DON’T be stronger every day

It’s easy to feel discouraged when your workout performance is sub-par. But those workouts can be incredibly valuable in the long-run.

I remind myself that my purpose is merely to stimulate an improvement–not to set records every day.

I’m investing in exercise for the long-term. And while it’s most fun to make these investments when I feel my best, many of the best investments will be when I’m not.

There’s daily/weekly variation in our strength and energy for lots of reasons. Such as when we’re coming back from a vacation, from being sick, or just having an “off” day.

Now, if you’re sick rest and don’t exercise. That’s really important. When you’re sick, REST.

But when it’s time to exercise *after* being sick, you might have a feeble workout. We *are* going to be weaker…exercise will help bring us back up to speed.

The same is true if you’ve just taken a long break from exercise for any reason, injury, vacation, or just not prioritizing it.

It isn’t a great performance that brings us exercise value; it’s the degree of challenge to our current capabilities. When our capabilities are less, we can create a high degree of challenge more easily. That’s the good news.

I find it’s helpful to think of such workouts as “set-up” workouts…

If I’m having a weak and poor workout one day, it seems to set me up for a much better next workout. So, I remind myself that: 1. This is a “set-up” workout, and I’m not comparing to days where I’m at my very best, and 2. whatever extent I can endure today will make the next one much better. It really seems to.

Remind yourself of this the next time you don’t feel like working out, and see if it helps with your long-term investment in exercise.

When do you decide to stop a weight lifting exercise? Is it when you can say, “I don’t think I can do any/many more”?

That’s what many people seem to do. And it isn’t very satisfying.

I’ve found a way to conclude that gives me a much more satisfying sense of completion–and at the same time it helps me get more out of the exercise.

I think of this as a “full finish,” or “100% finish.”

Here’s how it goes…

Last week I wrote how to do a mental RPE (rated perceived exertion, 0-10 scale) assessment occasionally as you experience the “stair stepped progression” you can intend to create during an exercise.

For finding a satisfying conclusion of an exercise, I simply strive to hit what I’m absolutely convinced is a “10” on my RPE assessment.

Now, there are a couple of conditions to this:

First condition:
When I’m truly at a “10” in effort, the weight must be moving at a pace that would take it at least 20-30 seconds to complete the movement. Maybe it even comes to a complete halt after it’s been slowing down at this pace.

Now, I personally tend to never move much faster than 10 seconds lifting a weight–so when speed bogs down for me it goes pretty quickly to this level.

If I were to put my effort at a “10” and the weight shot up and completed in 1 second, or even 12 seconds, I’d consider that I’m not there yet–I haven’t hit my conditions yet. So, I’d keep going.

Second condition:
After I’ve hit what I’m convinced is a “10”, assuming the weight is moving very, very slowly and with complete control, as per above, then…

I strive to sustain at a “10” for at least 5 seconds.

If I’m new to an exercise, and just beginning to get to what feels like a “10”, sustaining for even 1 second feels like a huge accomplishment. But then I get motivated to go next time and go just a little bit longer.

Eventually, as I build up my tolerance and confidence, I can get to serenely pushing with all my might, and with complete control, for at least 5 seconds after the wight has slowed to a crawl or even a stop.

And then I feel a great sense of completion.

But beware, if–and when, as it will!–your mind shifts to the default mode of thinking you need to be moving, you’ll feel frustrated and discouraged. Everything I mentioned last week about changing this perspective applies, so you might want to review that.

If, and when, you do shift into that “performance” mode, just notice it–and know that next time you can try again. Eventually, you won’t even have to wait for the next time–you’ll be able to switch your focus this way right in the moment, during the exercise. But that will take a while.

If you keep at it, you’ll be able to experience a sense of real accomplishment and motivation as you hit the opportunity a full finish, instead of discouragement as you approach it. And it’s all about training your mind to align with the goal you’re actually creating, and that actually benefits you, instead of the inadequate and incomplete goal of just “moving.”

