The most important exercise concept you haven't heard of

The beginning of a New Year brings about a renewed interest in exercise and fitness for many people.

You can read a million strategies on developing habits, the optimal routines, the best way to get started, and almost everything else until you develop analysis paralysis.¹

I’ve already written in this newsletter on the importance of strength training as possibly the most important way of improving health and avoiding frailty, so I’m not going to rehash the case for that here.²

But what I am going to write about is an exercise concept that I think most people would benefit from at least being exposed to, even if it doesn’t necessarily prove as influential for you as it was for me.

That concept is Fuckarounditis, and learning about it totally changed how I thought about exercise.

Fuckarounditis is a sarcastic way of saying that many people waste their time in the gym

Most people who read that post I linked to above³ will be turned off by the way it’s written - it’s condescending, sarcastic, and pretty dismissive of people who are just trying to get a workout in and take better care of themselves.⁴

But if you’re able to get past the style, there are really important ideas in there.

I would summarize the important concepts I took from the article in a few points:

• It’s easy to get confused by fitness messaging that you come across

• Most gym equipment and most exercises aren’t helpful for the goals that the majority of people have - to look better and be healthier

• If you aren’t seeing progress like getting stronger or leaner, then your time spent strength isn’t being well spent⁵

• Doing too much isn’t helpful - the KISS principle applies

• Many exercises are a total waste of time and you should focus on the big ones⁶

• Not having a plan means you’re planning to fail

• You need to push yourself to see the results that you want

But the most important take home point for me was this:

• Tracking what you’re doing is the most important thing that you do with strength training

If you’ve spent a lot of time lifting weights but you aren’t much stronger than you were when you started or your clothes don’t fit differently, then you probably have a case of fuckarounditis.

The Fuckarounditis concept doesn’t totally apply to cardio in the same way

I think of physical activity as having a few different pillars, and to optimize our health, we need to engage each of the pillars.

Those pillars are:

• Strength - I would lump muscle mass in with strength, since improving one means you’re improving the other

• Low end aerobic activity - the type of steady state activity you can do for a long time that makes you sweat and gets your heart rate up

• High end aerobic activity - this means sprinting or at least interval training. This should make you breathe pretty hard

• Balance/flexibility/mobility - this is the Built To Move⁷ ethos

• The absence of being sedentary - your 10,000 steps per day.

You’ll notice that the absence of being sedentary is it’s own pillar - for most people, just walking doesn’t suffice for physical activity as it relates to their goals of aging well and maintaining functional status.

But while some of the aspects of the fuckarounditis post apply to cardio, a lot of it doesn’t.

For instance, while having objective standards is useful, you aren’t going to make “gains” the same way with cardio that you do with weights.

There are a few conclusions that you shouldn’t draw from that article

It’s easy to imaging that someone could read that article and think that if you aren’t doing heavy squats then you’re just spinning your wheels.

But that’s not the right conclusion to take away.

It’s not about any particular exercise - or any of the specifics, really - it’s about the concepts.⁸

And if you aren’t sure how to do an exercise, then you certainly shouldn’t do it heavy without hiring a trainer to teach you the right form.⁹

The notion that tracking what you’re doing is the best way to make progress is powerful.

You can keep track in a million ways - written in a notebook, in a Google doc on your phone, using a fitness app that records weights/reps - but monitoring progress is absolutely vital.

Tracking enables you to improve slightly each workout. The term “beat the logbook” is fitness canon for a reason.

Once most people start to track what they’re doing, they wonder why it took them so long to get started.

It’s never too late to apply these principles - seriously!

Even people over age 85 can build strength and muscle with strength training.

I’m not joking - there’s data looking at people over 85 years old placed on a weight training program that shows they gain comparable muscle and strength to people who are decades younger.

As we get older, the importance of doing this stuff goes up, not down.

And unfortunately, too many people do less as they get older rather than more.

I talk about physical activity with patients all the time because of how strongly I believe in it.

While activity and exercise don’t replace modern medicine, they often make us need less of it.

The best time to start is today.

Happy New Year, and thank you for reading!

1. It’s confusing to know how to program a workout and it’s not intuitive to just pick up weights and know how to do the right movement. The volume of information out there means that you need a huge baseline level of knowledge to even understand where to start. And unfortunately, based on the type of stuff I see from many influencers online, even people who suggest that they are experts (or who look like they work out a lot) often have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s part of why hiring a good trainer is actually pretty tough.

2. If you’re willing to keep reading I’ll assume you’ve found the argument that everyone should be lifting weights persuasive.

3. If you click the link to that original post, you’ll see the website is called leangains.com, which is written by Martin Berkhan, the person probably most responsible for bringing the concept of time restricted eating into the public consciousness.

The concept of intermittent fasting seems to have really taken off after David Zinzencko, the former editor of Men’s Health, published the 8-hour Diet, which likely ripped off the concept from Berkhan.

And while intermittent fasting has certainly become the more widely discussed and disseminated one of Berkhan’s ideas, the more data we have on the concept of time restricted eating, the more I’m persuaded that it’s just a strategy for calorie restriction that doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.

4. It also suggests fitness standards that are only really applicable for a tiny fraction of the population, which can be a real turnoff if you’re reading the original post.

5. There’s nuance in this point - at a certain point, we can’t really get stronger or put on more muscle, and as we age our strength and muscle mass will go down. But the vast majority of people exercising never make it to this point.

6. Doing bicep curls - a staple of many exercise classes and written programs - is likely almost a complete waste of time for most people because the biceps are small muscles and we strengthen them when we’re doing multi-joint exercises like rows or pulldowns

7. Built to Move is a book that that I would highly recommend.

8. If a certain exercise doesn’t feel right for your body, you don’t need to do it just because Martin Berkhan suggested it. And that concept applies no matter who your preferred influencer is.

9. Avoiding injury is more important than any of the fitness pillars.