how to get fit - The Fit Ethos

3 Lifestyle Habits to Give You New Life

Are you living, staying stagnant, or dying? Before you answer, take a hard look at your daily habits. If you want to see your future, you can disregard your beliefs, values, and pointless platitudes you recite to sound deep. If you want to see your future, look at your habits. Does your day to day give you more life, or does it suck away at your life? It’s true that how you do anything is how you do everything.

What if you changed a few things in your daily life that pushes you towards your goals a little bit each day? Simple things can make drastic improvements to your health and outlook on life. Here are 3 high-impact lifestyle habits that will give you new life.

1. Sweat, train hard, & lift weights

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates

There is no argument about the evidence. Physical activity is essential for optimal health. Poor fitness and strength will plague your elder years if you don’t address them early. Exercise, particularly intense strength training, will improve the health of your musculoskeletal system, joints, and essentially every organ system.

But let’s set aside the “scientific” benefits for now. How will it affect your day to day life?

Regularly exercising at high intensities will give you more energy. It will make everything feel easier. It will teach you discipline.

Intense physical training will show you what your body is capable of. We often never learn what our body’s full potential is. How strong can you get? How fast can you really run? What are you actually capable of achieving if you learn to stick with an exercise program?

How long can you play with your kids? 5 minutes? 30? 60? What about for the next 10 years? How happy and full of life and energy can you really get?

These are things we often value but completely neglect when it comes to taking action. It’s hard to fully embrace living when it takes multiple attempts to stand up from a chair or having to sit out from running around with your kids, and it’s scary how quickly these situations creep up on us.

Get outside. Run hard. Jump. Lift heavy weights. Learn to live.

2. Eat good quality food

Recent inflation numbers aside, we are fortunate to live in a time when we have abundant and affordable access to good food. Even the run-of-the-mill, non-organic foods that Hacky-sack John scoffs at is miles better than what was regularly available a couple hundred years ago.

Unfortunately, with the boom in the food industry came a boom in highly processed foods.

These foods have much of their nutritional value stripped away in favor of texture and flavor.

I won’t lie. I love me good bowl of cereal, some chips, or chicken finger from time to time, but we need to exercise caution so these foods don’t make up the vast majority of our nutritional intake. It is easy to consume an excessive amount of calories and it’s hard to get the right combination of macro and micronutrients from these highly processed foods. What is more, we tend to lose a lot of food variety when eating a high volume of processed foods.

We tend to fare better when we eat a large variety of real, whole, and unprocessed foods. An easy way to add more variety is substituting certain portions of your current meals with items such as sweet potatoes, rice, salads (the possibilities with salads are endless), fruits, vegetables, good meats, and fish.

All of that being said, remember that the most important tenet of changing your body composition is still caloric balance.

3. Sleep well. Really well

Everything will get better or worse with sleep. When you sleep better, literally everything about your health improves.

Sleep impacts every system in the body. Disruptions to sleep can severely impact cognitive abilities, hormonal profile, emotional regulation, and physical performance. For gym rats, sleep deprivation will destroy your recovery and degrade your gym performance. Some studies cite a 20% reduction in cardiovascular capacity following a night of poor sleep.

If you neglect your sleep, no amount of bandaid interventions during the waking hours will reverse the damage done. There is no exercise program, nutrition plan, or supplement that will fix a lack of sleep.

Just go to bed on time. Here are some guidelines to get you started.

Go to bed before 11pm. The profile of sleep changes with different bed times, and tend to get worse with later bed times.
Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Cover bright LEDs with foil and tape. Use a sleep mask.
Make your bedroom as cool as your can tolerate.
Make your bedroom as quiet as possible. Use earplugs if needed. I recommend Mack’s Ultra Soft Earplugs.
Try and keep your bedroom for sleeping only. Keep work material and bright screens out if possible.
Go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday.
Try and get 7-9 hours of sleep every night.

You will be pleasantly surprised at how much better everything becomes when you regularly sleep well.

