Fitness: Day One

Fitness is the first foundation I’m addressing in my year-long project to improve those things that are essential to thriving as a human being.

Exercise isn’t something we evolved to do. We’re hardwired to avoid unnecessary effort. For the vast majority of our species’ existence, simply living was exertion enough to keep our bodies functioning well. Today, though, my livelihood doesn’t depend on hunting gazelle or tilling a field. I make my living typing on a computer most of the day.

As a result, I need to exercise.

The benefits of exercise are overwhelming. It boosts your mood, mind and mobility. It reduces the risk of dying from heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia. It increases your energy levels and provides a foundation for a vigorous life.

Current guidelines recommend a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, combined with at least two resistance training sessions every week.

Unfortunately, it’s a target most of us don’t hit.

Today, I’d like to share my fitness history, the goals I’ve set for the month ahead, and what I’m doing to solidify this essential foundation in my life.

Does Becoming a Father Require a Dad Bod?

I’ve never been an athlete. I swam as a kid but never posted great times. I ran in high-school but was never fast enough to win races. I was awkward at tennis and lousy at basketball. It’s a cliché to say it, but I was a bookish kid who was lousy at sports.

As a teenager, I finally found the first kind of physical activity I liked—lifting weights. Perhaps my interest was because I was naturally scrawny and thus drawn to the promise of getting more muscular. Or perhaps it was because lifting heavy objects didn’t require great dexterity.

Throughout my teens and twenties, going to the gym and lifting weights became my main source of exercise. A fast metabolism and relatively low-protein diet (I was vegetarian for most of my twenties, pescatarian today) meant I never got particularly big, but I can at least say there were some periods when my muscular fitness was pretty good—at one point I could even do twenty-five pull-ups in a row without stopping.

Things changed after thirty. Shortly after my wife and I welcomed our son, Thomas, into the world, COVID-19 happened, and suddenly all the gyms were closed. While the lockdown didn’t last forever, every trip to the gym required irritating sign-up sheets that meant racing to book my slot online in advance. I resorted to climbing the stairs at our apartment—climbing up and down in the concrete cocoon of the fire escape.

At the same time, the era of my youthful inability to gain weight was finally over. I was getting flabbier—mostly from overeating, but also from the pressures of the pandemic and parenthood, making it harder for me to stick to a regular gym routine.

The pandemic went away, but my solid gym habits never quite returned. Sure, I’d go to the gym once or twice a week and use the stair machine (a holdover from my pandemic-era exercise solution). My fitness level was “okay.” But if I’m honest, I probably wasn’t hitting the recommended minimums for exercise most weeks. And I wasn’t lifting weights at all anymore.

I don’t want to exaggerate my story for dramatic impact. In many ways, I think I’m pretty much the default case: someone who tries to exercise, does so at least some of the time, but not with the consistency that I think I should.

My Goals for the Month

I have two main goals for the month:

• Consistency. Ideally I’d like to be more active than the minimum. But I want to re-establish a strong, default exercise habit so that even when there are periods when it’s far from my central focus, I’m still putting in enough.
• Breadth. In my twenties, I mostly did strength training with little cardio. In my thirties, that switched to only cardio and no weights. I’d like to fix that by making sure my routine incorporates cardio, strength and flexibility.

My longer-term goal is to try to get closer to the fitness and energy levels I had when I was younger. I don’t imagine I’m going to transform myself into an elite athlete. But I think I had accepted some of my general fatigue and sluggishness as being an inevitable byproduct of being older, rather than a sign that I was getting out of shape.

Losing weight is not a particular focus for this month, but I feel I’m at least 15 pounds heavier than my healthiest weight—possibly more, given the fact that my lack of resistance training has probably involved some degree of muscle loss.

Following the ACSM’s Complete Guide to Fitness and Health, I decided to do a few measurements of my fitness level to use as a baseline. I don’t expect huge leaps after one month, but I’m looking forward to checking back throughout the year to see if there are any improvements.

As of writing this, I:

• Ran the 1.5 mile run test in 11:00 minutes. (Estimated V02 max = 47.4)
• Could do 24 consecutive push-ups with good form (chin to ground, back straight).
• Could do 3 consecutive pull-ups with good form (no swinging).

My Plan of Action

Finding a good time to exercise has been tricky with kids. My ideal time to work out was late afternoon. That’s usually when I have the most energy and enthusiasm to work out, and my work productivity is often dropping somewhat, so it makes sense to switch gears and hit the gym.

This was the strategy I had been using for the last couple of years. I’d bring my gym clothes to the office and catch a workout before heading home for the day.

 Unfortunately, this time was highly vulnerable to disruption. If work pushed late (which it frequently did) I would feel guilty about staying later to exercise since the hours around dinner at home were the ones where things were most hectic. Additionally, I would work from home sometimes, which basically ruled out exercising that day since my gym was close to the office but far from my house.

This month, I’m trying something different. I’m going to wake up at 6 am to get a minimum thirty-minute workout in before starting the day. I’ve picked a new gym closer to my house for weight training, and I plan to run outside when the weather is good.

I can say with certainty that I never thought I’d be a 6 am workout kind of guy. I had tried in the past to stick to morning gym routines and failed. But the kids usually wake my wife and me up around that time anyways, so it’s not as if the alternative is sleeping in. And working out first thing in the morning is probably the closest thing I have to a time slot that is guaranteed not to be interrupted by work or family obligations.

In terms of the workout itself, I’m trying to be as flexible as possible. I want to use the month to try a variety of different workouts, both to see what strategy I like best and also to avoid injury.

My basic plan is to do cardio for two days, followed by a day of weights, alternating between push/pull/legs. As the weather is nice right now, I’m mostly running and cycling outdoors, but I expect that to shift to a treadmill or stair climbing machine in the winter.

I’m thinking of trying to fit in flexibility/stability exercises while playing with my kids. I’m also going to keep that as a backup workout option for days when I’m feeling sore, sick or tired.

I want to try to be consistent with the 6 am slot, both for habit-forming reasons and so that the routine gets more firmly established in our household so my wife and kids can come to expect it and plan around it. However, the aim of the month is just to get thirty minutes of exercise in regardless—so if something comes up that makes the 6 am slot unworkable, I’ll try to do a backup exercise later in the day.

A Side Note on Timing

As I’m writing this, I’m on the fifth day of my first month-long challenge. But as you are reading this, I’m already working on the fourth month of the year-long foundations project.

Why the discrepancy?

While I have done “live” projects in the past, the need to create content while simultaneously doing the challenge can be tricky. Now, I have a team supporting me with editing, filming and video, so the best way to ensure high quality content is to make sure everyone involved has time to do their jobs properly.

Additionally, unlike my past year-long projects, I’m also running a course alongside this one. Doing the challenges ahead of time seemed like the best option for the participants since it would ensure I’ve had a chance to do a deep dive on the research and iron out kinks in the advice before I get anyone to begin the project themselves.

That being said, for the rest of the year, despite the publication delay, I’m writing about each challenge as it is happening. I’m also going to avoid the temptation to edit any of these personal entries after the fact if it turns out I was wrong about my initial plan of action or predictions. I just wanted to make that clear, for transparency’s sake.

Care to Join Me for This Month’s Fitness Foundation?

While I’m preparing a lot of content specifically for those in my Foundations course, anyone reading this blog is welcome to follow along more informally. All you need to do is try to exercise for thirty minutes, every day, throughout the month.

Toward the end of the month, I’ll share some thoughts on how the month went, as well as some highlights from all the books on my reading list.