctuates, and its also important to understand that normal body weight fluctuation up or down, does not neccesarily mean fat lost or gained. We want multiple weights a day, so we have a solid number of data points over a week to begin to see a trend line, and that is what is most important. Not your given weight one particular weigh in.
When we track both the calories we consume and the calories we burn through exercise, along with our weight 2-3 times a day, and weekly body fat measurments, this helps us get a clearer picture of your metabolism. If you are tracking everything accurately, and you are not losing fat, than that means something is wrong in our measurements, either in calories consumed, calories burned, or your RMR. The corrective course of action is to ensure we are indeed tracking everything, even zero calorie food still has some calories in it by the way, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. If that is accurate, we can either increase our exercise activity, or decrease our calorie consumption. Then of course monitor and reavaluate weekly. As week we progress, you can learn to dial things in, exactly how much you need to need to eat, and how you need to exercise to maintain your weight loss.
In my experience, and I think in the experience of many others, the harder the diet, the less sustainable it will be, and this increases the odds of gaining the weight back after coming off a diet. So I think the best strategy is to understand the principles behind a training plan, that you can continue forward even after you have acheived your weight loss goal.
Exercise
As previously mentioned, existing burns calories, movement burns calories. Any activity you engage in burns calories. So the first step to losing fat, is to simply try to move more. Any kind of movement burns calories, so just try to move more.
Cardio. Steady-state cardio is one of the most effective ways to burn fat. Steady state refers to your exertion level which can also be measured by your heart rate. During steady-state exercise, the difficulty, and your exertion remains, just that, steady. Steady-state is most easily achieved when engaged in a regular and repeated movement pattern such as running, biking, rowing, stairs, etc.
One pound of muscle can consume around 6-7 calories a day, just resting. So increasing your muscle mass can significantly increase your RMR. So building muscle in conjunction with a consistent cardio regime will aid in accelerating fat loss.
Progressive overload
When training either cardio or strength, another reason why we want to log our workouts is so we can plan progressive overload. Progressive overload is the basic concept, of doing more work each time. More work could mean that we’ve done more reps, we’ve lifte more weight, or we ran further in a given amount of time, or we have or we’ve ran the same distance in less time. If you have a fitness wearble, you can also add calories burned in a given cardio session. This can gamify your workouts to a degree, allowing you to compete against your past self.
Reccomendations for a fat loss exercise regime.
Cardio M/W/F
Gradual Warm-Up (aprox. 5 minutes): Starting with an easy warm-up is excellent for preparing the muscles and cardiovascular system for exercise, reducing the risk of injury.
Increased Intensity (aprox. 5-10 minutes): Gradually increasing the intensity helps in acclimatizing the body to a higher level of exertion, which is important for someone who hasn’t exercised in a while.
Moderate Intensity Workout (20 minutes): A moderate-intensity workout is sensible for building endurance. The guideline to maintain the ability to hold a conversation (often referred to as the “talk test”) is a good measure to ensure that the intensity is appropriate.
Extended Cool Down (aprox. 10-30 minutes): A long cool-down is beneficial for gradually reducing the heart rate and avoiding abrupt cessation of activity, which can sometimes lead to dizziness or lightheadedness in beginners. Starting out, feel free to keep
Strength Training Tue/Thur
For strength training twice a week, I suggest focusing on upper body on the day of your choice and lower body on the other. It is always important to begin any training regime slowly, and gradually increase the intensity over time, and implementing the process of progressive overload over time. Remember keeping any kind of gym log is required for tracking your progress.
Equipment
Calipers – These are a simple, yet effective tool for measuring body fat. Calipers are not the more accurate, but if you are careful and consitent with measurements, they can be fairly precise, and this is most important when tracking fat loss, which is difference in overall body fat, not necccesarily what your overal total body fat composition is.
Garmin Instinct Watch – This is a good starter watch for capturing biometrics. This was my first smart watch for capturing biodata. Used in conjunction with a heart rate strap it provides good biometric data at a entry level price. It should be noted that I never rely on a watch alone for accurate heart rate data. For accurate heart rate data its well worth the investment to get a strap to go along with a watch. So why get a watch in the first place? It’s of course a personal preference, but at the very least, the watch allows me to monitor my heart rate in real time. This is useful for not only having a grounded view of actual effort, but it also helps build an intuition for what each range of cariovascular effort feels like, ie what 150 bpm feels like.
