Essentials of Fitness, Dustin Fontaine

Essentials of Fitness

> Insert obligatory ‘consult your doctor’ stuff here. <

First of all, let me just say I am by no means an expert or guru or anything else, I’m just a guy that wanted to do better. I’ve made progress of my own and have had people approach me asking for advice or tips. So this is mainly a brain dump of what I’ve learned, from my own perspective. There is no reason you can’t work toward fitness no matter what you do. I work in technology and data, and this is not what I look like.

One thing I’ve found when trying to learn everything I can about fitness is, there is A LOT of information out there. Much of it is very unnecessarily complex, some of it is not entirely accurate or doesn’t encompass certain elements that should be considered, and some of it is just dumb.

The thing about being in an industry, is many fitness professionals have differing ways of doing things and that is what I feel like is one of the the biggest contributing factors for people just wanting to get off the couch and turn themselves around. They find all this content and it’s so absurdly overwhelming that it ends up causing them to just plop back down and turn that TV back on. I have certainly been one of these people, so I definitely understand the plight.

Luckily, I don’t blog to make money. I primarily keep this site as an evolving resume, and my blog is mostly just a big FAQ. If someone asks me about privacy online, I send this, it’s nice and organized and has handy-dandy links.

Now the human body has not changed a whole lot in the past several thousand years and even though there may be a whole lot more to what I say, the basic concepts behind fitness are still pretty simple to apply.

Diets

The most important thing here is, you guessed it, calories! The thing nobody wants to count or even acknowledge exists! The good news is it does not need to be anywhere near as complex as some might make it seem. Though as a fair warning, if you’re like most Americans you are likely eating larger portions than you should be.

Now, download the app for either MyFitnessPal or Cronometer (or any other counter you like). I like Cronometer because it lets you scan the bar codes and track net carbs in the free version if you decide to go the keto route. Don’t go cold turkey on this. Start with logging what you are eating so you can see what you are currently eating. Include all the little stuff like the butter you used to make your eggs. Get a food scale.

Now we need to start adjusting those numbers. If your goal is fat loss, you can use a calorie calculator and look at the maintenance numbers and different weight loss metrics. This is just a starting point though, and should only be treated as an estimate. Your own body will tell you what you need a lot better than any calculator you can find. I wouldn’t recommend doing more than a 200-300 calorie difference at first.

One thing that is common to do is to eat at a deficit five days a week, then have two re-feed days. If you have a target of 1900 calories for five days, and a target of 2200 calories on re-feed days, you average about 2014 calories for the week, not too far from the “recommended 2000 calorie diet” that most labels are based on. Oh, and don’t trust those, get a food scale, measure in grams (I’ve had some way off counts in the past).

The next most important thing is protein. You can calculate using this protein calculator or estimate via lean body mass or you can just set your actual weight as this goal. This will largely depend on what makes sense for you, but protein is the one thing you can have an excess of an not hurt your progress. Be reasonable though, if you’re 200+ pounds and your goal is fat loss, you won’t need that much protein and trying to hit that will only mean more calories.

All that is left is carbs vs fats. Once you have the numbers from above, you can allocate to whatever kind of diet you want. There are good fats and bad fats, just like there are good carbs and bad carbs. This is something you’ll want to investigate more as you formulate your meal plan. However, to get a good understanding of how America has become so obese, I’d give the links in the Fun Facts below a read.

If you are trying to “bulk up” then you might already have guessed, you need to eat in a calorie surplus. The Calorie Calculator has an option to show gains. Start there, also start SLOW. You don’t need to go from eating ~2100 calories to ~5000 like you’re the Rock or something. Start with +200/300 from maintenance and go from there. Same for the protein.

Exercise

If you thought there was fluff about diets, there is even more about exercise. High/low rep ranges and weights, different training programs, splits, hypertrophy, etc. O-M-Goodness, how do I decide? Now, there are a lot more qualified resources out there if you are trying to get into bodybuilding and all kinds of more advanced stuff, so I’m keeping with the tone of this post and making it simple.

As for the high rep/low weight or low rep/high weight thing, I got the link from the Physiqonomics article below, but it’s sourced here. Basically it doesn’t matter. If you do either to failure it will have the same result. Now there is a lot of varying methods here involving “drop sets” and “negatives” and other things that you would focus on for building hypertrophy and the like, but again – this is for day-one beginners so we aren’t worrying about that now.

Anyway, I think a good place to start is to find a basic full-body routine and do a weight that you can do about 8-15 reps to failure because I certainly don’t want to be at the gym half the day and I’m sure the average person doesn’t want to either. And you don’t want to do max all the time – that will end up hurting you. Also if you are not training for some sort of competition you really don’t need to do max, just make steady progress. One of the best ways to lose fat is to build muscle.

Here is a site with a ton of free routines.

Also a couple notes, if you are starting a caloric deficit, you will typically do worse workouts the first few weeks before your body gets in the groove. Don’t let that discourage you. And ladies, without hormone injection or some other steroid, you will not get absurdly buff from just strength training an hour a day, 5 days a week.

The trick to working out and keeping it consistent, is you need to make it a habit. I like to do it first thing in the morning Monday through Friday and that works for me. After a few weeks of making myself go to the gym, eventually it just became something I do as part of the morning wake-up routine.

Cheat Days

I’m going to wrap up with this widely debated topic.

I personally define a cheat day as a day where you have something that is not part of your normal diet. I do not consider gorging all day – maybe have a half dozen donuts for breakfast, a Big Mac for lunch and a pizza for dinner – to be an acceptable cheat day. That’s just bad and your body will hate you for it. But having cake at your kid’s birthday party after having a light breakfast and lunch is perfectly fine in my opinion.

Sure you have a bit of a hiccup in your progress, but I think one of the main reasons people can’t maintain a diet is because they restrict themselves too much or make it just a miserable thing to begin with. Now I don’t go making a habit of this, but you have to be able to maintain your overall diet and it’s much easier to do if you allow yourself to bend the boundaries a little once in a while.

I don’t recommend doing this in the early stages of your diet, however – you can easily fall back into bad habits. Best to at least spend a couple months in strict mode or even start off on a particular diet as a ‘sprint’ such as doing keto for fat loss. Then after a few months, you can drop off, but still keep a diet that is easier to maintain.

Fin

Okay, that all seems like a lot all at once, but just take the basic numbers and a basic workout and get started. If you literally just do that, you’ll have made a serious move in your life. If you want something more advanced, there is plenty of material out there.

Also, if you are the type of person that doesn’t stay on track, create an accountability. This can be just a few people that you ask to check in with you, or a support group of others in your area that may want the same in return. Work out together, share recipes, whatever. Just having someone to nag you about it might be just the thing you need to keep moving.

Finally, I’ve left some good reads below and a lot of them were linked above, so do give them a read.

Essentials of Fitness