Lesson 14

Basic Exercise

Welcome to Lesson 14! Yeah!

Now that we’re tracking our macros each day, I’m going to give us the next 6 days to practice and experiment with ways of hitting our macros on our own. For the next 6 days, we will be learning about exercise and creating a workout program for ourselves that we can follow!

tl;dr - The most important part of the exercise is to simply do it, and do it in a safe manner. The second most important part is to constantly push yourself a little farther, in the words of my teacher “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you!”

I once read somewhere: “If a drug company could put all of the benefits of exercise in a pill, they’d make billions”. To read a list of 100 benefits you can check out Sleep Like The Dead’s article. Hopefully, we can appreciate that physical movement is important, but Fitness Frenzy aims to take it a step further, we want to build muscle!

Muscle is active tissue. The more lean muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate, which means you burn more calories! The more calories you burn, the more you can eat without gaining fat! Muscle is built by constantly challenging it - the human body is amazing, it will adapt to whatever you throw at it. And the best way to give it that challenge is what’s called Progressive Overload: a weightlifting methodology - ‘gradually increasing weight or reps to constantly challenge the muscle-skeletal system’. This ensures that you are always progressing or at least maintaining muscle mass. Oh and Ladies, if you’re worried about getting ‘too big’, don’t, naturally it’s not possible. So at best, we want to become comfortable in the gym, at second best, we find ways to add resistance to our workouts at home.

In the next couple days, we will be programming our own workouts. We will be building a total of 4 workouts that encompasses our entire body:

• Day 1: Push

• Day 2: Pull

• Day 3: Legs

• Day 4: HIIT

Each day we build will have several ‘Compound Movements’. Compound movements are exercises that work several muscle groups at the same time. Not only are they functional, but they tend to build muscle evenly, and since they recruit several muscle groups at once - talk about being thrifty!

Just like whole single-ingredient foods is the foundation of our diet, compound movements are the foundation of our workout routines.

Compound movements we will be using:

• Bench Press (Push)

• Military Press (Push)

• Deadlift (Pull)

• Barbell Row (Pull)

• Pullups (Pull)

• Squat (Legs)

• Romanian Dead Lift - RDL (Legs)

• Glute Bridge (Legs)

Now that we have an idea of what we are building and why - we can lay out the plan:

First, we build all of these workouts in Fitness Frenzy, then we will be able to journal them in the app. In 5 days, we will choose one of these workouts to do. We’ll do it and log it. The next time we do that specific workout, our previous record will appear. This is important! Try to beat that previous record by either adding weight or a rep(s). Beating it, by a little, each time, compounds and leads to Progressive Overload!

Let me tell you a little secret - there is no magic workout routine. Honestly, if all you used are the workouts we are creating, forever, you’d be just fine. That’s not to say there are not benefits to other workout routines, but the movements we will be working with are foundational - and should be your bread and butter. Anything else is additional is an optimization. As an engineer, I learned early in my career that early optimization is the death of any project. Trust me, it’s way more important at this step to just start putting in the work. Don’t waste your time trying to find the “perfect” routine (FYI - it does not exist). Rant over - thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Keep logging, and keep striving to hit those macros! Oh, and it’s progress picture day!

TODOs

• ☑️ Log your weight

• ☑️ Log your food & try to hit your macros

• ☑️ Log your habit

• ☑️ Log your progress picture

Complete TODOs Below