2.__Run at least twice a week.__ I would focus on high-intensity
sprinting, such as running as fast as you can for 20 seconds,
resting for 40 seconds, and repeating for 5 sprints.
3.__Stay active regularly.__ Try to find excuses to get out and walk,
take a bike ride, go for a swim, or just play with your kids.
## Health vs fitness
Before diving into the details, I want to talk about two related but
distinct terms. Definitions on these two terms vary quite a bit, but
I'd like to give my own simplified definitions based on the input of
many other sources:
* __Health__ is a measure of your ability to live life without
sickness, crippling weakness, premature death, or other debilitating
conditions.
* __Fitness__ is a measure of your ability to perform tasks. In our
context, we're talking about the ability to perform specific
physical feats, such as running a mile in a certain amount of time,
bench press a certain amount of weight, etc.
What I'm trying to get across in these definitions is that health is about reaching a baseline where your body is not working against you. By contrast, fitness lets you push the boundaries of what you're capable of.
Often times, these go hand in hand. Being able to run a mile in 15
minutes, for instance, is a good indication that you are not suffering
from any respiratory conditions, your bones are strong enough to
withstand the impact of running, you have decent lower body muscle
mass, and so on.
However, these two concepts can and do diverge. The ability to
deadlift 300kg (660lbs) is not by any reasonable standard a
prerequisite for a healthy body, but certainly measures
fitness. Running a 4 minute mile is an amazing feat of prowess in
fitness, but doesn't really tell me you're healthier than the person
running an 8 minute mile.
I point this distinction out here because this series of posts is
intended to cover *health*, and using nutrition and exercise to
achieve it. It is very tempting to get caught up in numbers and goals
that measure fitness, while throwing health to the wind. For the most
trivial example of this: taking steroids to improve your powerlifting
numbers will certainly improve your fitness, but I'd argue pretty
strongly against it as bad for your health.
All that said, there's nothing wrong with pursuing fitness goals, and
as I mentioned in [why I lift](/blog/2017/06/why-i-lift), doing so can
be a lot of fun. Having something to compete against—even
yourself—is a huge motivator. Just make sure you're not
sacrificing your health in the process.
## Resistance training
This is also known as *strength training*. Let's rip off the
definition
[straight from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_training):
> Strength training is a type of physical exercise specializing in the
> use of resistance to induce muscular contraction which builds the
> strength, anaerobic endurance, and size of skeletal muscles.
The term strength training tells us the *why*, whereas resistance
training hints more at how we achieve these goals. Resistance training
involves exerting your muscles against some external
resistance. Probably the most emblematic version of this is resisting
against gravity in the forms of lifting weights, but we'll see that
there are many other approaches available.
### Why?
This could be my own personal experience that others have not felt,
but growing up I always had the impression that training for strength
was somehow *bad*. Lifting weights was a vain pursuit of bigger
muscles, and real health benefits only came from cardio like jogging.
If you never had these misconceptions, congratulations. I certainly
did. And in case others do as well, let me disspell them:
* Muscle mass has a __protective effect on your body__. For example,
if you have more muscle, you can withstand a larger impact.
* If you're capable of moving larger weights, then __day to day
activities are easier__. For example, if you can deadlift 100kg,
then picking up your 30kg child is a much easier activity, and won't
exhaust you as quickly.
* Strength training doesn't just increase muscle mass; it also
__increases your bone density and strengthens your tendons__. This
makes strength training a great way to __fight off osteoporosis__,
making it a vital activity for older people, and especially older
women. (Unfortunately, this is the group most likely to not bother
strength training.)
* While strength training doesn't burn as many calories as cardio, it
does encourage your body to use calories consumed to __build and
maintain muscle mass instead of fat mass__. This means you can get
away with eating some level of extra calories without gaining fat.
* Because strength training uses up muscle glycogen, it can be a great
way to help __control blood glucose levels__. After a heavy training
session, your muscles will be primed to absorb glucose to rebuild
glycogen, instead of leaving the glucose in your blood to convert
into fat or (in the case of diabetics) simply harm your body with
toxic glucose levels.
* Increased strength can __help avoid injuries__. Prior to 2016,
despite no longer being overweight and having a decent strength
base, I was constantly throwing out my back from normal day-to-day
activities (like sitting at a computer for too long). This was my
biggest motivation for getting into weight lifting that year, and my
back has been much happier since.
* Strength training helps improve many __health markers__, like blood
lipid profiles (cholesterol) and hormone levels.
That's a lot of benefits, and it's far from a complete list. You may
not relate to all of the points above, but hopefully it makes the
point that strength training is not just for young guys wanting to
impress people with their biceps. Strength training is a vital
component of good health for everyone, regardless of age or gender.