If you’ve never felt this, know that it does take most people quite a while. Any engagement with this goal is the only way to progress, and this is a worthy path of progress to pursue. It took me years to experience this…but I didn’t know it was something I could even shoot for. I just found it, and it made the whole experience of exercising suddenly feel much more “zen” and more fulfilling.

I highly recommend working to experience what you know is a true “full finish” at least once. It might change your whole experience of exercise in an intersting way.

A final note…

After each exercise I like to mentally note how close I was to hitting a “full finish” as I’ve just described it. I don’t expect to always be there. I find that questioning/assessing my efforts right after each exercise reinforces the goal, and when I didn’t hit it, I feel more motivated for next time.

Think about what happens after you initiate an exercise…

(Last week I described a way to initiate an exercise here: https://myogenicsfitness.com/3-phase-perspective-of-exercise-initiation-phase/)

Once we start producing any reasonable “exercise level” of effort what *must* happen is: our muscles start to fatigue.

If our implicit or explicit purpose is to move a weight, to move our body, to produce a certain level of force, or whatever, then this fatigue feels frustrating–even defeating.

But if our goal is *exercise*, then moving weights, moving our bodies, or whatever we’re doing with our efforts are *means*–not ends. Exercise means putting a challenge to our muscles. And because the more we challenge our muscles the more fatigue they experience, the fatigue we produce actually tells us something positive about how much we’ve achieved.

So, far from viewing fatigue as a pesky impediment to our goal–of, say, moving a weight, we can embrace fatigue as a sign of accomplishment of our goal. And to a strong degree, the more fatigue, the better.

A simple way I like to think of this as a “stair stepped progression”:

If I’m lifting a weight, I expect–and strive–to make each repetition feel *noticeably* more challenging than the previous one. And during each movement, I’m thinking that my goal is to set myself up for the next repetition to feel significantly more challenging.

This way, I experience the added challenge–that *will* happen the same whether I want it or not–as a welcome accomplishment that I desire, rather than an impediment to my moving the weight.

To help with the idea of a stair-stepped progression, I like to do this RPE assessment…

I mentally asses, as I go, where I am on a scale of “rated perceived exertion” (RPE) that is a 0-10 scale, where “10” is 100% of the focus and effort that I can possibly put into it.

This way, instead of just feeling, “this is miserably hard!” I’ll think something like, “this feels miserably hard!…but I’m actually at about a “7”–hmmm…can I get myself to a 9 or 10 by the next rep?”

Doing this often dramatically changes my psychological experience of the exercise and helps me to get a lot more out of it.

If all goes well, you’ll pretty quickly get to where you’re at a 9 or 10. Or to a 7 or 8 that you *think* is a 9 or 10. Regardless, at this point you could stop the exercise having gotten a lot more out of it than you otherwise would have.

OR, you can see this as having set yourself up for Phase 3: an extremely short, but extremely valuable phase: the “full finish.” But I’ll get to that next time; don’t worry about it now.

For this next week or so, try putting your focus into being able to really experience the “stair stepped progression” of rising intensity during each repetition–or each few seconds–of an exercise you do. And see if you can mentally quantify your efforts with the 0-10 rating of perceived exertion along the way. A little practice at this goes a long way.

Here’s a perspective I’ve found helpful to bring to each exercise I perform: anticipate that the exercise has 3 phases: initiation, progressive fatigue, and “full (100%) finish.”

Just focus on the “initiation” phase this week, and see if adding attention to this adds something to your workout.

“Initiation” phase quick description: I bring all of my focus and attention to the muscles I’m intending to work as I start to exert effort. This might even include a few seconds before any movement begins, as I start to lightly push, pull, or whatever–and also check in that my position is good and everything feels good. This continues as I first begin to move slowly. And as I start to move, I’m thinking of trying to use the movement primarily to feel more effort in the muscles I’m working–NOT trying to move as a primary goal.

I feel “locked-in” to the exercise if initiate properly. I feel the muscles I’m targeting. I feel positioned well. I start moving in a manner that’s focused at exercising my muscles, not focused at moving a weight.

