Introduce the idea that working out is a vehicle for change, a new health initiative tends to be preceded by an event or moment that tells you that’s what has long been a should is now a must.
This means that exercise is the perfect vehicle for the change you’re looking to see in your life so this means confidence, more energy, better mood, and transferable skills that you can apply to anything.
As Kevin Kelly says’ habit is more dependable than inspiration, focus on being the kind of person who never misses a workout rather than getting in shape and being in shape will happen by default in a way that can be maintained.
We have a very clear goal in this video. I want to set you up for your first workout and I want you to still be exercising in 30 days, that’s the goal.
Let’s take a look at a model for the various stages of exercise.
Stage 1: Habit Forming + find your baseline
Stage 2: Specificity
Stage 3: Multiple goals (at the cost of maximal results) – all-around athlete.
This guide is to establish your stage 1: Habit Forming
The reason we want to focus on stage 1 initially is that when you are starting out or making a return from a period of inactivity you will stand to see benefits in multiple areas from muscle growth, fat loss, improved endurance, better flexibility, and improved cardiovascular fitness, and this can be achieved with a broad profile of exercise, you could consider this stage the universal on-ramp to all of your other training goals.
Right now we aren’t looking to maximise your potential in any one area, we’re aiming to account for any weak spots and see incremental improvements over time. If you have a number of weaknesses at the moment, and then you double down on a very specific goal, you could end up with imbalances.
A simple exercise quadrant I like to use includes
- Resistance
- Mobility
- Cardio
- HIIT
- LISS
We’ll talk about the role each one of these plays in a well-rounded exercise program shortly.
The idea is that no matter what your goal is, you keep your hand in each quadrant to some degree, the idea being that if you do this you’ll never develop unnecessary weaknesses. For our initial purposes, we’ll start out with them relatively even, but once you’ve reached your cruising altitude you can start to have more specific goals. Again the reason I suggest only having specific goals once you’ve been consistent for 30 days, is that it’s easy to get excited about a certain goal and lean right into it, but once it’s achieved, you have to have a baseline in place that just feels normal, otherwise, you’re going to fall into an all or nothing cycle which is a big mistake and the cause of a lot of setbacks in fitness.
So if we’re going to be starting out with exercise, or more likely making a return to exercise after some time, then the main goal should be to get to a point where you’re exercising consistently without it feeling like a strain to do so.
I’ll make separate guides for starting with home or gym training, the advice we’ll cover here is broad and will apply to either, the reason I won’t insist on gym training right now is that a lot of people suffer from anxiety getting into the gym, and whilst I would say we’ve all been there, and anyone that would judge someone new to the gym, isn’t worth your time anyway, sometimes just getting active is your fight, and there is no need to fight two battles at once, I have another guide to battling gym anxiety that you can check out if that’s something you want to overcome.
To Make sure we’re stacking the odds in your favor we should ask ourselves 5 questions that can help make some decisions about exercise.
Do you actually like exercise?
If you do, then you have what is called intrinsic motivation and you’re personality is actually set up to enjoy training, so what probably happened is that you’ve had a busy period, hit a set back or had a darker chapter of your life and you’re ready to make a return. If this the case the biggest step you can take is to start, now… Like right now even, stop reading this article and go for a walk, because all you need is momentum and you’re back in the game.
However if you don’t like exercise, but know you need to do it. Think about is there anything at all you like doing thats active, that we could harness to get you active, maybe you don’t like working out in a gym and lifting weights, but perhaps you like to dance or go cycling, start there and then build very efficient workouts so that you’re not spending too much time on training.
Again the good news here is that the more you exercise, and the more results you see, the better you’ll feel and the more you’re going to start enjoying exercise.
What has caused me to struggle with my fitness goals in the past?
This is going to be a personal question only you can answer. For some it’s going to be going too shard too soon ans burning out as we’ve described, for others it’ll be getting too busy or too stressed, or perhaps more insidious a failure to prioratise your own self care, probably for a very good reason, but almost certainly with some negative effects. You’re going to have to have a strategy in place to make sure whats gone wrong in the past can’t go wrong again, this could mea anything from setting your environment up differently, having some difficult conversations with those around you, or just expecting more from yourself than you have in the past. Only you will know. The more uncomfortable the potential solution feels to you right now, the more likely is is to be the thing thats held you back.
What’s my motivation?