### Mechanism
All strength/resistance training fits into the same basic idea. You
want to move some part of your body by contracting a muscle. You want
to use some technique to make that contraction difficult so that your
muscle has to struggle. By challenging the muscle, you
trigger—through various pathways—your body to:
* Make the muscle stronger
* Increase toughness of the tendons
* Increase bone density
These benefits occur during _recovery_, or the time after you stop
exercising. This is important: if you keep exercising non-stop for
days on end, you will get _weaker_, not stronger. The formula then is:
* Perform exercise against resistance
* Rest/recover
* Repeat
This kind of exercise is *anaerobic*, meaning "without air." Because
resistance training is short bursts of heavy intensity, it mostly
relies upon glycogen for energy, which can be burned without
oxygen. This may seem to imply that resistance training has no
benefits on the cardiovascular (heart and lung) system, and doesn't
help burn fat (which requires oxygen to break down). Neither of these
is true, however. During the recovery phase, your body will need to
rely on your fat stores to provide energy to rebuild muscles, which
will put demands on the cardiovascular system to provide additional
oxygen.
### Stress
Last bit of theory here before we dive into how to do all of
this. Another way of looking at exercise is a _stress_ we are applying
to our body. Stress has a bad rap, and for good reason: chronic
stress, such as we experience in our daily life from work and
continual electronic stimulation, is damaging. However, in small
doses, stress is wonderful for our body.
When we temporarily stress our body, it provides a stimulus for our
body to get better, so it is able to more easily handle the stress in
the future. Stressing our muscles causes them to get
stronger. Stresses our bones makes them more dense. And stressing our
cardiovascular system with extra oxygen demands makes our heart and
lungs more efficient.
Temporary stress with proper recovery is the very heart of exercise,
and will carry through to everything in this post.
### Bodyweights
OK, let's actually talk about some exercises! The most easily
accessible form of resistance training is *body weight exercises*, or
*bodyweights*. The concept here is simple: use your own body and
gravity to provide a resistance for your muscles to exert against.
Probably the most famous example of this is the pushup. You are
pushing against the ground with your arm, shoulder, and chest muscles
to create enough force to move your body against gravity. Your own
body weight is working against your muscles.
If you read the word "pushup" and thought "I can't do that," no need
to worry. Bodyweight exercises usually follow some form of
_progression_, where you can start with easier forms of the exercise
and gradually move to more difficult versions. Taking a pushup as an
example, a progression may look something like:
1. Stand in front of a wall and push your body away from it
2. Put your hands on a table and push up from that position
3. Do pushups with your knees on the ground
4. A standard pushup, with only your feet and hands touching the
ground
5. Put your feet on a stool and push up
6. Put your feet high on a wall and perform a vertical pushup
There are other variations you can perform: changing the width of your
grip by putting your hands closer or farther apart to focus on
different muscles. You can also follow a one-arm pushup progression
instead of a vertical pushup progression. Vertical pushups put more
stress on your shoulder muscles, while one arm pushups put more focus
on your chest muscles.
If all of this sounds confusing and a bit daunting, don't worry. Some
very helpful people online have already created programs around
bodyweights. Some references:
* [StartBodyWeight.com](http://www.startbodyweight.com/p/start-bodyweight-basic-routine.html). I
did this program for about a year, and highly recommend it as a
the programs I linked to above. The basic idea is to avoid stagnating
by constantly challenging yourself to improve.
### Plate math
If you're going to be doing barbell exercises, it's important to get
comfortable with adding up weights, also known as _plate math_. I'll
start with the metric system, since it's easier to handle, and what I
use.
A standard barbell weighs 20kg. The plates you'll put on the barbell must be balanced: you put the same amount on the left and right side. If you put a 10kg and 5kg weight on each side, you'll end up with:
* 20kg bar
* 10kg times 2 (one per side) = 20kg
* 5kg times 2 (one per side) = 10kg
* __Total__ 20+20+10=50kg
I find it easiest in most cases to add up the weight per side of the
bar, double it, and add 20. So in the above example, I'd do "10 + 5 =
15, 15 * 2 = 30, 30 + 20 = 50." This is just arithmetic, so don't get
too hung up on it, and do what's comfortable.
Now let's do this in reverse. Suppose you're planning on benching
70kg. In order to figure out what to put on the bar, you would do
this:
* 70kg - 20kg for the bar = 50kg in plates
* 50kg total plates / 2 = 25kg in plates per side
* Start finding the largest plates that will add up to your number. In
this case, you're probably looking at a 20kg and 5kg.
Try not to just match the total weight, but also the plate
distribution. In other words, don't put a 20kg on one side of the bar
and 4 5kg plates on the other. That will feel unbalanced. Most gyms
will have plates of size 20kg, 10kg, 5kg, 2.5kg, and 1.25kg. Some may
also have 25kg and 15kg.