Garmin fenix 6X Sapphire Watch – This is my current watch that I use. I upgraded from the instinct because I liked the more professional look the color display and the higher number of fitness metrics it records.
Garmin HRM-Dual Heart Rate Monitor – Getting back to chest starts, this was my first heart rate monitor, and it still works well, a downside to this, is it requires an active connection to the a smart watch in order to function. There are some other differences between
Garmin HRM-Pro Plus, Premium Chest Strap Heart Rate Monitor – This is my current heart rate monitor, it collects more data. Compare straps here
Garmin Index S2, Smart Scale– This really is a luxury item- you don’t need it, any ordinary scale will do, but this scale really reduces the friction in recording my weight, because it is done automatically. I weigh myself, and it automatically syncs my weight data to my Garmin connect app.
Any food scale
Measuring Tape – Use this to measure various body dimensions.
Gym Reaper Knee sleeves – I religiously wear these. I feel naked and cannot go to the gym without them.
Gymreapers Quick Locking Weightlifting - A must for me whenever I am squatting or deadlifting.
Summary,
Remember these are just the items that I have found useful, that you also might find useful yourself.
Essential items for a weight loss training program: • Calipers • Tape measure • Any Scale for weighing yourself
The heart rate monitor or heart rate monitor and watch combination is not necessary but I really find a tremendous benefit in understanding my heart rate during exercise as it allows me to track my intensity over time. It also better allows me to quantify exactly how a cardio session went. Additionally, what I have found is that a watch alone is just not a reliable mechanism for providing consistent and accurate heart rate information and thus a chest strap is the best tool for providing accurate heart rate data.
Resources
Calorie Tracking Apps – I do not use this app all the time, only when I am seriously cutting, however it is very useful when tracking your caloric intake. As I mentioned before, create a rule for yourself that you wont eat anything that isn’t tracked.
Online body fat calculator – This is the calculator that I use in conjunction with the calipers listed above to give me my body fat. Remember that these calculators are only so accurate, but so long as you are consistent in measuring, it should yield fairly accurate information as how your overall body fat it changing over time.
Blood Work I wish I got my blood work done in my early twenties. I had no idea what any of my levels looked liked, what my testosterone, estrogen or growth hormone levels are. It wasnt until I turned thirty that I began to get them checked. You can always request bloolwork from your doctor and ask for whatever you want tested, but some insurances companies limit how often you can get them checked.
Supplements and Protien
Over the course of my lifetime and fitness journey I have countless dolloar on countless supplements. In my experience and according to many other fitness and health experts, these three supplements are the most proven effective supplements.
Gold Standard Whey
First a note of why protein in important and how it works. Proteins are made of amino acids, which are like building blocks for your body. They’re crucial for building and repairing tissues, including muscles, especially after exercise. When you exercise, your muscles experience tiny tears. Protein helps repair these tears, which is how muscles grow stronger and larger.
Taste. In my opinion, taste is thee most important factor when considering what protien you are going to add to your diet, because if you don’t like it, odds are you wont even end up drinking it, no matter how “good” it is otherwise.
I like Gold Standard whey by optimum nutrition, I have been taking it for over ten years. When shopping for protien there are a few things I like to consider other than taste. Taste being equal, I look at how much protein I am getting, that is total weight of protien, not the total weight of the product, just the weight of the protien, per dollar. Think, how many grams of protien per dolloar, or you could think of it the other way, how many dollars per gram.
So don’t mind the total weight on the front. The number you are looking for is the grams per serving. In this case it’s 24 grams.Now find the number of servings, in this case it’s 74. Now multiply 24x74, that gives you 1776, A perfect number if you ask me. Now take 1776 and divide by the price of the unit, in this case its $79.35. This give us a score of 22.38 grams/dollar. The higher the number the better. Like I said, you could also go the opposite route, and in that case, you of course want a smaller number. This now gives you a good bench mark to compare protein in terms of it’s value. The other factors to look for are going to be protien type, quality of protien, and, what you might call caloric cost, if you are concerned with calories at least. Take the number of calories in a serving, and divide them by the grams of protein in a serving. In this case, we have 120/24. We get 5 calories for each gram of protien. This is a pretty good ratio, egg whites, one of the best sources of protein scores about 4.6 protein calories. The same method that we applied to evaluating this protein can also be used to any food in fact, and you can trade out any of the values you wish, depending on which trait you wish to optimize for.
