Purpose

This article used to be a subsection of A Comprehensive Healthy Living Guide.

Exercise has numerous health benefits. No matter who you are, being physically active is an essential part of being healthy.

The American Heart Association recommends:

• 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise every week (or a combination of both).
• 2 sessions of muscle-strengthening activity - resistance or weight training - every week.
• Avoiding long stretches of sitting. Any bit of movement helps!

We’ll split this into two types of exercise: Passive and active. Passive activity is all the stuff you do without really thinking about it - walking/biking for commute purposes, climbing stairs, moving around in your room. Active exercise, on the other hand, is an intense period of activity that you intentionally set aside for working out. Both these types play major roles in getting you the activity needed to stay healthy. Active will be further split into two types: Cardio (heart health/endurance) and Strength Training (building muscle).

The first section below focuses on passive exercise. All other sections implicitly focus on active exercise.

Passive

WIP

Active Workout Schedule

3 days a week is fine. Up to 5 days a week is great!

Go for at least 2 days of cardio and 1 day of strength training per week. Ideally, aim for 3 days of cardio and 2 days of strength training per week.

There’s not really an ideal limit to how many days you can go for these, but for strength training, give your muscles time to recover. Also, it’s not really practical to keep up an exercise routine on all 7 days…

Warming Up and Cooling Down

Warm Up, Cool Down | American Heart Association

Warmups and cooldowns are essential parts of active exercise.

• Warm up for 5 minutes through stretching - like arm circles - and light cardio - like high knees.
• Do your main workout for ~20 minutes.
• Cool down for 5 minutes through minimal cardio - like walking - and stretching - like a lying butterfly stretch.

Doing warmups and cooldowns makes it easier to move your muscles during the workout and lowers post-workout muscle soreness afterwards. They should be thought of as the foundation of workouts, not parts that you can cut out due to lack of time. Do not skip these unless you absolutely have to.

Cardio

WIP (go into details on heart rate zones and stuff)

Any exercise is fine, as long as it gets your heart pumping! Do stuff that you enjoy - think stuff like sports, biking, or maybe even rhythm games built around exercise (Beat Saber, DDR). This is the easier type of active workout to do - you don’t need any special knowledge to start!

Strength Training

First of all: How is strength (muscle) training different from cardio? How exactly do muscles grow and show through the skin?

The gist of it:

• Lift weights or apply tension on your muscles in some way. Also, eat protein.
• Muscles grow as an adaptive response to make it easier for you to perform the exercises you’ve been doing. They use protein as building blocks to actually grow.
• As for your body shape, muscles - like a six pack :p - will show through the skin if and only if 1) they’re big enough, and 2) you don’t have too much body fat covering them up.
• Use progressive overload: Increase some training parameter over time to make things more challenging.
  • Ex for lifting weights: 10 reps, 11 reps, 12 reps, then 10 reps + 5 lbs, or add a set, or squeeze harder
  • Ex for running: 9 min mile, 8 min mile, 7 min mile, then 14 min 1.5 miles, etc.
  • Ex for general exercise: Increase the time you’re doing it for, or make the exercise more difficult through harder technique or adding weights (like a 4 lb barbell).

Details

Ok, but how exactly do you train and eat?

• Effort = How hard are you pushing yourself?
  • Most of your sets should leave you close to muscle failure, with no more than 2-3 doable reps.
  • This is the fundamental variable for muscle growth.
  • Muscle failure = Inability to complete another rep despite maximum effort. This means you’re pushing yourself too hard.
• Volume = Total number of hard sets per muscle
  • 10-20 hard sets per body part per week is optimal
    • Hard as in “this set felt hard to finish”
  • Too little or too much volume leads to less gains!
• Intensity = How heavy the weight is
  • 6-12 reps is good for practical purposes
  • 3-24 for some exercises is fine
  • 3-30 reps before you reach your limit gives similar muscle growth results based on studies
• Exercise selection = More of an art than a science
  • Total body exercises vs. isolation exercises
    • Generally, only use isolation exercises to target specific muscles
• Frequency = How many sessions per week, and what to focus on?
  • 2 sessions for each muscle group per week
    • Ex: upper, lower, rest, upper, lower, rest, rest)
  • Total studies show that frequency has a relatively minor effect compared to the other variables (anything from 1 to 3+ times a week gives similar results)
• For nutrition - Recommended daily protein intake: 0.7 - 1 gram per pound.
  • For me, aim for 120 grams of protein daily.
  • Note that this is higher than the general recommendation for maintaining stable health. You need more protein to build more muscle!
  • Training is more important than diet when it comes muscle growth: Diet is mainly to help you show your muscles under fat.
  • Protein Intake — How Much Protein Should You Eat per Day? (healthline.com)
• Mind-muscle Connection = Actively pay attention to your body as you exercise.
  • Also known as attentional focus
  • Focusing on the exercise uses your muscle fibers more than doing it while distracted, partially because it’ll help you with proper form