You may also hear people say things like "squatting 2 plate," or on
stranger parts of the internet, "2pl8." This means you have 2 20kg
plates per side of the barbell. Why 20kg? Convention. Do the math,
I'll give you the total weight for this at the end of this section.
__For you Americans__, the numbers are slightly different. Instead of
a barbell weighing 20kg, it weights 45lbs, which is just slightly more
than 20kg (20.4kg). And the plates come in sizes of 45lbs, 35lbs,
25lbs, 10lbs, 5lbs, and 2.5lbs. As a developer, I love the power-of-2
system employed by the metric plates, but if you have to use imperial
measurements, just get used to doing the math.
This has the funny side-effect that if you say "I squatted 2 plate,"
it means something different between America and the rest of the
world. (Go ahead and figure out what that total pound value is.) The
numbers are close, but not exactly the same.
*Answer: 2 plate is 100kg, or 225lbs.*
### Importance of proper form
You'll read this just about everywhere that discusses weight lifting,
but I'll say it here too: using proper form on your lifts is
_absolutely crucial_. Using proper form will:
* Ensure you are getting the full value from your workout
* Help you avoid injuries
* Make sure you don't end up in an embarassing video on YouTube
There are two particular points of proper form that I want to point
out:
* The act of lowering the weight is known as the *eccentric portion*
of the exercise. It is common to see people lose control of the
weight during this portion. If you do this, you are hindering your
progress dramatically! Most of the muscle tearing that leads to
muscle regrowth occurs during the eccentric portion. Lowering the
weight in a controlled, steady pace is difficult, but well worth it.
* Be sure to follow full range of motion. You'll often hear people say
they don't want to squat to parallel because it will injure their
knees. This is in fact a myth: squatting with insufficient depth
leads to muscular imbalances and injuries.
* I'm well aware of the fact that I haven't actually described how
to do a squat in this post; please see the linked routines above
that describe how to do a squat properly.
### Full body vs splits
A full body workout is a routine that exercises all (or most) muscle
groups each day you train. A split routine somehow splits up days of
the week to specific muscle groups. There are many tradeoffs between
these two approaches, and I won't be able to cover them all here. But
here's a basic idea: you should always have a day of rest between
training a specific muscle group. But having too many rest days in
between is limiting your growth potential.
If you're going to work out three days a week, you can do a full body
routine each of those days and have 1 or 2 days of rest in between. By
contrast, if you're going to work out 6 days a week, doing a full body
routine each day won't give you any time to rest and recover.
The routines above are all full body routines. That's probably the
right place to start; I would highly advise _against_ strength
training for more than three days a week as a beginner. If you later
want to progress to more days of working out a week, you can consider
some kind of split. There are many preexisting routines based on
splits, and you can of course make your own.
Personally, I've found the PPL (Push/Pull/Leg) split approach to be
pretty good. The idea is to first separate out all lower-body/leg
exercises to their own day. Then, of upper body exercises, break them
up by whether they push the weight away from your body (like a bench
press) or are pulling the weight toward your body (like a curl or
barbell row). This ends up pretty cleanly dividing up the upper body
muscle groups.
### How to eat
If you're just getting started with strength training, you don't need
to worry too much about eating. Follow nutrition advice from the
previous post. If you're trying to lose fat, eat at a caloric
deficit. When you're initially going from untrained to trained, you
get to experience what are known as "noob gains," which lifters treat
as the magical ability for your body to get stronger and leaner at the
same time.
Once you're past that initial beginner phase, it gets harder to pull
this off. You'll hear people talk about bulking and cutting, on the
premise that you need to eat extra food to fuel muscle growth (bulk),
and then go for a period of caloric deficit to burn off the extra fat
you gained (cut). Other approaches believe in trying for a recomp, or
body recomposition, consisting of careful balancing of calories to get
_just enough_ to gain muscle and burn fat. Other approaches like Lean
Gains believe in *carb and calorie cycling*: eating more carbs and
calories on training days, and less carbs and calories on rest days.
This is all rocket science versus what we're discussing here. I'm
mentioning it all so that you know you don't need to freak out about
it. Remember, your goal is to get used to training, enjoy it, nail
down form, and get basic strength gains. If you decide to pursue
strength training more aggressively (like I have), there will be
plenty of time in the gym to read hundreds of articles on the right
way to eat. For now: eat healthy and lift heavy things.
Final note: be sure to get __plenty of protein__ while strength
training. You'll be using protein to rebuild your muscles after
working them in the gym. If you don't have enough protein in your
diet, your body will be unable to recover.
### Summary of resistance training
Wow, that was a lot! I honestly didn't realize I had that much to say
on the subject of resistance training, and there's still a lot more
worth saying. But hopefully this gives you a good place to start. In
sum:
* Strength training is for everyone
* Don't forget to focus on health, not just pushing some numbers
* Body weights are an easy way to get started and require little
