I grew up playing most sports and eating healthy. Despite that, I made mistakes when I tried to get fit and be more attractive. It’s easy to screw up improving your fitness, but it’s easy to do well too - you need a breadth of simple knowledge. This is the article I wish I had when I started intentionally improving my fitness.
80% of my advice
“Fitness” covers three areas where you may want to improve your body: aesthetics, health, and functional fitness. Those areas have high overlap, but they require focusing your effort on different things. You can be toned and unhealthy. You can be a flabby olympian. You can be perfectly healthy and otherwise mediocre.
Regardless of your goals, diet is the most important topic to focus effort on. Exercise is second. You will have to spend time learning and building habits in both topics - focusing on one and not the other will slow your progress.
First, establish these habits and execute for a few months. That journey will teach you enough to figure out, ‘what next’?
Diet habits
- Track the total calories and protein you eat every week
- Know your target calories and protein
- Track your body weight every week
Exercise habits
- Have weekly exercise commitments
- Learn theory, techniques, and programs
- Track progress (time, weight lifted, repititions)
To establish those habits, you’re going to have to learn. The fastest way to get a foundation is to spend a few hours learning from a professional: a dietician or personal trainer. You can also learn from fitness friends (gym buddies), fitness classes (find ones where learning technique is part of the class), or self-study (reddit, youtube, etc). I couldn’t find trustworthy diet information on the internet, but exercise content was great.
Here’s a good self-study start:
The last 20%
Count calories
This was the biggest failure in my fitness journey.
So much of diet centers around controlling the calories + protein you eat. Your body is bad at telling you what you need to eat to bulk or cut. Your intuition for your stomach will be off, but you can build an intuition for the numbers. Counting calories is so boring. Just do it.
How do you count the calories/protein you eat?
Use the myfitnesspal app or website to find the calorie counts of food. Once you’ve recorded your regular meals and days, you can reuse the past. For example, “My cereal meal is 600kcal. Today I added an apple and ate half as much, so it’s 350kcal.” The data you collect will tell you what must change.
How do you figure out target calories + protein?
Talk to a dietician or personal trainer and give them data: calorie consumption, fitness tracker, and weight change.
Alternatively, you can iterate until you figure out your target. Track your weight change. Adjust your diet and training until the velocity is correct. You can’t gain more than a couple pounds of muscle a month - the rest will be fat. If you’re losing weight, maintain your weightlifting numbers or you’ll lose muscle too. You need to hit a target protein number, independent of the calorie target. Google, “how much protein should I eat to {your_goal}”. Unless your target is 5000kcal/day, you’re going to have to change your diet so protein can take a larger percentage of your calorie intake.
How accurate do the measurements have to be?
It depends on how accurate you want to be in working towards your goals, but here’s a rough guide.
One kilogram of bodyfat allegedly takes 7700 calories to burn off. If you eat 7700 calories extra, you won’t gain one kilogram of bodyfat, but it’s the right order of magnitude. If your measurements are 1000 calories off, it’s around 1/10 kilograms or 1/3 pounds of bodyfat.
Expend effort where it matters - know what’s calorie-dense and track it carefully:
- Red bell pepper: 31 calories
- Carrot: 41 calories
- Apple has 52 calories
- Cup of rice: 200 calories
- Mars bar: 228 calories
- Half a box of ritz crackers: 1120 calories
20% error on 200 calories is the same as forgetting a whole fruit or vegetable. Omitting a candy bar is like forgetting a picnic of fruits and vegetables.
Learn from people IRL
Exercise is a simple topic, but slow to learn on your own. That makes it a great topic to learn from amateurs. Find a peer group that pushes you to learn and improve. Weightlifting buddies and technique-focused group weightlifting classes are fun learning opportunities. Personal trainers and dieticians are expensive, so you’re not going to spend a lot of time with them. Use them to teach you the fundementals or advanced knowledge - the vast middle is best filled by others.
Always look good
In the 10-15% bodyfat range, men look great. There’s a desirable range for women too. Lose fat until you look good, then do bulk/cut cycles in that range to stay looking good. All goals require building or maintaining muscle with strength exercises (including losing fat). The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn. Cardio and conditioning barely build or maintain muscle, but they are good for your health and burn lots of calories.
Fitness effort complements office work effort
After working in an office 9am-5pm, it’s hard to do more white-collar work. You can exercise, though. They are different, complementary efforts. You can pursue goals in both areas of life with low conflict.
Thanks to Anthony, Issy, Lukas, and Phillip for reading drafts of this.