Exercise

quotes “The workout is merely a trigger that sets the body’s growth mechanism into motion.”          – Mike Mentzer”

If you’re looking to sustain or improve health, exercise will be the main prescription for entire swaths of conditions.  Exercise improves quality of life in nearly every dimension you can think of physical (weight, cardiovascular, muscle, and bone health), mental (lower stress, better sleep, improved cognition), and emotional (boost self-esteem, confidence, regulate anxiety/depression). 

In this arena let’s start with one common viewpoint: 

Exercising sucks, it is a waste of my time and energy, and could literally be the definition of forced torture. It is uncomfortable and I find nothing relaxing about it. I push myself to the point of stress on purpose and am often achy, sore, and getting injured. I mindlessly do pointless movements that make me sweat and smell gross when I could be doing more productive projects. I either have to have to get up early or waste time after work traveling to the gym. It’s stressful being judged at the gym or in unregulated sports with random people better than you. I’ve never seen the point.

I’ll try my best to flip that here: 

Exercising is the genuine liberation of the human body. You push yourself so that you grow stronger and more capable. The movements cultivate discipline through repetition and the investment of time cultivates even more energy. Exercise is endlessly appealing, be it peaceful forest walks, camaraderie team sports, or activities where you only compete against who you were yesterday. I can put my body to use in ways that benefit me, motivate me to eat healthier, and improve the quality of my sleep. I have a simple home gym for days with low motivation and a world of possibility from simple routines, varied activities, and friends who share, support, and inspire. My slow steady accumulation of results has been achieved through modest consistency. Watching my body respond and feeling my mental state improve over the last year has been so satisfying. The couple of hours that I devote to exercise each week has been foundational in improving nearly every aspect of my life.

Very few people who strongly hold the first position will be swayed by just reading the second position.  

There is a strong undercurrent of “just do it and it will become enjoyable” but that’s not very persuasive.  

There’s also a strong undercurrent “I would, but…” or “I did for awhile, but…” there are all these reasons preventing it. 

Remember we are building the bedrock on which the rest of your life can stand so you either need a strong Why or carefully work through your natural resistance.  Examine the reasons your mind picks for not taking on this practice

What is your Why? 

Or, what are natural resistances?

If you’re worried about discomfort and injury there are plenty of options tailored to your current activity and skill level.  If you’re worried about wasting time,  reframe it as a time investment in the long-term benefits (energy, improved mood, better health) small consistent steps can lead to big results.  If you’re worried about the social aspects, start a home gym or find small friendly beginner groups where everyone is learning. If you’re worried about purposeless movements, remember that your body moves in many different ways. A squat isn’t just moving up and down it’s strengthening the entire lower body and core to aid in sitting, standing, or picking things up. If you don’t have enough time… If you don’t know what to do… If the things you’ve tried felt bad… 

We might have found our Why or we might have examined our resistances.  Now, how do we get there?

1. We just completed prepare your mind

2. We’re going to figure out where were at and our goals

3. Go through common options

4. Pick a plan

I think Sam Sager’s approach is 

Prep

We’re going to focus on strength, endurance, and range of motion.  Put another way anarobic, aerobic, and form.  Strength through weight training, endurance through cardio, and hammering in the effectiveness of proper form.  It’s difficult to prescribe a one size fits all routine for people so as in the common theme of this book I’ll do my best to describe how you can determine what is best for you.  The other two salients are key here, sleep and Nutrition can make or break your exercise progress.  Aim to sleep well and eat well.  Thankfully these things generally tend to help each other - exercising well helps sleeping well.  Eating well helps exercising well.  Sleeping well makes it easier to focus on eating and exercising well.

First, determine your goals.  Losing weight, gaining muscle, or pursuing peak fitness.  My personal goal is that this bag of meat that I’m stuck in should be able to do whatever I want whenever I want.  Need to lift 300lbs? Great, go do it.  Need to run a marathon? Lace up the shoes.  Need to skip two meals, get a workout in, and do a mentally demanding task?  It’ll suck, but gut it out.  Circling back to struggle I think the more you push in this direction the more you’ll raise the tide that lifts all boats.