You’ve probably heard a lot about the importance of having a ‘why’ when it comes to fitness because it’s important for motivation and whilst thats tue I want to discuss how motivation really works. For example a lot of people look to personal trainers like myself for motivation but the truth is, nobody can make you want something if you don’t want it for yourself, really a coaches role is to hold you accountable to the actions you need to take to get you to the goal, that you’ve already decided that you want.
To get clear on your motivation there is a very simple mental imagery task you can do. The way motivation works is that you’re either trying to get toward something, like achieving a new goal or you’re trying to get away from something, like offsetting a health issue or just getting as far away from how you feel right now as you can, we’ve all been there.
So take a few moments to think and feel through both what you are looking to achieve and what you are looking to avoid. For example, whats life going to be like for you once you’ve achieved your goal, what will it mean for you, what you can do, the opportunities that will open up for you and how will it change your relationship with yourself.
Of course, negative motivators can be equally important, sometimes a harsh talk with yourself is exactly what we need. Again, what would it mean to never achieve your goals? How would this inform your relationship with yourself, what would begin to be taken away from you?
These are very personal answers, but I really think there is a lot of value in reflecting on them. They will give you all the motivation you need.
Am I ready to make a long-term commitment?
Really reflect on this question. I’m not talking about doing a fitness program or going on some kind of diet I mean fundamentally changing your relationship with exercise so that today represents a line in the sand for you, and you never fall below the level of consistency we’re going to establish over the next 30 days. If you’re ready to make that happen let’s take a look at the workout program itself.
What’s my current fitness level?
This questions is going to help us decide how frequently and how intensely we want to start exercising if it’s been a while and you don’t quite have your fitness levels and strength where they used to be, you need to make your return to exercise nice and steadily, because if you work too hard, you’ll start to under recovery, evenover train which not only has it’s own physical effects, but als sets about a trend of feeling tired all of the time, and ironically even though your’re tired, it’ll actually be harder to get good sleep, which then means you’ll be more likely to reach for bad food choices. So going all out is not in your best interest,
Interestingly in my experience, for some people the discipline of holding back the reins actually takes more discipline than starting in the first place, especially if you’re a big of a go getter. But you have to resist this, because it’s part of an all or nothing mentality that leads to a lot of burn out in fitness. If you go too hard to early you’ll end up back on the side lines and that completely undermines what we’re looking to achieve.
Remember when we ask whats your current fitness level, I don’t just mean could you probably turn up to a 10k and get it done, it’s more about where your baseline energy levels are, how much stress you’re under and how well you’re sleeping so unless all of those things are way above average, I’d training at 5-8 on a rate of perceived exertion, which is a scale of 1-10 allows us to assess how hard we feel we’re working. There is no utility is red-lining right now.
The Workout Program
To determine what we want from a workout, we should define what a workout means ideally a workout is going to be time spent in activity that is pushing us to a point where we’re going to make an incremental improvement, in this way it’s outcome-oriented.
You might also look at this through the lens of infinite vs finite games. Each of your workout goals or stages as we’ve described them pursuit represent a finite game, as in something you’ll do to until the goal is achieved, whereas regular activity is an infinite game and something that you’l always do for the sake of doing it, because you enjoy it.
Then on the other hand, even on non workout days, we want a period of activity, and depending on your goals you could make this very strategic as you might with specific fat burning cardio, or you could just be going out for a nice walk or cycle, there is less pressure on activity, we’re looking for it’s presence rather than it’s performance.
When you’re starting out, often the biggest challenge you face can be in habit formation, which means becoming the type of personal who is going to exercise regularly come rain or shine is a battle that is as much mental as it is physical.
First of all, the funny thing about exercise is that yes there is a lot of nuance about rep ranges, training protocols, exercise selections, day splits and every other detail, but that all comes in stage two and three. Right now what we’re looking to do is still be here exercising regularly in 30 days, if you are consistent for the next 30 days you’re going to feel great, so let’s keep the exercise side of things simple. If you do want to get into the weeds I have a complete guide to how to approach any fitness goal on my website, the link is in the description.
Interestingly, I could film this video 10 different ways with 10 different workouts, and they would all work, this isn’t a magic bullet or a special formula, it’s just a well calibrated approach that I think it going to be effective for the most amount of people.
Let’s start by referring back to the quadrant i mentioned before.