All of this sets me up to continue my effort into a connected, controlled, and effective “body” of the exercise that fatigues my targeted musculature, and then to finish with a truly focused, true 100% effort for a few seconds–that I can do with both zen-like focus and a high degree of safety, because I’m still “locked-in” from the initiation. That’s where it starts.

I recommend focusing on experimenting with and refining your “initiation” of exercises this week. I’ll follow up to share a few important tips about the other two phases; but you might even discover some of that on your own if you get really into the initiation of each exercise you do.

Today, at the start of the year, I’ll share a perspective I’ve found really helpful:

“Have a non-negotiable baseline”

What I mean is that there are all kinds of actions I *might* take in the realm of exercise and physical fitness. And it’s easy to get over-excited and take on more than I can reasonably sustain. But there’s a much smaller list of things that, are “minimum effective dose” actions. These are the minimal actions I need to experience significant success that I’d be happy with at the end of the year–if I did them consistently, no matter what.

For me, personally, that “minimum effective dose” is a once-a-week full-body workout of 3-5 large exercises, done to full effort. I know I’ll experience great quality of life and health benefits from this, and it’s my personal “non-negotiable baseline”–week-in and week-out.

If I can–and I often can–I like to do a second workout time with great spine movements like neck, low back, rotary torso, and some HIIT interval training. I can use all the cool machines I have at my disposal. And I’ll do some hikes and swimming–more for enjoyment than exercise value.

But–this is important–I’m clear in my mind that I have a non-negotiable baseline that feels completely doable. It makes it simple for me to not drop below that baseline, and I also enjoy more what I do above that baseline–that feels like bonus, and not a chore.

If you think having a clear personal baseline is helpful for you, I recommend taking a couple of minutes of focused thinking through what that is for you, so you can own it and commit to it.

For the final day in this series, I want to share an insight I’ve learned that has had the most value to me in my over 15 years of training myself, training clients, consulting with people, and studying and seeking out the best information I can find.

This valuable insight is: Doing more exercise can improve your results. But most people are sabotaging their results by trying to do more exercise the wrong way.

A story about London double-decker buses will help clarify what I’m talking about…

Double-decker buses and exercise

In the 1950s, a study that observed London transportation workers revealed that conductors on double-decker buses had half the heart disease mortality as the drivers of those buses. This study has sometimes been cited as the beginning of modern medical exercise science.

The standard explaination of this is that the conductors, who walked up and down stairs all day collecting fares, were far more active than the drivers; and their increased activity caused their health benefits.

Seems plausible, right? But what does more activity really mean?

The assumption was that “more activity” meant more volume of activity. After all, those double-decker bus conductors were more active for *hours* every day. So, the thinking goes, if you’re not seeing the desired results then you need to spend more time being active!

At least, that’s the conventional wisdom.

But, doing more activity could also mean something that is at odds with spending more time exercising.

If that doesn’t make sense at first, stay with me…this gets interesting.

First, think about the “sedentary” drivers in that study: they were active. They were turning the steering wheel, pressing the accelerator and brake pedals, talking to people, etc. In fact, they were more active than someone reading a book or watching TV. In this way, the drivers on these routes were actually doing increased activity for the exact same duration as the conductors. The bus conductors were doing the same total duration of activity, but their activity was more intense.

This suggests that we must look for answers to two separate issues:

1. How much should you increase your intensity beyond “average” or “sedentary”?

2. For how long do you need to maintain that intensity to achieve the exercise benefits you desire?

Note: an aspect of #2 above is: how often should you repeat this activity?

As we look for answers, this point is critical:

You can only increase or decrease the level of activity your body is doing. You cannot completely “do” or “not do” when it comes to your activity level. There are only degrees of doing.

Take, for example, this moment…

Right now you’re blinking your eyes and scrolling this email. If you’re standing, you’re experiencing a slightly higher intensity of activity than if you’re sitting. As long as you’re alive, you’re body is producing some degree of metabolic activity. For 24 hours a day you are already doing activity; you cannot increase your activity volume beyond 24 hours a day…so no more duration of activity is possible. And no less duration of activity is possible as long as you are alive.

