How I Approach Exercise
Step one, increase how much you are doing. Then you can start to consider optimizing what you do.
Exercise is a fundamental part of health alongside nutrition and sleep. It is totally non-negotiable for winning at life.
We are human animals and are made to move. Not only do we decay and atrophy if we are sedentary but we get rewarded almost IMMEDIATELY by happy chemicals during and after exercise.
A brief look at the vast majority of history shows movement as being an integral part of people's lives whether that was hunting, farming, fighting, walking, or building. Even as recently as 50 years ago, we were much more active than we are today.
There are a whole host of benefits to exercise that I am not going to waste my time repeating. Let's just say it makes you better at life - you perform better at daily tasks, you have an increased capacity to do more, you look better, you feel better and you're less likely to get sick or frail as you get older.
All of this is just to highlight that the modern approach to movement (that exercise as an optional hobby) is NOT NORMAL. It never has been and never will be. We need to move to win at life and the 'how' is what we're going to discuss today.
Start here
The guidelines by the CDC and NHS (US and UK health authorities respectively) state that we need to do 150-300 minutes a week and that 'some is better than none'.
This is true and a great place to start. But this is "Ultrawinning" - so what would be optimal? What could we shoot for if we wanted to maximize the experience and benefits?
A recent article from 2022 suggested that the current exercise guidelines aren't enough and we can get more benefits by doing twice as much exercise as the guidelines recommend (this is 300-600 mins of moderate exercise per week or ~45-90 minutes per day).
After looking over a number of other related articles (2015, 2016, 2018), I concluded that 12 hours of moderate exercise a week would be a reasonable goal for me and that doing more than that wouldn't cause any harm.
This is around 2 hours a day (with a rest day) and if that draws a chuckle of ridicule then stop for a moment and consider how deeply the programming runs.
This is not normal and hasn't been the case in the vast majority of human history - we are not meant to sit in front of a computer all day.
I would even argue that that is just exercise and we should walk and move about above and beyond that. In any case, do not worry - the goal of this article is to break this down EVEN IF YOU DO ZERO EXERCISE RIGHT NOW.
This article explores the concept of building an optimal exercise habit. It looks at both how I approach it whilst drawing on my years of medical and coaching experience to consider how I would recommend that others could do it. It's broken down into:
How I Approach Exercise Currently
Progressions for optimizing resistance training
Mobility vs Flexibility: What's the difference?
Hierarchy of Exercise (How to Build a Weekly Exercise Practice)
Video: Programming Push/Pull/Legs (How to Train Muscles 2x Weekly)
Link to my Exercise Library (on YouTube)
Full Body Mobility Workout
3-minute mobility workout to break up work blocks
What if you want to take a different approach?
How to optimize muscle building?
How do I optimize for strength?
Enjoy.
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