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Helen Drewski
Sure, there are a few competitive athletes, movie stars and Navy SEALs around that still manage to keep in strong form, but if you are not willing to devote your entire life to training, you might as well just head straight for the stretch pants, right? Older age strikes and there is nothing you can do about it.
Oddly enough, if you could peer at the financial statements of your fellow citizens, the story might be similar: consumer debt is normal, the bills keep piling up, and only the movie stars and athletes (and corrupt CEOs of big banks, of course) make enough money to actually get ahead.
All of these factors, yet all systems seem to be better than ever. Returning from the latest travel binge, I found roughly the same level of strength and bodyfat while keeping the same overall weight on the scale. How can this be?
We sit still at work, sit in automobiles, and stand still with rolling luggage on the airport escalator to avoid the strain of the staircase, and hire contractors to take care of our lawns and shovel our driveways. And then we wonder why we get fat, or injure our knees and backs, or get any other less-than-satisfactory performance from our bodies. Only the most dedicated workout junkies (rebranded as CrossFitters these days) seem to get anywhere, and even they often fall off the wagon and become mortals eventually.
Principle Zero: Moving is Normal, Sitting Still is Hazardous
Before we even begin, we need to make a change to the most basic paradigm of modern life. Most of us sit or lie down almost constantly: to sleep, eat, work, drive, and even (shudder) to watch TV. Instead, I like to think of sitting as something you do as a short break from your real life. And you should feel just a bit uncomfortable when sitting down, because it really is a hazardous activity.
Whenever you get a chance to move, take it: get up and pace around while you read books. Attend your conference calls with a mobile phone headset while out walking along the river. Cut your own lawn. Walk the 5 miles across town that you would normally drive. Always, always take the stairs. Never, ever use a drive-through. You can even try taping your laptop to the drink platform of a treadmill and working as you pace slowly along at 1 MPH (I have tried this and it is amazing).
On really good days, I might spend 4-10 hours walking or biking around for various reasons like errands, carpentry, and just plain old strolls, and these really good days result in incredible happiness. On days when I fail to obey this Principle of Constant Movement, I instantly devolve into a more average and grumpy person.
Principle #1: Building Muscle is Far More Effective than Cardiovascular Training
I think the most common beginner fitness mistake in the world might be when people decide to start jogging or other aerobic exercises as a method of weight loss. Double Fail Points if you go for a treadmill or a stationary bike while watching TV inside a smelly commercial gym.
As Tim Ferriss demonstrates in the Four Hour Body, it is possible for a relative beginner to trigger over a pound of muscle growth (3500 calories of body composition change) with just one brief session of barbell squats.
To clarify this after many angry and skeptical comments below: YES, the squats themselves burn only a few dozen calories. But by breaking down the tissues of your largest compound muscle group including quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus, and a plenty of assisting muscles, you force your body to rebuild the entire set bigger and stronger. This is an incredibly calorically-intense process which can take almost a full week to complete. Thus, the total net energy cost ends up being several thousand calories.
Sure, mild exercise is still far better than sitting still. But you get much better results if you think about each muscle group and make sure you have overloaded it recently, thus sending it the message to become stronger.
The benefit of doing real-world exercise (especially sprinting) instead of lame treadmills at the gym, is that it forces you to flex and stabilize all your abdomen and oblique muscles and make them stronger. But you can still target the core directly with a few of my favorites:
Important note: core and abdominal muscles do not help you lose abdominal fat any faster than any other exercise. The fastest way to lose fat (after fixing your diet) is to accelerate calorie burn, which means triggering muscle growth. So if you want better abs, do squats.
Consider the following counter-intuitive trick: walking down a flight of stairs delivers much better strength and muscle-building results than walking up that same flight of stairs, even though going down is much easier. I learned this amazing shortcut just a few years ago, but it has allowed me to get better results in less time ever since.
To put it into practice, you can bend your legs more deeply when going down stairs or hills, lower your body more slowly during pushups and pullups and weight exercises, and in general think about fighting loads as the chief source of strength.
