Blueprint for Personal Growth - Part 2
Written by Drew Duglan, PhD
In part 1 of the mantra, I laid out the significant physical and psychological benefits of exercise, and how the motivation and resilience acquired in this domain will nicely spill out into other areas of your life. In part 2, I will guide you through an effective exercise approach that will promote sustainable, positive change.
When many of us think of prescribed exercise to get fit, all too often we think of hours of aimless cardio. But if we really want to make lasting changes to our body, our mind and our health, the most bang for our buck is going to be resistance training to build muscle and get strong.
No gym, no problem
There are multiple reasons and ways to resistance/strength train. Often, it’s thought to be lifting weights in the gym, however, home body-weight training delivers an equal butt-kicking. If at home, you may have to get a little creative with your surroundings and perhaps adapt some exercises, depending on your baseline abilities. You may be able to find yourself a park/playground with some bars and benches, where you can use some pretty low investment equipment like resistance bands (perhaps a weight belt and some weight plates). Trust me, the relatively low investment is well worth the returns. So what are the benefits of all this?
Healthy metabolism, in terms how we store and use our energy. Our lean mass is the biggest contributor to our basal metabolic rate.
Weight maintenance
Optimal physical functioning in day-to-day life
Protection against aging
Aesthetics
Building confidence and promoting mindfulness
‘Simplicity is brilliance’ – Bruce Lee
Whether it be dumbbells and barbells in the gym, or your own body weight, the magic 80:20 rule applies. This rule (a simplification of the Pareto Principle) states that in most events or situations, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It applies to so much of what we observe in the world, from sales revenues, to dating success, to the size of meteorites. Working out is no different. 80% of your strength and physique results are going to be built on around 20% of the available exercises. These will be the big, hard-hitter exercises that activate multiple muscle groups (compound exercises). They are generally the more difficult lifts we think of, and which are all too easy to shy away from – pull-ups, dips, bench press, squats, deadlifts, military press, push-ups.
An exercise plan based on this principle and these exercises strips away the non-essentials and leaves you with the things that count. Think about the finest restaurants you’ve ever eaten in. They don’t have a million things on the menu; they don’t spread themselves too thin. They specialize in perhaps only one or two different dishes per course, but they do those dishes phenomenally well. Building your physique is exactly the same; endless volume across several exercises is not the answer. Master the key exercises for each muscle group and your physique will be transformed. It’s not easy, but it is simple. And simple is often very effective. It can be as simple as the following:
* Difficulty can be increased by adding weight to these exercises, or switching to harder variations e.g. handstand push-ups, one-arm push-ups, single-leg squats.
It can be as straightforward as that, using progressions or exercises that you find most comfortable, but that are comparable in their effectiveness. Once you have these figured out and you’re making progress, you can perhaps add in some other accessory movements to hit certain muscle groups more (e.g. arms/shoulders/abs).
Regardless of gym availability, I particularly like body weight-style exercises, such as weighted chin-ups and dips, push-ups and handstand push-ups. Aside from just looking badass, these exercises require multiple muscle groups working together, so you can effectively stimulate a lot of your muscle mass. This is because they are what’s known as “closed-chain” exercises, since your hands are in a fixed position and your whole body is moving in space (as opposed to “open-chain’ exercises – e.g. with dumbbells or barbells– where your body is fixed and you’re moving a weight in space).
DD & EW at their home-gym (apartment)
Get. Strong.
No matter what, the biggest driver of muscle growth is going to be progressive tension overload, which is lifting heavier weights over time, i.e. getting stronger over time. There are no two ways about it, when you see someone who looks like they’re carry dense muscle, you can bet they are going to be damn strong. And if you’re not coming into the gym or into the park and getting stronger each week, then why would you expect your body to change? If something doesn’t need to adapt, then it won’t. Therefore, if you’re doing the same thing week in and week out then you may just be spinning your wheels and you’ll likely end up with very little to show for it.
This also means that you need to be working out with a practical rep range per set that allows you to get stronger. For most people, this is a weight that you can manage only a maximum of 5-8 or 5-10 reps. This is high enough to allow you to maintain your form and feel the muscle exercising, but also low enough that it will really test you and provide enough tension to the type of muscle fibers that are better able to grow. These would be our type II, or “fast-twitch,” muscle fibers. These respond to lifting heavy and/or lifting fast. These are also the muscle fibers that we tend to lose with age if we don’t keep them active. When we trip or fall, these are the parts of the muscle that we turn on rapidly to try to prevent injury. By ensuring we build and maintain a lot of this muscle mass, we can protect ourselves as we age. There is a lot to be said for the element of power in sustaining progress. The weights should be at a level where we are still able to lift explosively and complete the reps at a good pace. You don’t want to be slowly grinding out each rep; this will tax your nervous system and burn you out extremely fast. Similarly, taking every set to failure is simply training yourself to fail. You want to finish each set strong and reinforce a feedback loop of success. This will aid recovery and motivation so that you can continue to come back stronger in the next workout.