What you can increase is the intensity of your body’s activity for some time during that 24 hours. We can think of intensity as roughly the amount of metabolic activity happening per second.

Every moment we exist somewhere on a continuum of activity level–of intensity. And again, two important questions to ask about exercise are:

1. How much should you increase your intensity beyond “average” or “sedentary”?

2. For how long do you need to maintain that intensity to achieve the exercise benefits you desire? (And how often should you repeat it?)

These questions are especially important because…

Your degree of increased intensity is at odds with how long you can sustain it.

Here’s a personal example: when I ran track I would run distance practices where I’d run continually for thirty minutes or longer. But when I ran my event, the 800 meter race, at the end of the race I was DONE. I would lie on the ground for several minutes afterwords and still feel utterly depleted for quite some time later. This was only around two minutes of activity, but because I was raising my intensity so high, there’s no way I could have continued for even three minutes…let alone thirty.

The higher your intensity level, the less duration you can sustain.

Most people assume that any above-sedentary-level activity is good–whether walking or swimming or cycling, or whatever; and they further assume that more of such activity must be better. But striving for more duration necessarily limits the intensity possible to us. If I wanted to be able to run for twenty minutes (or three minutes!) I would have to lower my intensity below the level of my 800 meter race effort. If I wanted to be able to exercise in the gym for longer than 20 minutes, I’d have to lower my intensity below what it normally is when I exercise–because my intensity does not permit me to exceed 20 minutes. In any challenging workout, we have to make a choice between duration of the workout and intensity of the workout.

You’ll often hear that you should increase your activity level for x hours per day or week. But would we be better served by thinking in terms of the intensity level, rather than the hours we spend? For example, “Increase your activity level to a high intensity that does not permit you to continue past 3 minutes”?

And as it turns out, there is some interesting evidence about the relationship of intensity and the duration an increased intensity is sustained.

Now that the questions are clear, lets look at the evidence about them.

First I’m going to repeat the two questions one more time because they’re so important:

1. How much increased intensity is desirable—above the sedentary level of activity we’ll already be doing?

2. For how much duration do we need to sustain this increased intensity to achieve the exercise benefits we desire?

A somewhat recent Harvard study on the relationship between exercise and heart disease looked at 12 years of data from 44,000 people who had engaged in a variety of activities and exercise routines. This study observed that there was no difference in heart disease risk when looking at how much or little time people spent per week exercising; but it did find that increased intensity of activity associated lowered heart disease risk independently of duration or frequency of activity. For example, people in the study who trained with weights for just 30 minutes per week had a lower risk than people who walked for 30 minutes every day. That’s presumably because the intensity of weight training was higher than in walking. Across all the various activities that were seen, the people who trained more intensely lowered their risk to a greater extent. And their volume and frequency of increased activity didn’t matter. The observed trend was that higher intensity mattered, and frequency and volume did not…all the way down to the lowest volumes of exercise measured.

The problem with these studies…

Both this Harvard study and the double-decker bus study are just observational studies. And there are many similar studies that show the same trends. This type of study is good for finding hypotheses to test more rigorously. But observational studies, even lots of them, just aren’t reliable for showing causation.

We need controlled studies to see whether these hypotheses hold up when they are isolated. Fortunately, such research exists…

Higher quality evidence…

At McMaster University, trials have recently been conducted to compare randomized groups of people assigned to do either traditional intense “cardio” training routine of 4 to 6 hours per week, or assigned to do only intense 30-second interval “sprints” for a total of 6 to 9 minutes per week. The outcome was that both exercise and muscle biopsy tests showed that the people doing the intense 6-9 minutes per week got equal “cardio” benefits to those who did “cardio training” for 4-6 hours. That’s a dramatic reduction in exercise time, with no loss of benefits.

These results shocked a lot of people in the exercise world. The researchers at McMaster were forced to do this study a couple of different ways because people didn’t believe there could be such impressive benefits from so little time invested. The results were consistently impressive, and all the more solid due to the additional study.