L-Citruline Malate
The key benefit of L-Citrulline Malate is its ability to increase blood flow. This happens because L-Citrulline boosts nitric oxide production in the body, which helps dilate or widen blood vessels, allowing for improved blood flow. Better blood flow means more oxygen and nutrients are delivered to your muscles during exercise. This enhanced oxygen delivery can lead to increased work capacity, allowing muscles to perform better and for longer periods. Additionally, with improved blood circulation, there’s potentially more efficient removal of waste products like lactic acid from the muscles, which can aid in recovery. The overall effect is a potential increase in exercise performance and calorie burning.
Creatine Monohydrate
Creatine is vital in the regeneration of ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is the primary energy source needed for muscle contractions. During intense exercise, when an athlete depletes their immediate ATP stores, the presence of supplemented creatine in their system aids in the rapid regeneration of ATP. This process helps replace depleted ATP stores, allowing the athlete to maintain a higher level of performance during short bursts of high-intensity exercise.
Diet
Calories in, calories out, and your resting metabolic rate or RMR are the two the most important concepts when it comes to losing fat. We first need to understand that a calorie is simply a unit of energy. And the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. So, any calories you consume will either be used by the body, or stored as fat. So, if you are consuming more calories than you are expending, you will unavoidably accumulate fat. So how does the body use calories? Your body is constantly burning calories. You are burning calories just sitting there breathing. Humans as warm blooded creatures generate their own heat. Generating heat consumes energy, and remember calories are just a unit of measure of energy. So breathing consumes energy, our heart beating consumes energy, walking to the bathroom uses energy. Everything we do, uses energy and thus burns calories. This is where the notion of resting metabolic rate, RMR, comes in. Your RMR is the rate at which your body burns calories, just to sit there and exist, this is your metabolism. Think of calories per day. Everyone’s RMR is going to be different based on body composition, genetics, environment and activity level. It should be noted that this number is usually just a rough approximation, but it’s still a good place to start. RMR is usually determined using a formula like the Harris-Benedict Equation, which was derived through experimentation. Once we have your RMR, from this number, remember calories per day, we now have the requisite information to build a diet and exercise plan. If the goal is simply to burn fat, than we can achieve this either by dieting, for our purposes we will define dieting simply as deliberate meal planning and with predetermined restrictions, or dieting and exercising. We then build our diet to keep our calories consumption under our predicted RMR, creating a caloric deficit.
Side notes on tracking.
It is crucial that during any diet and training to track as much data as possible. This means all calories consumed. Let me say this one more time for emphasis. Every calorie consumed will be recorded to the highest degree of accuracy possible.
Make a rule. If you cannot record it, you cannot consume it. This rule alone might help you curb your calorie intake.
Track every calorie and log every workout. Fitness wearables can be very helpful, but if you don’t have a wearable, try to record time started exercise, time completed, workouts completed, sets and reps, perceived exertion and your heart rate during and at the end of exercise, especially during cardio workouts such as running, biking or on any cardio machine. Also tracking your weight at 2-3 times a day is important because it helps you develop an understanding for how your body weight fluctuates, and it’s also important to understand that normal body weight fluctuation up or down, does not necessarily mean fat lost or gained. We want multiple weights a day, so we have a solid number of data points over a week to begin to see a trend line, and that is what is most important. Not your given weight on only one particular weigh in.
