Health & Wellness

Fitness

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What to know before you start [posted]

  • It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the idea of working out. It’s a physically and mentally intimidating activity from the outside looking in.
  • Below are a list of six things to keep in mind before you head to the gym the first time. Hopefully these will help ease the transition from desk jockey to fitness enthusiast.
  • Hygiene
    • Personal
      • You’re entering a shared space where your going to sweat. You need to shower, brush your teeth, and wear deodorant. The majority of gyms will have access to showers. You have no excuse.
    • Facility
      • Make sure your facility has some cleaning services come through. The last thing you want to do is get sick.
      • Make sure your facility offers some way to clean surfaces on your own. Use them! You can’t be too safe.
  • Gear
    • There are only a few movements that require you wear the proper attire. And that attire is really just your shoes. If you plan on doing any of the following deadlifts, squats, cleans, snatches, or most cardio movements you should invest in a good pair of shoes.
    • Your tops and bottoms should be whatever you’re most comfortable wearing. This usually means shorts & a t-shirt for men and yoga pants & tank top for ladies. Honestly, wear what you want just realize you’ll get some looks if you show up in cargo shorts and a button-up.
  • Have a plan
    • Going to the gym is just like going to the grocery store. If you go without a checklist you’re going to end up missing some crucial components
    • The first time I started at the gym all I did for my lower half was angled presses and cardio. My physique paid a price. It could have been a lot worse too if I hadn’t stopped working out in just under a year.
    • There are almost an infinite number of plans for beginners online and I’ve compiled my own as well available here.
  • Sustenance
    • Make sure you’ve eaten a full meal sometime in the past 8-hours. I tend to go to the gym first thing in the morning and always have a hardy dinner.
    • Bring water with you. I’m sure your gym will have a drinking fountain, but we can just assume all drinking fountains are disgusting.
  • Stretch
    • If you’ve never been to the gym before and you’re not prone to exercising outside there’s a good chance you spend the majority of your time hunched in front of a computer. If so, you must incorporate stretching into your fitness routine. Your lower back, shoulders, and neck are all sorts of fucked up from years of screen time.
    • There’s a good amount of research stating you shouldn’t stretch too much before your workout.
  • Social Anxiety
    • It would be unfair to say that no one is or will look at you in the gym. But no one really cares that you’re there and that’s what is important.
    • I’ve been going to the gym for 10 years and these are the three reasons I’ve ever looked at anyone,
      • They’re hogging a shit load of gym equipment like a self-important monster
      • They have no idea what the fuck they’re doing and I’m worried for their safety, but to social anxious to say anything
      • They’re wearing jeans or flip-flops
      • They’re my gym rival.
    • So, here’s how you avoid people like me looking at people like you.
      • Don’t build workouts that require you to use multiple pieces of equipment, especially if your gym isn’t meant for circuit training.
      • Research all the lifts you’re going to do beforehand. Even better, get some one-on-one training in specific lifts. The guide linked on this page circumvents this by relying on machines rather than isolated movements. Great if you’ve never been a gym before.
      • Wear gym attire rather than looking like you’re heading to a BBQ.
      • Don’t come to my gym.
  • Each of these are simple principles to follow. There are entire books written on healthy eating and gym habits. I’m not trying to replicate that work. It’d be a waste to do so. All we want to insure is that sitting up after a heavy lift doesn’t cause you to become light-headed.

Looking Long Term - [posted]

  • The Best Time to Start is Today
    • You’ll likely be tempted to find the perfect plan for yourself. One that matches with your ideal body type or has been vetted by fitness gurus and influences. The type of optimization you’re looking to do is meant for intermediate to professional lifters. Simply getting into the gym for an extra week will be just as, if not more, worthwhile as all the research you do.
  • Change Takes Time
    • Set realistic expectations for yourself. The great thing about strength training, especially as a new lifter, is that gains will come quickly and often. It’s not unrealistic to add a bit of weight every single week for the first 3 to 6 months. The catch is that your overall shape may not improve much unless you started out very thin.
  • Consistency Matters Most
    • Your gains are made with time in the gym, it’s that simple. If you want to get stronger you need to head to the gym and start building up the habit. On the other side of this is keeping muscle on. Research indicates you can start losing muscle mass after 7 - 14 days of inactivity. Even if you’re on a vacation, you only need to hold yourself to doing a fully body workout right before and after your trip.
  • Support Yourself
    • Supporting yourself means sleeping the right amount, eating enough calories to add on mass, and taking a break when you’re injured. To get the point across - DO NOT FUCKING LIFT WHILE INJURED - If you pinch a nerve in your neck or start to feel an ache in your knee, stop immediately. Getting in another rep is never worth the possible days or even weeks of repair that could result from the additional stress.
  • Lifting Goals
    • Lifting goals all follow the same structure. You either want to gain a certain amount of muscle, lift X amount in Y exercise, or go to your fitness class a predetermined amount of times each week. As you learn more about fitness you’ll understand that no goal is truly unique. It’s simply a balance of knowledge combined with the severity of transformation you want to undertake.

