Spencer's Basics Of Health and Fitness 1: Getting Started

I am writing this article as a small part of a larger series that will hopefully be useful for people getting into the gym, or broadly wanting to get a bit more into health and fitness. I have been in the gym for about 10 years, and it has been a cornerstone of an extremely tumultuous life.

The gym can be an amazing place. It can be a place where you go to improve yourself. It can be a place where you can become more familiar with your body and how it moves. It can be a place where you can go to get stronger to help those around you. It can be a place for meditative contemplation and taking stress out in a healthy way. Almost everyone I talk to says a very similar thing. The gym is always there for you. When things are going well, the gym can be there making you physically feel great too. When things are going terribly, the gym can be a place to focus and burn your energy, or just get away from it. It really is a good place to be, and in my opinion, almost everyone should be there in some capacity. I knew a guy, Steve, who couldn't move the bottom half of his body, and he asked me, a random 16-year-old he didn't know, to help lift him to machines and strap him in place to do his movements. If he can do it with confidence, you can too.

Health

Here are some general ideas of what constitutes physical health. It isn't everything, but everything is connected, and these give some good ideas to pay attention to.

Sleep: Good sleep will help with mental clarity and ability, physical ability, mood, and hormone function. If you feel like your sleep is really good, it is probably good enough. If you feel like you're always tired, waking up feeling terrible, or if you can't ever get to sleep, most sleep can be improved simply through less use of electronics before bed, having a consistent bedtime and wake-up time, and dialling in diet and exercise alongside it.

Diet: Knowing what you eat is important. Having an eating disorder is unhealthy. Broadly speaking, eat healthy foods most of the time, and ensure that you have general control over your eating. If you start snacking when you are stressed, be aware of it, and work on the root causes of the stress while working on not using food to solve it. Get a good amount of protein, there should be some protein in every meal. If you eat more than your body uses, your body should start to store that energy and gain weight. If you consume less than your body uses, your body will need to use those energy stores, and you will lose a bit of weight. This level is your TDEE, and online calculators aren't great at finding it. To start, just be aware of what you eat and try to make it a bit healthier if you so decide.

Movement: When you sit for a while, your body may feel stiff. If it was stiff, you would need to stretch to fix it. Stretching does not help, rather, you need to move your body more to get rid of that feeling. Your body needs to move. The contraction of your muscles helps pump blood around your body, and literally, your body is made to move. It is a body. If your work demands you sit for extended periods of time, walk around a little or do some push-ups every half hour. Steps aren't the be-all and end-all for movement, but it's not the worst metric. Get some steps in. Bike to work if possible. Do a couple of squats and push-ups at the very start of the day too if possible, getting your body moving after sleep is good for it and your mental health.

Aches and Pains: Your body likely has some aches. Chances are they don't need to be there unless you're doing something stupid and it only hurts when you do that stupid thing (my right wrist hurts when I throw someone and catch them with one hand while they are spinning). Find a good physio or related service, and get them to check out any annoying aches. Knee pain, elbow pain, neck pain, etc. Chances are you can live pretty pain-free, it's just a matter of knowing what is actually causing grief so you can fix it. Find an aggressive young physio. Over the last 10 years, we have discovered that the RICE method (Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate) can reduce pain, but actually slows down healing. Many still prescribe it to help with healing. Now, the general advice is to get things moving as fast as you can in a range that may be uncomfortable but isn't painful. If your physio tells you some bullshit like rest then do 2 generic exercises, it might be good to look for a new one.

Mental health: Be physically healthy, get paid enough, and have some friends you see frequently. Easier said than done, but frankly, this probably puts you 90% of the way to good mental health. Therapy can be useful too I suppose.