Exercises and Muscle Groups

WIP. Just do full body workouts, use an app!

Research

How To Build Muscle (Explained In 5 Levels) - YouTube

Details behind the “why”:

• 3 things driving muscle growth
  • Mechanical tension: Type of force that pulls muscles, causing them to pull back
    • This is the primary driver of muscle growth
    • More tension (without damage) = more growth
  • Muscle damage: Physical damage, like microtears in muscles, delayed onset muscle soreness
    • Damage is not linked to muscle growth!
  • Metabolic stress: Accumulation of hydrogen/lactate ions and oxygen deficiency (muscle hypoxia) that often follows weight training
    • Again, this is not linked to muscle growth.
• Muscle growth tips
  • Short rest periods = More metabolic stress, less muscle growth
  • Partial range of motion = More metabolic stress, less muscle growth (than full range of motion)
  • Failure training = More metabolic stress, equal muscle growth (than stopping a few reps before failure)
  • Blood flow restriction training = Tons of metabolic stress, less or equal muscle growth
• Practical application: Go for progressive tension increases to the muscles
  • Consistent technique + progression overload
  • Mind-muscle connection and eccentric control will also help

Sidenote: The pro section is a good review of Biology. Lmao

How To Get Six Pack Abs | Ab Training Science Explained ft. Christian Guzman - YouTube

• You build your abs with training. You reveal them with a diet.
• Don’t over think it: Muscles are targeted when they are used! For the abs, that means rotating the spine (chest area).
• Specific exercises that target the abs: Crunches with arms extended straight out (situps!), Double Leg Thrust
  • Supermans and squats are good to keep your posture balanced
  • 3-6 sessions per week, 2 exercises per session, 3-4 sets per exercise, 15-30 reps are good recommendations for these exercises
  • Remember that you can add weights to these exercises to make them more challenging!

Apps

Fitness apps are useful for both recommending workouts and keeping you accountable. They’re also much cheaper than a full-on personal trainer… although you could get one of those instead if you really wanted to.

What We’ll Try

Freeletics

Cost: $94.99 per year

The coach is great; it suggests good workouts with full warmups and cooldowns, and it even has an “adapt my session” feature which lets you make the workout shorter or longer, and also choose not to use any equipment / just do a run. I love this because the key is consistency, not how hard you push yourself on any 1 given workout. Freeletics seems to have that part down.

The one thing I’m still slightly confused about is the fact that the app seems to built around timed challenges. While this might be good in the short term… what happens once you finish a challenge, or all the challenges? Can you redo the challenges at a higher difficulty? This won’t be a big deal for a longgg time, but it’s worth considering.

What We Considered

Fitness Coach

Has no cool down - an essential part of a workout - suggesting that whoever made the app has limited scientific knowledge to back it up.

FitnessAI

Too advanced for the beginning fitness user.

Fitbod

Not enough guidance (for a newbie exerciser like me :p). I think this is meant more as a companion gym app, rather than a full-on fitness coach. Works well for its purpose, just not for me…

Nike Training Club

It’s free and the exercises on here are good… but there’s no accountability or variation, so it wouldn’t work in the long term.

Personal Trainer Apps

Stuff like Future. These cost WAY too much. Like $149 per month!?!?!? How about no lmao

Last updated: 09 April 2023

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