Walk and Run for Transportation- and Borrow Bikes when you Travel
Sidewalks and roads. Curbs and airport and hotel staircases. These are all amazing fitness machines, disguised as boring urban infrastructure. By seeking them out during travel, opportunities to stay fit magically materialize.
As a result, I have enjoyed bike tours of dozens of US cities and even a good number of international spots that were often the highlight of the entire trip. If you seek to maximize your effort, the benefits come quickly.
Sprint Whenever you Can
Performing just a single 10-second sprint across a park or a parking lot can change your body for the better. But you can also apply this principle on the bike, or during a set of pushups, or even when shoveling a driveway of snow. Any time you want to become better, challenge yourself to max out for the next ten seconds!
Whenever you go to peak exertion, you are telling your body it is time to grow. If you stay within your comfort zone, the body decides it is fine as it is. Sprinting will send your body this change signal, in almost every situation.
Pro Tip: I make myself drop for 25 or 50 pushups every time I am going to indulge in something questionable like a beer or a high-carb snack, to help compensate for the negative effects before they happen.
The tips above will make a huge difference in any life that is currently too sedentary. But your body will fight to keep its fat reserves, and it will win this fight, if you obey its requests for constant sugar and carbohydrates.
Hasfit.com is a great place for exercise and nutritional information. The site owner has also created an app. There are hundreds of different workouts (high intensity, weight training, body part specific etc.) and the site also provides workouts for beginners or seniors. Does not matter the fitness level, anyone can find a workout plan to follow.
The other aspect of the gym that you are not accounting for is babysitting. My local YMCA has a $93/month membership that includes 2 free hours of babysitting daily. We have five kids under six years old and go four to five times a week. We live in a 3 bed 1.5 bath apartment without a yard. I treat the gym mentally as part of my rent. babysitting even at $10 per hour x8 hrs x 4 weeks would be 320.
Too funny!
I am shocked by ALL of my neighbors who drive their primary-school kids to school and their middle-school kids to the bus stop. The bus stop is 2 blocks away and the primary school is 4 blocks away. I only wish I was kidding.
I have one better: A local company owned gym user (gym membership is extremely cheap) said he would not be going to the gym because he would have to pay for the parking (which was free when he worked). I pointed out there was a free parking lot not more than 10 minutes away, and the walk/run would just be a warmup. He still ended up leaving the gym and buying an expensive Goodlife membership. People are amazing.
The thing I like about my current weight training routine is that I probably spend an average of 5-10 minutes a day on formal barbell stuff. The rest is just taking opportunities to move around as they come.
Long ago I suggested that 6 drinks per week is a reasonable upper limit, but then I decided it really should be more like 2-3 for me. I usually still end up between the two numbers, but on certain trips that can go way up.
Better to just reading starting strength or similar. P90x is an expensive fad, I have never met anyone in my life who has done p90x every week for X years.. but I know tons of people who have done basic squats/etc for many years.
P90X3 is so much more than strength training, it only takes a little more than 30 minutes and requires no barbell (the pull-up bar is the hardest for most people to obtain). There are two yoga and a Pilates session. The cardio routines mix in balance and strength (including squats). Only 5 of the 16 sessions are what I consider upper body workouts.
The problem with a barbell is that it is a two trick pony and takes up a bunch of room. A barbell set easily be replaced with dumbbells which can allow you to do many more range of motions with your legs and arms.
Respectfully disagree. Strength is the most important factor in regards to fitness. Basic barbell training is the most bang for your buck. Being able to do 300lbs back squat will do more for balance than P90X. Squats and deadlifts are what will keep old folks out of nursing homes.
Dumbells are more expensive, are not as easily loadable incrementally. They have no place in training until one is at an advanced stage and depending on goals. For an untrained novice, dumbells are unnecessary.
So, I get that MMM likes the feeling of the snow in his face while doing perfect squats, the DVD home method is another great option for the Mustachians out there. I challenge MMM to get the Insanity Max 30 and tell us what he thinks of that.
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