Supplements: Supplements can act as a little boost to a specific missing aspect of a diet. You can use a protein powder if you struggle to hit protein goals. Fish oil is good, creatine can be useful for athletes. You don't need to spend money on supplements. They can help a bit, but having a more consistent sleep pattern, diet, and exercise regimen will all trump the difference supplements make and it won't be close. That being said, get some blood work done and see if you have any vitamin deficiencies. Take something if one of them is notable. Women, iron is useful and is in your blood. Women have a general tendency to eat less as well as lose more blood than men. If you are frequently super tired or short of breath, look into it.

Movement

Here we will work with some basics, but I won't go into too too much detail.

You have bones, and tendons connect those bones to muscles. Muscles broadly connect things in your body and pull them together. When you grab something, you have forearm muscles that are contracting, pulling both ends closer together, and the magic of your body does this in such a way that closes your fingers. Try holding your forearm as you open and close your hands. Feel something moving? If so, the contraction is what you're feeling. If you don't feel anything, well, we can work on that.

So the body has a lot of these muscles, and they coordinate and do things for you. When you pick something up, you have to grab it with your hands, bend your arm, move your legs, straighten your back, and hold it up with your shoulders. Talking about each muscle individually takes too much effort, so I like to reduce it to fewer movement patterns.

Broadly speaking, your body's basic patterns are somewhere around: – Squatting: Crouching position –> Standing position – Pushing: Close to torso –> far from torso – Pulling: Far from torso –> close to torso – Twisting: Asymmetric forces on the body – Carrying: Holding and moving with something

I am leaving out a couple of movements commonly grouped in as basic movement patterns:

I think these movement patterns are enough to have a pretty complete understanding of how you want your body to move when lifting weights. Pretty much every exercise can fall into these categories, or at least directly adjacent to one. For example, curls, which may start with a weight at your hip and end with a weight just in front of you, still serve to pull that weight closer to the part of your body your arm is attached to: the shoulder. Using your triceps would do the opposite. This broadly makes the biceps a pull muscle and the triceps a push muscle. Using this logic, we can categorize our muscles in a productive way for hitting the gym.

Aspects of movement

Flexibility: The ability to bend, and the ability to remain strong in bent positions, broadly translates to how difficult it is for you to randomly get injured in everyday life (unless you have a condition that specifically makes it not so). Also, it makes things much more comfortable. If you do not use your body's full range of motion, your body will adapt to not using it. If you do use your body's range of motion, your body will adapt to using it. The best way to keep your body feeling great as you get older – or even just now – is literally to use it how you want to use it. Don't let your range of motion disappear. Someone who has not used their hips or stretched their legs may trip and fall as they get older and take quite an impact. Someone who has retained their ability to bend may be able to catch themselves much better with minimal discomfort.

Strength: How much you can exert yourself to lift weight. Strength is effectively the ability of your muscles to move mass. Heavier weights require more strength to move, lighter weights require less strength to move. If you can pick up something heavier, you have more strength at your disposal. A person who can pick up a 100-pound object may find an 80-pound object heavy. A person who can pick up a 400-pound object can probably readily pick up and move something that is 150 pounds. It is less strain to pick up something that is a smaller percentage of your total strength capacity, so becoming stronger makes things feel much easier and lighter. It also just feels so good to pick up something heavy.

Cardio: The ability to do things for an extended period of time. People are designed for endurance. Sweating is very effective at reducing our core temperature, and we have multiple great methods for getting around that we should take advantage of. If you cannot jog 3 to 5 kilometres right now, you might want to look into that. It doesn't have to be fast, you don't have to be pretty at the end of it, but if you can't, improving your cardio will generally improve your life. Hell, I'm not picky, choose biking or some other form of cardio and do a similar test. Cardio is the efficient long-term movement of your body, and not having it means your heart will have to work significantly harder than necessary to do far less work. There are tons of different ways to train cardio, chances are one will work for you.