What this is all boiling down to: intensity matters—big time.

In fact, there’s much more upside potential to intense workouts than what we’ve seen so far…

First, the intensity involved in most of these studies is no where close to a typical high intensity training sessions. The actual cardiovascular benefits of precise, slow, and therefore more intense, exercise (like I do personally) may greater yet.

Second, the studies I’ve mentioned so far look only at cardiovascular benefits. But I haven’t even mentioned studies of other exercise benefits like strength and bone density improvements–which is where more intense training shines even brighter.

Now, you will still be confused by news reports on exercise–until you stop and think for a couple of seconds…

I have no doubt that in your daily life you will soon read or hear about studies that show benefits with high volumes of activity. But take notice of this: such reports often don’t mention the increase the intensity of the activity.

The reports usually focus on how many hours per week people exercise, so you have to be a detective and question what was happening with the intensity levels of the groups that are being compared. Based on what I’ve seen, whenever a group of people benefiting from a high volume of activity are compared to a group who does a higher intensity, but for much less time, the higher intensity group comes out at least equal, if not better.

The lesson here is the payoff to increasing exercise intensity is huge. One workout per week done very well may indeed be far more valuable than four or five workouts done moderately well. In fact, as intensity rises, working out less often becomes necessary–your body needs extra recovery time (that’s when you’re actually getting the benefits). Working out too frequently can lead to overtraining syndrome.

What about fat loss?

Okay, so you probably see a strong case here for using increased exercise intensity for cardiovascular health, strength, bone density, etc. But you might be wondering: don’t we need hours of activity to burn calories in order to lose fat and get lean?

There’s a lot of research about exercise and weight loss, and the evidence is solid that increased activity simply does not cause fat loss. There is interesting evidence that the calories burned through physical activity are nearly always compensated for by a combination of a lowered metabolism and increased hunger following exercise.

You might make weight loss progress in spite of increased durations of exercise, but not because of it.

Weight loss is almost completely about your diet. And, once again, intense exercise may confer some benefits to your weight loss goals, as well as providing muscle strength and definition that you probably want to have go along with your weight loss. But the strong scientific evidence is that large volumes of activity won’t help weight loss at all, as counterintuitive as that might sound. If you want more clarity about the fastest method to fat loss, you can look up things I’ve written previously, or we should talk to discuss how to make this work for you.

It’s been a fun 12 days of fitness, and I’ll talk to you soon.

To health and life,
Chad

52 checkmarks to improve your results by 500%

What gets measured gets done.

There’s an old saying that what gets measured gets done. If your fitness actions are being measured, they’re much more likely to get done.

What should you measure?

I track workout consistency. I track every week that I meet my workout goal for the week–for me, it’s one workout per week. I have a sheet of paper with 52 weeks on it: it lasts one year, and it just takes a check mark per week.

As you start to accumulate a good track record, you won’t want to break it!

What gets measured and reported gets done much better.

Commitments that are purely internal are easily abandoned. If you can have an accountability partner who you have to report this to then you’re much more likely to follow though.

Say a friend calls you every Saturday to check if you’ve done your workout(s) for this week. But what’s going to motivate them to call you? One thing that can work is a good-natured penalty payment you give them whenever you don’t succeed. Say it’s $50 or $100–painful enough you don’t want to pay, but well worth the payment if a handful payments means you’ve been on track the entire year.

Of course, there are other methods…

You can hire a personal trainer, who is at the gym waiting for you every workout, and who charges you if you don’t show up. And there are other benefits to having a trainer or workout partner who can give you real-time feedback to improve your exercises during your workouts, and not just the fact that you’re doing your workouts. I could go on about the benefits a good trainer can provide, because this is what I do; but I’ll leave those for another time.

If you want to sustain your fitness progress beyond just a week or month, and be still maintaining your progress after a year…a decade…and a lifetime, then one key is to have an accountability and feedback system that ensures your consistency. Whether an incentivized friend or a hired trainer, put in place a system that operates independently of your willpower any given week. This will be much more effective over time.