Give yourself new life

A better life is only a few habits away. Think about how different things can potentially be if you spend a little bit of time everyday to move towards your goals. Where can you be in a week? Month? Year?

If you want to see your future, just take a look at your daily habits and the group of friends you hang out with.

Don’t Give Up On Your New Years Resolutions. Yet.

It’s about that time of the year. Gyms will slowly become less crowded. Lines at fast food chains become longer. The highway is riddled with the mangled remains of New Years Resolutions that got tossed aside for an easier life.

I can’t fault people for this. Change is hard.

But I know that you don’t want to stay the same. You don’t want to be the same collection of bad habits, so something needs to change for the better. How do we stay on the path? How can we keep from straying from the Way?

Want to know the secret?

Weekly Roundup: The Best Articles On Strength and Fitness

Here are the top 10 research articles, blog posts, or books on strength and fitness that I’ve found value in recently. (All links open in a new tab).

Men’s Health: Research Has Unveiled How Many Sets You Need to Do to Build Muscle
Tony Gentilcore: “DEADLIFTS ARE ONE OF THE WORST THINGS YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR SPINE” (not actually. Read the article)
The Muscle PhD: Are Deadlifts Dangerous?
Journal of Human Kinetics: A Systematic Review of The Effects of Different Resistance Training Volumes on Muscle Hypertrophy
Frontiers in Physiology: Comparing Time Efficiency of Sprint vs. High-Intensity Interval Training in Reducing Abdominal Visceral Fat in Obese Young Women: A Randomized, Controlled Trial
Mike Reinold: Ultimate Guide to Blood Flow Restriction Training
Eric Cressey: So You Can’t Squat?
Juggernaut Training Systems: 5 Common Mistakes in the Bench Press
Nerd Fitness: Strength Training For Women: 7 Things You Should Know First!
Born Fitness: Sentenced To Life

If you have any blogs or articles you enjoy reading, please let me know in the comments! Let’s gather some good information!

The 5 Pillars of Getting Jacked and Fit

Everyone wants to get jacked but no one knows where to put forth their time and energy.

The 80/20 rule remains true for fitness. A vast majority (about 80%) of your gains will come from about 20% of what you do. This means that there are endless gimmicks in the other 80% that will distract you and waste your time. Focus on these 5 high impact pillars of fitness to get the most out of your efforts.

The 5 Pillars of Being Jacked and Fit

I can simplify getting jacked and fit down to 5 things: lift heavy 3-4 times per week, do high intensity conditioning, eat well, sleep well, and manage your stress. If you neglect any one of these things, your results will take a large hit. There are an endless number of extra gimmicks like massage guns, red light therapy, overpriced supplements, cryotherapy, and rolling around on foam tubes to distract you. If you don’t take care of the 5 pillars first, then none of the extra gimmicks will make any difference.

Supplements can be helpful, but not if your nutrition isn’t dialed in.

Massage guns, foam rollers, and cryo can all be helpful, but not if your sleep isn’t taken care of.

And all of the “corrective” exercise in the world won’t help you if you’re not on an intelligently designed training program.

I repeat: a vast majority of your gains and results come from the core behaviors and principles of training, nutrition, and recovery. We need to differentiate that from the fluff.

So let’s dive in.

1. Lift Heavy 3-4 Times Per Week

In order to get strong and jacked, we need to be lifting heavily and focus on the large compound exercises. These include squats, deadlifts, lunge variations, presses, pull ups, and rows.

Compound exercises are more effective than isolation exercises. The big movements are the core of your training program. Curls and triceps extensions are the icing on the cake. You don’t get dessert before your protein.

We should also be lifting heavily. A vast majority of people will make incredible gains lifting within the 5-10 rep range. I will sometimes push that to 10-20 reps for certain phases and exercises, but most of my sets are done between 5-10 reps.

There is no way around progressive overload. If we want our muscles to grow in size or strength, we must be doing more in the future compared to now. This means doing more reps per set, more sets per exercise, or lifting more weight.