We’re going to lead with strength training because it’s the most multi-faceted and adaptable. For example strength training can help you gain muscle, gain strength, and burn fat, up at the higher reps, it can also help with endurance and fitness too. We’re going to aim for three training sessions per week.
As I mentioned we could use various rep ranges, really anywhere from 1-20 reps can be effective for gaining muscle, and even more if we’re doing cross or muscular endurance training, we going to start out with 15 reps, not necessarily because it’s the most effective but because it’s a great trade off between effectiveness and safety, I say safety because if you’re new to certain movements you can start to de-risk them by using lighter weights, if it’s a big concern of yours you can de-risk further by using gym machines, which take the stabilsers muscle out of the equation and give you a fixed plain of movement thats easy to exit if you need to.
To keep the training split simple, we’re just going to have two workouts An A workout which is going to be Upper Body and Lower body that is going to be the B workouts, in week one we’ll do two A’s and one B and then we’ll switch it up in week then
Always start with weights lighter than you think you could do, once because you’re less likely to hurt yourself, and two because it breeds longevity into the program, because you’ll be able to lift incrementally more weight over time, this is called progressive overload and it’s this mechanism through which you are sending signals to your body that you want to make a change.
Which then brings us full circle to what I said about being able to create ten different workouts and they would all work, ideally we would stay in each of those workout phases for 4-8 weeks, then move onto the next, and this is why if you’re wondering what the best program to achieve you’re goal is, the answer will always be that this is a constantly moving target and your workout needs to be novel enough to force the adaptation you’re looking for so by definition it’s going to have to change over time.
Think of it like this, our bodies evolved to survive, and when it comes to muscle mass it takes energy to gain muscle and to hold onto it, so you need to convince your body that there is always a good reason to have it, or your body, on a long enough time line will jettison that muscle, to be efficient as you can again, less muscle, less calories needed to survive each day, and this is why you should avoid restrictive dieting at all costs, you’re sending a famine signal to the body, so you can imagine what it’s likely to do with that hard earned muscle….
This is why your ideal solution will never lie in one single program, but rather in a framework made up of exercise, healthy meals, activity and stress management, the framework remains the same but the pieces have to change over time.
In terms of exercise selection, this can be overcomplicated, generally speaking there are about 20 foundational exercises and thats really all you need, Once you’ve got those down, the way to switch up a workout program is to change things like rep range, rest periods and day structure.
Start with 5-7 exercises in each session. With rest periods of 60 seconds. This keeps it nice an uniform and the reasonable rest periods mean the workouts won’t be too intense. This should bring your workouts in at about 45 minutes.
Generally speaking as you lower the rep range you’ll be dealing with heavier weights, and the shorter the rest periods the more intense a workout will be, until it becomes a spectrum you can fully manipulate to chase that adaptive response and lean into a particular goal, but for now we’re just looking for consistency, so for the time being thats all academic.
Next we move onto the next two parts of the quadrant which cover both HIIT and lights activity. Again, there is huge variance on both of these, as a 30’000 foot view we’ll want to be using short bursts of HIIT training to help breakdown bodyfat stores, we’ll then want to bolster that with plenty of lighter steady state, or liss training, this is going to be at a level of exertion that allows for the actual fuel source the be used to be fat.
I way of looking at it then, is that HIIT training is a tool for breaking down your fat stores to be burned, and LISS is the type of activity where that fat burning is occuring in real time.
Now, HIIT training isn’t always going to be comfortable, especially in the early stages whilst you’re trying to get fit, so what we’re going to do is keep is short, sweet and effective. All I want us to do is tack on a single 4 minute component of HIIT to the end of the strength session.
We’re going to use a TABATA drill, which is a HIIT protocol from Japan that has been found to be very effective for fat loss. It’s only going to take 4 minutes. What you do is set a timer, there are plenty already available online. I chose Tabata firstly because it’s short, but also because it’s another example of the protocol or concept being more important than the exercise, so Tabata can be done running on the spot, as a burpee, on a spin bike, in a pool, shadow boxing right now on the spot, getting a barbell and push pressing it, it’s up to you, pick something you can lean into intensity wise. Go as hard as is comfortable for 20 seconds then take 10 seconds rest, do that eight times and you’re done!