Second, prepare your mind.  You might think exercise sucks.  That it is punishment. Some people (vanishingly few) are incapable of enjoying exercise but it’s about seeing and feeling the progress that reaffirms the goals.  

Third, understand where you’re at. This includes somatotype, skeletal formation, muscle length, and fat distribution are genetic traits that are more or less visible and therefore ascertainable to a high degree of accuracy. However, muscle fiber density and neurological efficiency—two inherited features that play a role in determining ultimate potential—are invisible.

What does your exercise journey look like?

Something is better than nothing

Developing a connection to the body

Creating a mix of aerobic and anaerobic

Over the hump and into enjoyment

Progress and dialing in

Mind Body Connection 

Strength Training

• Bodyweight

• Big 3 Movements - Intimidating but essential and most bang for your buck

• Accumulate a list of other exercises and design a sustainable balanced program. A ramp-up period gets you acclimated to working out with as few excuses as possible. I want you to build the habit of working out — so that it sticks.

• Light to heavy progression

• Perform each exercise with a heaviness that isn’t overly challenging but also isn’t so light that you can barely feel it. Once you’ve found a weight that satisfies this, do 7 reps with it. Then take a 3 minute break and increase the weight to the next heaviness level to see if you can do 7 reps again. 

• Keep incrementing the weight and taking 3 minute breaks until you get to a heaviness you cannot lift the full 7 reps with. When you get to this level, make a note of the level that came before it. This second-to-last level will be your starting weight when you begin working out next week.

• Form Form Form

• Aim towards consistency, expect slow progress, gentle push

Cardio

Walking is not “exercise”, it is an essential part of life, as much as sitting or standing. Hence, any exercise you do is over and above walking. If you can walk, do a lot of it.  Explore your neighborhood or do it in nature for an added boost.

Just run, don’t worry too much about the right gear or training plans.  Get out the door a few times per week for as many minutes as you want and learn to love it… or hate it.  As with everything seek variety and experiment with what works for you.

A lot of people think the first mile sucks no matter how long and hard you train, but it gets better at mile 2.  It’s ok to walk.

Running is immersion - there’s the sense of touch that indicates the wind on your skin; and the proprioceptive sensors that respond to the position of your limbs; and the nerves that record the strain on your muscles.  There’s a whole strip of sensorimotor cortex running along the top of your brain, that would be much more intensely involved in “real” running. breathing in huge gasps and pumping your arms as the sun beats down on your shoulders, the grass brushes your shins, and the air whips around you with the wind of your passage.

Cardio is mainly about increasing VO₂ max

VO₂ max is the maximum (max) rate (V) of oxygen (O₂) your body is able to use during exercise.

Oxygen is a critical ingredient in the respiratory process that’s involved in breathing. As you breathe in oxygen, your lungs absorb and turn it into energy called adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

ATP powers your cells and helps release the carbon dioxide (CO₂) that’s created during your respiratory process when you exhale.

The benefits are simple: The greater your VO₂ max, the more oxygen your body can consume, and the more effectively your body can use that oxygen to generate the maximum amount of ATP energy.

As you get older, your VO₂ max typically declines.

There’s plenty you can do to keep your VO₂ max levels at their highest for your age and desired fitness levels. A 2016 study found that even occasional intense workouts can help improve VO₂ max levels.

Here are some suggestions:

Perform high-intensity interval training. This consists of doing several minutes of intense aerobic exercises, like cycling on a stationary bike, reducing the intensity for a few minutes, and increasing the intensity again.

Switch up aerobic activities in a single workout. Start with cycling, then swimming, then running, and so on. Rest in between each activity.

Sample VO₂ max training workout

Here’s a VO₂ max workout that many people use to train for 10K races:

• Sprint as fast as you can for 5 minutes.
• Measure how far you went in those 5 minutes (for example, use a fitness tracker to measure steps, miles).
• Take a 5-minute break.
• Run the same distance you just measured, but go about 20 percent slower. If you went 2,000 steps in 5 minutes, try to do those 2,000 steps in 6 minutes.