Lifting about 2 times per week is the absolute minimum dosage for strength gains, but 3-4 days seems to be the optimal range. I advocate for an upper/lower split. This is how most athletes train.

If you train 3 times per week, your training schedule may look like this:

Monday: Upper Body 1 Bench Press Emphasis
Wednesday: Lower Body 1 Squat Emphasis
Friday: Upper Body 2 Overhead Press Emphasis
Monday: Lower Body 2 Deadlift Emphasis
Wednesday: Upper Body 1 (The cycle begins again)

A 4 day training week may be distributed to Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.

High Intensity Conditioning

Don’t do cardio. Perform conditioning.

Low intensity cardio will only yield disappointment when it comes to performance gains and body recomposition. High intensity interval training and sprint interval training are both vastly superior in terms of performance and fat burning.

We don’t need to look much further than Olympic sprinters to have a visual understanding of this.

High intensity conditioning is more effective and time efficient than low intensity cardio. You can get a good HIIT or SIT session done in 20-30 minutes, whereas it can take up to that amount of time of jogging to even sufficiently reach a fat burning state for some folks.

Here is a good sprint interval training protocol to try:

Complete the following 2 times a week:

Week one: 4x10s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week two: 6x10s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week three: 8x10s, 2 minutes rest between each
Week four: 4x20s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week five: 6x20s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week six: 8x20s, 2 minutes rest between each
Week seven: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week eight: 4x30s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week nine: 4x30s, 2 minutes rest between each

Complete the following 3 times a week:

Week ten: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each

Dial In Your Nutrition

You must tailor your nutrition towards your goals. If you trying to gain weight, then you need to be in a calorie surplus. If you are trying to lose weight, then you need to be in a calorie deficit. And, if you trying to maintain your weight, you need to be at calorie maintenance. There is no way around this law of thermodynamics.

Gaining or losing 1-2 pounds per week is a healthy start. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. In order to lose about 1 pound per week, you need to be in a 500 calorie deficit everyday.

Gaining a pound of muscle requires about a 2800 calorie surplus. This means you should be in a 400 calories surplus per day if you are trying to gain weight.

The calorie surplus and deficit are the most reliable metrics of altering body composition. The next most important is macronutrient distribution. This is the ratio of protein, carbs, and fats if your daily diet.

The most important macronutrient to focus on is protein intake as this will help with building muscle during weight gain phases and maintaining muscle during weight loss phases. Once you have protein dialed in, you should focus on taking in more complex carbs than fats, as carbs will provide more readily available energy than fat.

This does not mean to completely eliminate fats! Fats are important for a wide array of functions throughout our body.

If you have your calorie surplus/deficit and macronutrient distribution dialed in, then you will have covered a vast majority of your nutritional needs.

Sleep Like You Mean It

Sleep is the foundation of all health. If you neglect your sleep, then you are essentially throwing away all of your hard work.

I cannot emphasize the importance of sleep. Sleep is usually the first thing that gets neglected when life gets busy and hectic. However, skimping out on sleep will negatively affect literally every aspect of your life. You will notice that you have less energy, are more irritable, make poor food decisions, perform poorly at complex tasks and at the gym, and have reduced vitality overall.

There is a reason why professional athletes obsess over their sleep. It is the foundation of their performance. Sleep is the time that our body repairs itself, the brain literally cleans itself, and balances our hormones.

I have written about the importance of sleep and how to optimize our sleep in previous articles here and here (don’t worry, they open in new tabs).

Here is the gist. You should sleep between 7-9 hours every night (children and teenagers will need more). Get to bed around the same time every night. Make your bedroom as dark, cool, and quiet as possible. Cut out screens and stimulating activities about 3 hours before bed time. Stop caffeine at about 1pm.

Don’t neglect sleep.

Manage Your Stress

This is a big one for the modern world. Our attention and focus are being stolen from us everyday from every direction and our jobs only get more stressful. Responsibilities quickly pile up.

If we don’t do something to manage our sanity, we are heading towards a world of anxiety, panic attacks, and depression.