At the end of everyday, log your totals here -> https://forms.gle/dMGnyLA4C38NRJTG6 Weekly body comps totals here -> https://forms.gle/JfHJWCTwunWTMvMGA
When we track both the calories we consume and the calories we burn through exercise, along with our weight 2-3 times a day, and weekly body fat measurements, this helps us get a clearer picture of your metabolism. If you are tracking everything accurately, and you are not losing fat, than that means something is wrong in our measurements, either in calories consumed, calories burned, or your RMR. The corrective course of action is to ensure we are indeed tracking everything, even zero calorie food still has some calories in it, there really is no such thing as a free lunch. If our tracking is accurate, then we can either increase our exercise activity, or decrease our calorie consumption, and then of course monitor and evaluate weekly. As you progress, you can learn to dial things in, exactly how much you need to need to eat or not eat, depending on your exercise level, to either lose, maintain, or gain weight.
In my experience, and I think in the experience of many others, the stricter the diet, the less sustainable it will be, and this increases the odds of gaining weight back after coming off a diet. So I think the best strategy is to understand the principles behind a training plan, that you can continue forward even after you have achieved your weight loss goal.
Exercise
As previously mentioned, just existing burns calories, movement burns calories. Any activity you engage in burns calories. So the first step to losing fat, is to simply try to move more. Any kind of movement burns calories, so just try to move more.
Cardio. Steady state cardio is one of the most effective ways to burn fat. Steady state refers to your exertion level which can also be measured by your heart rate. During steady-state exercise, the difficulty, and your exertion remains. A steady state is most easily achieved when engaged in a regular and repeated movement pattern such as running, biking, rowing, stairs, etc.
One pound of muscle can consume around 6-7 calories a day, just at rest. Increasing then your muscle mass can significantly increase your RMR. Building muscle in conjunction with a consistent cardio regime will aid in accelerating fat loss.
Progressive overload
When training either cardio or strength, another reason why we want to log our workouts is so we can plan progressive overload. Progressive overload is the basic concept of doing more work each time. More work could mean that we’ve done more reps, we’ve lift more weight, or we ran further in a given amount of time, or we have or we’ve ran the same distance in less time. If you have a fitness wearable, you can also add calories burned in a given cardio session. This can gamify your workouts to a degree, allowing you to compete against your past self.
Recommendations for a fat loss exercise regime.
Cardio: M/W/F Gradual Warm-Up (aprox. 5 minutes): Starting with an easy warm-up is excellent for preparing the muscles and cardiovascular system for exercise, reducing the risk of injury. Increased Intensity (aprox. 5-10 minutes): Gradually increasing the intensity helps in acclimatizing the body to a higher level of exertion, which is important for someone who hasn’t exercised in a while. Moderate Intensity Workout (20 minutes): A moderate-intensity workout is sensible for building endurance. The guideline to maintain the ability to hold a conversation (often referred to as the “talk test”) is a good measure to ensure that the intensity is appropriate. Extended Cool Down (aprox. 10-30 minutes): A long cool-down is beneficial for gradually reducing the heart rate and avoiding abrupt cessation of activity, which can sometimes lead to dizziness or lightheadedness in beginners. Starting out, feel free to keep
Strength Training: Tue/Thur
For strength training twice a week, I suggest focusing on upper body on the day of your choice and lower body on the other. It is always important to begin any training regime slowly, and gradually increase the intensity over time, and implementing the process of progressive overload over time. Remember keeping any kind of gym log is required for tracking your progress.
Diet suggestions
Whatever you eat, so long as it is less than your calories expended throughout the day, you will lose weight guaranteed.
Instead of a diet, I will give you some principles to guide your eating decisions.
Track everything as previously mentioned, I cannot stress how important this is.
Increase your protein intake. Aim to eat a gram of protein per pound of lean body weight. This is your weight after you subtract fat weight. For example a 100lb person has 10% body fat, will have 10lbs of fat and 90lbs of lean mass. This person should try to consume 90 grams of protein a day.
Begin evaluating your food sources. Look at the nutritional label and become familiar with it. Understand what you are putting into your body.
Use the attached spreadsheet to customize your own diet plan and track calories. You can adjust the number of servings for each food item and it will automatically calculate your total calories and macro spread for the day. Feel free to add whatever foods you might want to include. I have included my favorite diet staples with links to them below.
Oatmeal
Yogurt
Granola
Blueberries
Protein Powder
Frozen Chicken
Tuna
Mayo
Vegetables
Milk
Apples
PB Fit
Eggs