Gender (18 to 45 years of age)	Activity level	Average VO****₂ max
male	sedentary	35–40 mL/kg/min
female	sedentary	27–30 mL/kg/min
male	active	42.5–46.4 mL/kg/min
female	active	33.0–36.9 mL/kg/min
male	highly active	≤ 85 mL/kg/min
female	highly active	≤ 77 mL/kg/min

Recovery

If you suspect you’ll be unable to eat or sleep enough on a workout day, reschedule the workout to a day where think you will. And, on the days before workout days, get a good night’s sleep so you have enough energy to lift heavy weights by the next morning.

A word about overtraining

• The sum of all stresses (training, family, work, financial) vs recovery (recovery time, sleep, diet, recovery techniques)
• You can overtrain and still be functional (this can actually help short term performance) but recovery may take up to two weeks
• Quickly reach non-functional where recovery can a month or more beyond that it becomes a syndrome

Flexibility - Flexibility is how far you can move a joint without injury. A passive stretch, such as trying to touch your toes while sitting with your legs on the floor, will test the limits of your flexibility, specifically how much your hamstrings can passively lengthen. It’s roughly equivalent to your passive range of motion.

Mobility - by contrast, is how far you can move a joint. Imagine a dancer who is standing up, and lifts her straight leg off the ground in front of her. If she can bring her foot high up off the ground, she’s got great mobility. But there’s more going on than just hamstring flexibility: She also has the strength, balance, and skill to allow her leg to take on that position.

The structure of your joints. For example, some people’s hip sockets are more toward the front of their pelvis, some more toward the side. The exact position of muscles and their attachment points is not always the same from person to person. Your body’s structure determines the range of motion that is possible, even before considering flexibility.

Stability. Sometimes a muscle needs to contract to stabilize a joint, and as a result, it can’t relax too much while still keeping your body safe and under control. Even though we sometimes think of strength and mobility as opposites, getting stronger can sometimes help mobility.

More strength. Sometimes we may just not be strong enough to move our body into a certain position. The dancer in our earlier example can’t hit that position with only flexibility; she also has to strengthen her hip flexors to be able to lift the weight of her extended leg.

Whether you’re warmed up or not. A warm muscle can stretch farther than a cold one, so it’s not unusual to feel stiff at the beginning of the workout and have better mobility toward the end.

For example, we have some suggestions here for improving your ankle mobility for squats. The first one isn’t a stretch at all; it’s a tip to use heeled shoes or plates. Even though that technically doesn’t make your ankle move any further in its range of motion, it lets you move more under control, which effectively increases the mobility of your hips to allow you to squat deeper. 

Dynamic stretches can also help with mobility, and they work well as part of a warmup. Instead of sitting down and forcing a muscle into a stretched position, you’re using your body to move actively through a range of motion. Controlled articular rotations, or CARs, are one type of dynamic stretch that has you move a joint like the shoulder slowly through its range of motion. As you move your arm in bigger and bigger circles, you’re warming up the muscles involved, and working on strength and flexibility at the same time.

From Ryan Humiston - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWEYP0CFmRQ

• SHOULDER - EXTERNAL ROTATION

• First apply traction to the joint to set it in the proper position, from there put your elbow out to the side arm at 90 degrees, you’re going to grab the stick and with the opposite you’re going to apply leverage. We are going to actively internally rotate that shoulder and at the same time apply more pressure from the off hand forcing your shoulder into a deep stretch. And the key is to slowly fight (letting the muscle lose) for 5 seconds, once then hold the bottom of the stretch which is often a recovered range of motion for another 5 seconds. Do 12-15 reps for 3 to 4 sets and obviously on both sides if they are both screwed up. 

1. SHOULDER - INTERAL ROTATION

• To fix this We’re going to use the band like before to reset the joint in the proper position by wrapping it around the front of your shoulder and do the exact opposite stretch by gripping the pvc behind your back, across your body and grab with your opposite hand. Apply leverage by pulling and just like before treating it like an exercise. 5-6 seconds, 12-15 reps, 3-4 sets.