To health and life,
Chad

To build a strong foundation, start slowly.

Aim for steady progress.

Take a long view.

Think about yourself, two years from now…

Two years will pass before you know it. In two years do you want to look back and vaguely recall that you got in better shape for a few of weeks? Or would you like to see that you made a habit of steady progress and your body has been transformed…and continues to progress?

What to do:

Commit to a minimum once a week or twice a week strength training routine.

Commit to improving your technique at every workout.

Make whatever you commit to a realistic minimum for the next 3 years.

That’s all for today.

To health and life,
Chad

From the mailbag…

Today, I want to answer a question about the “3-Exercise Workout” yesterday.

Here’s the email I received:

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“How many of each?
What is a good starting weight?”

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[Note: this is asking how many reps/sets of each exercise, and what weight to start lifting on the exercises.]

My reply:

Great questions!

And, interestingly, getting clarity about the first gives most of the answer to the second. Let me explain and break down exactly how to do this…

“How many?” vs. “How much?”

To answer, “How many of each?”, we first need to change that to, “How much of each?”

Here’s why…

The traditional method of counting repetitions we perform is a sloppy and problematic way to measure what we are accomplishing. As you attempt to perform more repetitions, your speed of movement can vary widely–by more than 100%. Because of this, counting ten repetitions on two different occasions can result drastically different amounts of exercise performed. See the problem?

Therefore, it’s better to use a stopwatch and track the total duration of time your muscles are working during the exercise. This is called Time Under Load, or TUL. And before I can get to the ideal time under load–the “how much,” we need to consider….

How much what?

Supposing you’re now just looking at the total duration your exercises last, there’s another problem we need to solve. Erratic movement and pauses during an exercise can create momentum and various kinds of muscular rest during. An exercise of a given duration could include a range of anywhere from 0% to 80% of rest time–when your muscles are basically at rest. Yeah, I’ve seen exercise sets that were seriously 80% rest time.

So, you need to standardize your movement speed and technique. And as long as you’re going to standardize these, you might as well make it as optimal as possible; a speed of about 10 seconds lifting and 10 seconds lowering the weight. Separately, it’s important to have completely smooth turn-arounds at both ends. Doing this will largely remove all momentum (and rest) from your exercise.

Now, if you try this you might notice how helpful can be to have someone else observing you and giving you good feedback to keep you doing this right…especially as the exercise becomes challenging.

And the magic target time is…

Okay, NOW, you’re in a place where what your doing is objective and standardized enough that I can answer the question of “How much.”

Begin by aiming to complete around three minutes of continuous exercise. And during this entire three minutes, you must maintain the standardized reps as described above–without pausing to take a break. If you this correctly, there is no need for a second or third set. Notice: after three minutes you’ve already spent far more time doing this exercise than most people who perform 3-5 sets. And those people rest between sets; you’re not!

What’s a good starting weight?

The answer to this question is now easy…

Select your starting weight to allow you to perform the exercise for 3:00 with perfect technique.

The first couple of times you do it you should consider more practice than exercise. Then, as you become confident with the exercise and your technique, raise the weight so that you CANNOT go beyond three minutes.

At first not being able to continue means that your form would deteriorate in an attempting to go beyond 3:00.

Eventually, this should mean that as you reach 3:00, you can no longer move the weight no matter how hard you try–and that you are sincerely trying with all your effort. Here, you stop thinking in terms of a cutoff time at 3:00, and just focus on getting to this point where you cannot budge the weight. Your times will now be things like 2:48 or 3:12, or whatever. After each workout you’ll just adjust the weight for your next workout to keep you in the 3:00 range.

Once you’re at this point, there will be additional options to consider; but this is a great path to get started.

To Summarize:

1. Start with a weight you can lift for 3:00 with perfect technique (form, pacing, breathing, etc.)

2. Increase the weight to find a weight where you CANNOT continue past around 3:00.

3. Continue challenging yourself and getting in stronger, better shape!

I hope this helps!

More questions? Comments? Let me know below, or here: facebook.com/myogenicsfitness

To health and life,
Chad