Then it’s over to LISS training, so what I’d like you to do here for these first 30 days is simply to get out for a walk as often as you can, don’t worry about for how long, or how many steps, What I’d like you to focus on, is that it’s brisk, this way it’ll be at the level of exertion that serves our purposes, whilst aiming for 10,000 steps is a great health goal, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to contribute much to a fitness program, the example I would use is that lets say you go toa theme park tomorrow, you’re on your feet all day and you cover a lot of ground, you might get 20,000 steps with ease, but all at a level of exertion that is largely irrelevant for fitness, whereas let’s say you go for a 20 minute hill walk instead at an average heart rate of 110 beats per minute, you might get 3000 steps but would have made a big impact on your fitness and fat burning pursuits.
So what I would like you to do for the next 30 days is to find ways to do the activity that you like that is more than just the day to day moving around, you were going to do that anyway. I mean as often as you can get out for a hike, a cycle, a swim, a surf, kayaking, rollerblading there is a time to do this monotonously on a treadmill, but what I’d like you to do is get outside on purpose, reconnect with nature and the act of play. It’s going to be great for your mood, how you handle stress, getting vitamin D, it’s also a call to getting back i tune with your body and moving because it feels good, keep it intuitive and don’t worry about the duration.
It’s important to note here that strength training and HIIT training both have a barrier to recovery, so you cannot apply a more = better approach to them. You will burn out. But with fun activity, you can do it for hours, your body will tell you when enoughs enough but you’re unlikely to burn yourself out with it so fill your boots.
So the final part of the puzzle, which is movement, is more of a preventative measure for most people, it’s really all part of knowing yourself, if your exercise history is all yoga and pilates then this will be easy for you, however if you hate stretching then the workouts might be the easy part of the next 30 days, and the movement element might feel like a chore.
Mobility is going to have immediate benefits for you if you ache a lot, or feel like you need to be really warmed up before your body moves like you want it to, in fact a lot of people feel like a different person after doing mobility for 30 days.
So what we’re going to do here is use a short dynamic warmup to ease into your workouts, so it’s going to move from very basic movements to actually getting warm enough to start training, this is a lot beter than just walking on a treadmill for example as it means your warm and will actually get you ready for your exercises in a very practial way as you’ll be using some of the exact same movement patterns as your actual workout. The only other thing I’d like you to do is set a 10 minute timer after your workouts, to stretch out, again keep it intuitive and stretch the muscles that you’ve just worked or that feel overly tight.
Thats it! This whole workout program is only going to cost you three hours per week for thirtys days, and you just pepper that with as much fun activity as you can afford time wise.
It really can be that simple, you have a diverse workout program thats going to have all sort of physical benefits, well calibrated so that you will actually have more energy in 30 days than you do now and most importantly you’ll have established habits and will be able use this framework to build out your future workout plans.
So we’re almost two done, just a couple omore points to consider, the first is how we’re going to approach nutrition, nutrition is a huge subject, and outside of the scope of this guide, however what I will say is that no matter your medium or long term goal, I reccommend that you eat at a break even intake for the next month, this will ensure that you’re well fuelled, have plenty of energy and won’t run into any of the many problems associated with restriction. In terms of what you eat, whilst you are starting out, it’s best to keep everything balanced, make sure you have a good balance of proteins, fats and carbs, don’t allow any of those to represent over 40% of your total calories or under 20% and you’ll broadly be in a good place. I’m not going to make a call on what the best way to eat is here, it’s a very personal decision but one rule to go by is that you want to avoid processed foods as best you can, think of it like this, imagine you were haing a conversation with someone that had lived their whole life in the rainforest, if you could speak the same language but still have a hard time explaining what your meals were to this person, the chances are they are too refinded and unlikely to be good for you.
If you miss a day, don’t worry about it, if you cant control your food for a day don’t worry about it, if you aim for perfection you’ll always be frustrated and giving yourself a hard time, and if you have a background where you the only option was perfect, either in your family, in academia or at work, that isn’t going to serve you in health and fitness. Not being able to do things is part of the process, I’ve been training for 20 years and I still can’t always complete my workouts as I’d planned them, thats part pushing your thresholds. Aim for what I like to consider ‘net-positive’ days, not perfect ones.
Stack enough net positive days together and I promise it will be a transformative process for you. A year from now you will either wish you started or be glad you did thats up to you.
Often in life we have one goal that makes the completion of all other goals more likely, or a single habit that acts as a keystone habit and empowers all of the other habits downstream.