The Benefits of Strength Training - Article

  • Maintaining Bone Mass
  • Stress Management
    • The benefits don’t stop there. Exercise gives the body an opportunity to practice working with stress. To build muscle or increase lung capacity we have to tax our body. Biologically, exercise activates the same physiological systems involved in stress. This response functions as a way to force systems to work in tandem. In doing so, our body gets practice responding to stress.
  • Preventing Affects of Aging
    • When reviewing this and other aging research, Tarnopolsky said, “If there were a drug that could do for human health everything that exercise can, it would be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed.”
  • Memory
    • [In a 2016 study](https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16) 30465-1), exercise was traced to gains in memory recall as well. Researchers split participants into three groups; no exercise, immediate exercise, and exercise four hours later. Only the third group, activity four hours later, showed a significant increase in their recall ability.
  • Executive Function
    • In young children, physical activity, especially games, can increase the development of goal-directed behavior. Dr. John Best writes, “…aerobic exercise engages EF and other higher-order cognitive processes by requiring goal-directed behavior and the coordination of motor movements.”
  • Improves Mood
    • If you’ve ever gone for a run after a stressful day, chances are you felt better afterward. Michael Otto says to the APA, “the link between exercise and mood is pretty strong. Usually, within five minutes after moderate exercise, you get a mood-enhancement effect.”

A Basic Routine - Article

  • Your First Workout - Easing In
    • For your first gym session, I recommend finding your maxes on whatever machine or lift you’re planning to use for the next few months. Doing so has a dual effect. It will mean your body gets a good, yet not too strenuous workout. It also sets a baseline for every future gym session.
    • If you find that any of the exercises you’re doing uncomfortable this is a good opportunity to test out other movements.
    • Unless you have an experienced lifter with you, I highly recommend you solely use machines at first. There are pros and cons to this approach, but if you’re working out alone they are far safer and allow you to push yourself while keeping the risk of injury low.
    • The target for your first workout should be between 45-60 minutes.
    • Take decent breaks between your larger lifts.
    • I’m a huge fan of the app FitNotes. It allows me to easily track my movements and each lift can have a custom timer. This way you can always know when to start your next set.
  • The Workout
    • We’ll be switching up the types of workout you’ll perform every 3-months. This is to help avoid plateaus.
    • It’s important to track your growth, preferably in an app that allows you to monitor growth over longer periods of time. This is an important step of checking for plateaus in your lifting.
    • Start Small
      • This workout will take a good chunk of your time over the next 3-months. You may need to start smaller to build up a habit. Keep in mind that even going once or twice a week will show gains in your fitness.
    • Why this workout over any others?
    • Your Next 3-months
      • You’ll be following a one-and-one split. That’s one day at the gym and one day off the gym. As you progress you’ll be able to start going more frequently and I’ve added options for upping time at the gym if you want to push yourself harder. However, for the first month I’d suggest holding the one-and-one split to avoid any risk of injury.
        • This scheme will have you working at 3 - 4 days per week. If this isn’t feasible I’d suggest 3-days (M,W,F) or (T, Th, Sat)
      • As a preview, the second month will add additional sets to every single exercise. Most of these reps will be to failure which will make them quite a bit more difficult. If you feel empowered to do so at the end of the first week or two please skip ahead and use those training regiments.
      • Month 1
      • Month 2 & 3
  • Further Modifications
    • As you grow accustom to the workout you can change how frequently you go to the gym. My current split is 3 days on and 1 day off. Which means I’m at the gym 5 - 6 days a week. Because you’re targeting almost completely different muscle groups and using machines to avoid injury it’s likely you’ll feel comfortable going more often than outlined here.
    • Many of these exercises can be done with dumbbells or barbells. If you feel comfortable using free-weights you can swap out any or all of these exercises with their free-weight version.
    • Don’t be afraid to test out different routines while you’re starting out. The workout above is a modified version of the workout I used the first time I hit the gym. Since then I’ve used a wide variety of plans and workout classes to stay in shape. Some I’ve loved far more than others. The only way to know what’s going to keep you in the gym, at least in the beginning, is to experiment.

Article

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