Prioritize the hard things
We have the annoying tendency to put off the difficult things in our lives, shifting them to the bottom of our to-do list. If they aren’t avoided entirely, it can often mean that they’re left incomplete or performed poorly. Resistance exercise is annoyingly the same. Those hard-hitting exercises we discussed earlier will be the most transformational for your strength and physique, and thus should be moved right to the top of that to-do list. This means that those exercises should be prioritized first during your workout, when your muscles, nervous system and motivation are fresh. Hitting personal records on these big lifts will also put you in a good mood and leave you inspired for the remainder of your workout.
In terms of practical programming, these heavy exercises could be performed with 3-5 sets of 5 reps per exercise (popularized by Mark Rippetoe). Alternatively, I often like to go reverse pyramid style: my first set would be the heaviest at around 5-6 reps, then each set after becomes sequentially lighter, such as 6-8 reps and 8-10 reps on the subsequent two sets, thereby adding in some extra volume. Since the heavy lifts are intense on the muscles and the nervous system, we want to make sure we’re resting around 3 minutes between sets for maximal recovery.
Filtering out the noise
We’re easily distracted. Quite the understatement. With boundless access to information across the latest new device or application, combined with the other chronic stressors of modern life, our minds are constantly fractured. The illusion of multi-tasking inevitably leaves multiple tasks done poorly. Focus is an act of discipline.
A quick glance around your local gym and you will see so many people just going through the motions, barely concentrating, perhaps even chit-chatting with their personal trainers during the exercise itself. When you are working out, that is what you should be doing. If you are gearing up for that heavy lift or personal record, you need to be in that flow state, giving everything to the task at hand. Forget scrolling through social media, forget the recent email from your boss and forget about what’s for dinner that night. As with everything that you find important, you should be completely present to you action. Like we discussed in part 1, the action itself is the means, and it should be almost meditative (this philosophy is nicely summarized in Practicing the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle).
Tracking worthwhile metrics
In the previous post, I detailed the benefits of setting micro goals to support habit formation. But the right goals on this journey are important. One morning we might very well look and feel better, but this can be victim to our own psychology, which can vary from minute to minute based on other internal and external factors. Strength should be our metric. By steadily watching the amount of weight and reps increase over time, we can be certain that we’ve made tangible progress. The pleasing byproducts of these visible strength gains are usually improvements in body shape, self-esteem and unshakeable confidence to take on those other difficult challenges in your life.
And so how do we know if we’re getting stronger at these exercises over time? Track your darn workouts! We’re never going to be able to accurately judge progress if we don’t measure it along the way. Some people make a note of them on their phone and I’m sure there are plenty of apps available. I’m more old school: I like to have a physical journal and write them down each week. Either way, it’s much easier and less mentally taxing than trying to remember everything you did in the last workout, plus it keeps you accountable.
Less is more
This heavy lifting is not just intense on the muscles, but perhaps even more intense on the central nervous system and the local nerves around the muscles, which actually tell them to fire and allow you to move the weight. This is why recovery is so important and why I don’t normally like to lift heavy on consecutive days, or more than around 3 times per week. When I’ve consistently wiped myself out in the gym, grinded out reps to failure, or trained too often, I’ve experienced fatigue, achy joints and difficulty sleeping. My body and my mind do much better with a minimalist approach.
My normal workout programming revolves around a “push day” (horizontal/vertical pressing), a “pull day” (back focused) and a “legs/core day,” which are spread out over the week on non-consecutive days (e.g. Monday, Wednesday, Friday). I keep each workout to only 4-5 meaningful exercises, with sessions generally not going beyond 60-75 mins. Wham! Bam! In and out. If I start to overdo things, I pull back and take a deload week or even a week of rest entirely.
I believe that is all you need in terms of workout frequency if you’ve got your training intensity and volume dialed in. You won’t be toiling away every day in the gym for two hours; you’ll feel refreshed and excited to get back in there after a day or two of rest, ready to crush some new goals. Less really can be more. Out of all the available hours in the week, strength training for just 3 of those hours seems like a reasonable commitment; in reality, you’re committing to a blueprint for personal growth that will, in time, reach far beyond the physical form.