All of these factors significantly impact our health and well-being. Chronic and high levels of stress will negatively impact our mental health, motivation, hormonal health, sleep, nutrition, and gym performance.

We are all wired to handle stress differently. Some people can manage loads of stress without any negative consequence, and others will fall apart at the slightest derailment of plans.

You must understand your needs and manage your stress or else suffer the negative consequences. Some strategies to help manage stress include meditation, journaling, exercise, sleeping enough, and making time for your passions.

Your life cannot just be your job and responsibilities. You need to make time for your tribe and community. You need to pursue your passions and hobbies. Go outside.

Spend Your Efforts Wisely

We only have so much time during the day. Ensure you are spending your efforts on the right things that will yield the most results.

Lift heavy weights.

Do conditioning.

Dial in your nutrition.

Sleep enough.

Manage your stress.

If you have these 5 pillars in check, then you are off to a good start.

You Need a Fitness Journal: The Secret to Strength Gains

If you’ve lifted weights for any amount of time, then you know that progressive overload is the thing you need to be pursuing. This is one of the fundamental tenets of strength. If you don’t lift heavier weights or do more work over time, you will not get stronger.

The Problem

Sounds easy enough. However, when I ask most people what they lifted on any given exercise in the last few days or weeks, they always have a hard time telling me. Not that they need to have their numbers memorized, but they don’t even have something they can reference in order to check their progress.

If you’re squatting 200 pounds for 3 sets of 5 today, you need to be using heavier weights or do more reps/sets next week or month. But if you can’t remember if you were squatting 185 or 225 last, how are you going to make intelligent decisions in the gym?

You can’t.

The One Thing To Transform Your Training Program Design

There is literally just one question you need to ask yourself when deciding how to design a fitness or strength program:

What is the ultimate goal of the program?

I know, I know. This is probably the most cliche and overused advice in the book but cliches exist for a reason. Let me illustrate this point with a story…

5 ways to naturally boost your testosterone levels

Testosterone is known as the chief male hormone. It’s usually associated with “being a man”, muscle gain, and general… manliness?

I often struggle to talk about testosterone in conventional ways and in terms of machismo because my interest and concern usually has to do with optimizing health and performance. While some woke-minded folks may say that testosterone is fueling machismo and ruining society, low levels of testosterone is associated with a plethora of health problems ranging from poor sexual health, decreased lean body mass (and an increase in fat), low energy levels, and even cognitive issues.

The 1 Shoulder Exercise I Refuse to Do or Prescribe

One of the great things about strength training and lifting is the amount of variation that you can find in exercise, programming, philosophy, and culture. Things almost never get stale and people fall in love with this world all of the time. However, in all of that variation, a mediocre idea or two will inevitably sneak in. Or thousands, as seen daily on Instagram.

Such is the case with this one shoulder exercise. It is considered a bodybuilding staple and has torn the lifting community apart since physical therapists and strength coaches alike have discussed (or fought about) the potential harm and misgivings of the movement.

How I Split and Structure Workouts

If you spend enough time in the gym or the fitness realm, you’ll find that there are a lot of things to spend your time doing. Strength, mobility, plyometrics, conditioning… but never cardio. F*** that shit (calm down, this is a joke, people).

You may also figure out that there are a lot of muscles to work. How on earth are we supposed to even begin exercising everything in a feasible and practical way?

One day, you’ll stumble upon training splits. This is essentially the answer to the given problem: How do you address all of the things that a training program is supposed to address?

If You Had to Pick One Muscle to Train… The Glutes

Physical therapists often have trouble getting their patients and clients to perform all of the exercises that they prescribe. Whatever the excuse, this is a good reason to keep any exercise program as short and concise as possible. If you can keep it to less than 3-5 exercises per day, this is plenty. To keep it concise, you need to know what is important and which exercises will give you the most bang for the buck.

Also, if you’re a therapist and your home exercise programs are 20 exercises on average, then you don’t know how to efficiently prescribe exercises.