Conditioning: Think of this as a blend between strength and cardio. OK, you can lift something heavy, but can you do it multiple times? Maybe you can move a big heavy box around. Can you do 50? If you're doing gardening or a friend is moving, one bag or box won't help too much, but having good conditioning means that you will be able to handle all kinds of challenges, and you can do it much longer than most people. Many strong people struggle when it comes to this. They can get big and lift heavy things, but get wiped in 5 minutes when it comes to actually doing something outside of the gym. Whatever lifts you do, make sure you sprinkle in some sets of very high reps (15 to 20) here and there, it is good for you and often helps find weak points.

Endpoint strength: How well does your body handle being pushed to the ends of its comfortable range of motion? It was thought for a long time when squatting that we should avoid our knees going over our toes because that is when most injuries occur. Turns out, training having your knees past your toes in a squat is good for athletes because they often end up in that position in their sport, and if they haven't trained it, it is now even more likely to get injured. Shoulder injuries, ankle injuries, and knee injuries are all extremely common. Lots of people feel unstable in certain ranges of motion. Training with some resistance in these weird positions can help your body learn to be comfortable in these positions and can stop you from getting injured if your body accidentally or unexpectedly gets forced into these positions.

Explosiveness: OK, so you can move heavy weight, but can you move it fast? From sprinting to fast deadlifts, explosiveness is very useful. It helps you move with better control faster, as well as can give comparable strength gains with significantly less weight. Explosiveness also carries a lot of fun. Sports and generally having impromptu fun, like chasing a stranger's dog, requires coordination and explosiveness whereas, without it, it just wouldn't be the same. A bonus to explosiveness is that it can help with weight goals. Having no fat makes explosive training tougher, the impacts hit harder. Having too much fat can also make it tougher, fat jiggles a bit, and too much fat doesn't feel amazing when doing sprints. I would know.

Getting started

Do not spend any money when getting started. If you have no old clothes you think you could work out in, get the cheapest crew shirts and whatever pants or shorts you can get a hold of for cheap and that's all you need. Old beater shoes are a gym staple. Spending money doesn't help in the gym (spare getting a gym membership). This is you, your brain, and your body. Your goals and what you have fun doing change over time. Early on, purchasing stuff might make you feel locked into liking one thing. If you want to run and your shoes are absolute garbage, maybe get some shoes.

Some apps might be able to assist you, like teaching you how to run and stopping you from just sprinting until you burn out, giving you a pace or something to work at. No need to buy one yet, there should be something free available.

Step 1: Exercise once. Get to the gym, go for a run, do some squats and some push-ups, go for a bike ride, fuck it literally anything. Before a meal, after a meal, in the morning, in the afternoon, at lunch, at night. Just get a little done. Make yourself a bit tired, then stop. Don't go insane and run a marathon, don't max out a deadlift, just do a little bit of something. A run around the block or a nearby park, go to the gym and go do some machines, they usually have pictures on them somewhere to show you how to use them. I've been doing this for around a decade and still looked around to figure out what the hell a machine was just yesterday. I sat in it facing the wrong way and looked for what I could grab. Nothing that way apparently. Ask for help, say you're new and ask a random person who looks confident to show you. I would find it incredibly strange if they said no, I have only ever had great experiences with it.

Step 2: Tell someone about it and tell them to check in on you in 2 or 3 days to make sure you've done another one. Even better, get a friend to start their little journey with you! Keep each other accountable, and make it a social experience. It's much nicer to go through anything with a friend, and it's also a good outlet to complain about soreness and such.

Step 3: Keep it up 3-4 times a week for a month (it's a jump I know I know). Have someone keeping you accountable, and if they ask you and you haven't completed it, you have to do it now. No need to do anything crazy, just make working out or going to the gym a habit. It starts feeling really good, trust me. If something is uncomfortable, maybe running is hurting your shins, maybe switch to biking weights, or swimming, which is nice on the joints. Just keep exercising.

The first step is to make a habit of doing some form of exercise. Don't worry about being great, no matter what you do, your goals will change in 5 years. Just have some fun and do something.