1. CHEST 

• Grab your band and getting in the position as if you are working to fix poor internal rotation because this will also help with that. Hand behind your back and you’re going to contract your chest by actively internally rotating your shoulder then relaxing and letting the band take your chest to the fullest stretch it’s capable of. Again the reason this is perfectly safe to do is prior to your workout is that it’s less like a passive stretch and more like an exercise and you’re going to treat it that way, doing several sets of 15 - 20 reps on each side if needed with extended holds at the fully stretched position for 3 sets.

1. THORACIC

• Grab a DENSE foam roller or put a barbell in squat rack then pinpoint exactly where your issue is then flex and extend over top of it forcing it to release. 

1. LOWER BACK

• I’ve found that most peoples problem is that they avoid training it all together and over time it just gets weaker and tighter. So the key is to slowly integrate exercises that specifically target those muscles the best one being a reverse hyperextension but that doesn’t mean you can’t immediately get relief and reset everything with a band.. Just adding a band that puts a little traction on your hip as you do the classic back stretch that we all did in PE class for at least 2 minutes on each side will instantly give you relief. 

1. GLUTES / HIPS

• We’re going to use a bench or box and get into a deep lunge and add traction from the band both from the side and the rear. You’re hunting for restrictions by going into a deep lunge on slightly different angles, when you find one sit in it for five to 10 seconds, back out and do it again until you feel it release and then keep hunting. 5 minutes on each side.

1. ADDUCTORS / KNEES

• Back against the wall, Place your elbows right under your medialis and engage your adductors and then apply force from your elbows by pressing your hands together and down.. Maintining the contraction from your adductors but still allowing your elbows to win. Again 5 second fight and then a five second hold at the bottom, 12-15 reps, 3 sets and make eye contact with no one.

1. HAMSTRINGS / HIPS

• Simply place the band high on your hip, bend forward with you banded leg bend, straighten it with a 5 second hold at the fully stretched position. 

1. CALF / ANKLE

• You’re going to wrap a band around the top of your foot putting traction on the ankle restoring normal function to the joint and then with your foot on a plate you’re going to actively drive your knee forward and out to the side. 5 second hold, 12 reps, 3 sets each side.

Range of Motion

Breath 

Supplements

A word on supplements.  You almost certainly don’t need to take supplements.  But it’s tempting to make your path easier by trying this new superfood and that new adaptogen.  Creating a stack of powders, mixes, and extracts that promise to pump

That being said here are tried and true additions that have been well studied and may work well for you and your situation:

• Protein + creatine supplementations = ⬆ Muscle adaptations from resistance training 

🎯 ~0.3g protein/kg BM 4-5x per day 

⏱ Whey protein immediately after training 

💊 Creatine: 20g/day (loading 1 week) + 3g per day (maintenance)

• Protein: Buy either whey or rice protein. It doesn’t matter which. To calculate how much daily protein powder you need, multiply 0.60 times your current bodyweight in lbs (or 1.32 your bodyweight in kg) to get the number of grams. Get into the habit of mixing protein into drinks (e.g. smoothie) and foods (e.g. oatmeal). Split the total daily amount into two separate servings (e.g. one with breakfast and one with dinner.)

• Creatine (for men): For prep week, “load up” on creatine by taking one scoop (5g) 4 times per day. The time of day you take it isn’t important, but you should take it with food (even just protein powder is helpful) to increase absorption. (After prep week is over, you only have to take one 5g scoop of creatine per day.)

Building a mind body connection - “Neurological efficiency refers to the relationship between the nervous system and the muscles. How nerves innervate the muscles and how they are activated by the brain determine the degree of muscle power and the number of fibers required to produce a certain movement against a certain resistance. People with high levels of neurological efficiency have the ability to contract a greater percentage of fibers during a maximal effort. In an all-out effort the average person may contract 30 percent of the fibers within a specific muscle. A few people may have the capacity to activate as many as 40 percent, while a blessed few may manage 50 percent. The ability to contract a high percentage of fibers increases contractile capacity, thus enabling more intense exertion. In terms of endurance this is a disadvantage, but a great advantage for stimulating growth or single attempt efforts.”