The Basics of Getting Fit

So, you wanna get fit. But where do you start? What information can you trust? And what the hell does getting fit mean anyway?

This document will help. First, we’ll define what we mean we we use certain terms. Then, we’ll talk about the underlying principles of body composition (looking good), diet, and exercise. Then we’ll cover how to apply all this.

The goal is to give you enough information so you can start getting autonomous about your goals and how to get there.

Definitions

Hypertrophy

The process of gaining muscle mass.

Rep

One complete movement of an exercise, eg a squat.

Set

One collection of reps, done one after the other, with no rest in between reps. A set can have as many as 20-30 reps or as little as 1, depending on the quality being trained.

Conditioning

Your ability to get work done over a certain amount of time. For example, good conditioning would be being able to push a sled with 60kg on it for 50 metres 10 times, with 30 seconds rest between each push. Bad conditioning would be having to take longer rests, or not being able to complete this.

General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

Similar to conditioning, this refers to the amount of work you can do and recover from. It’s a base on which most athletic activity is built on.

Volume

The amount of work you do in a session. Usually measured when lifting weights as sets x reps x weight. It can also be measured in number of hard sets of a movement.

Intensity

How heavy a weight is. A low intensity refers to something that is light and that you can lift many times before failure. A high intensity is something heavy you can only lift a few times before failure.

Frequency

How often you do a movement in a training period (usually a week). Frequency, along with volume and intensity, are the main variables to manipulate when writing a program.

Rep Max

The number of reps you can do before you hit major technical or muscular failure. So, when we say a six rep max, that’s the weight you can do for 6 reps before you fail.

AMRAP

As Many Reps As Possible. Denoted by “AMRAP” or a plus sign on the amount of reps (6+).

Calorie

A measure of the amount of energy in food.

Body Composition

A bit of myth-busting first up: being “toned” is not a thing. When people talk about being toned, they actually mean having some muscle, and a low enough percentage of body fat to see it.

Not toned, just lean and kinda muscly.

So what we want to do when we’re training to look good are oftentimes two contradictory things: gain muscle, which requires lifting a ton of volume and a surplus of nutrients, and lose fat, which requires eating less calories than you use up in everyday life.

Diet

Looking good is 80% diet. Terry Hollands was and is one jacked dude, but you couldn’t tell when he was a rugby player as he was too tubs.

First concept: calories (or kilojoules). Humans are pretty much water pumps: we take in food, convert it to energy, and then pump water in and out to stay alive. If we take in more calories than we need, we stash them for later in the form of body fat. If we take in less calories than we need, we burn fat stores to keep ourselves alive.

Myth No #152: Your hormones or genetics determine your weight.

Truth: Hormones may have a role to play in how nutrients get partioned (directed to fat or muscle), but it’s minimal. Calories in vs calories out is the most important factor in weight loss.

So, if we want to lose weight, we need to eat less calories than we burn. If we want to gain weight, we want to do the opposite, and eat more.

We also need to consider the idea of macros. There are three macronutrients: fat, carbohydrates, and protein. We count them differently as each has a different amount of energy per gram, and each has a different effect on the body.

To get diet in order, we’re going to need to count calories, watch our weight, and adjust our calorie intake based on our results. Everyone is different, so while online calculators may give you an idea, we need to tailor it to you.

Steps

1. Get a baseline for how many calories you burn in a day from a calendar like IIFYM.
2. Download an app like Libra, which averages out your weight change. Weigh yourself at the same time a few times a week to track your weight.
3. Download MyFitnessPal and start tracking your calories, aiming for your maintenance baseline from IIFYM. Remember, alcoholic drinks have calories.
4. Adjust calories based on results. If your weight stays stable and you want to lose weight, subtract 200 calories and keep weighing yourself. If you start losing weight, great! If not, subtract another 200. Only subtract calories when you stall out.

How you allocate your macros is up to you. There’s only one golden rule:

Eat 2g of protein for every kg of bodyweight.

Non-negotiable.

Once you’ve got your protein, plan the rest of your cals around that. Different people respond to different diets. You might like more fat, or you might prefer more carbs. Play with it and see which makes you feel better and perform better.

Myth #54: Carbs make you fat.

Truth: Carbs don’t make you fat, too many calories make you fat. Carbs are essential for performance.

Exercise

The main factor involved in building muscle is called progressive overload. That is, doing more than you did yesterday, last week, or last year. Slow and steady progress is how you make gains.

This is mostly determined by training volume. That is, how much work you do in your training session. Volume can be counted as sets x reps x weight, or by the number of hard sets. Either way, doing more volume will get you bigger.

It’s also influenced by intensity, measured by percentage of your 1RM. Intensities of below 65% are unlikely to offer up a high enough stimulus for your muscles to grow, and intensities above 85% are better for developing technical proficiency and testing strength than accumulating serious volume. So most of your training for hypertrophy should be in the 65-85% range.

There are two types of exercise: compound, and isolation. Compound exercises are ones that involve more than one muscle group, like squats, bench press, deadlifts, and overhead press. These will have the most impact on your physique, so focus on driving these up and making progress. Isolation exercises involve one muscle only, like bicep curls. These should be used to address weak points in your physique or performance, and as prehab to prevent injury before it happens.

So, we know to eat plenty of protein, monitor our calorie intake based on our observed weight, and focus our training on big compound movements in the 65-85% range, and fill the gaps with isolation exercises.

How Hard Do I Train?

The last question is: how hard should I push my sets? Do I stop when I feel my technique degrading slightly, or do I push until the only thing moving the bar is dogged self-belief and a light gust of wind?

Like most things, the answer is between those two. In general, you should stay one rep away from failure on your sets. The benefit of going to failure is that you know you’ve activated all the muscle fibers you possibly can. Activation = growth. The downsides are that by going to failure you risk technical breakdown that could lead to injury, and that going to failure induces far more fatigue, than say, stopping one or two reps short. That means that a failed set is far harder to recover from, could impair next week’s performance. Over the long term, constantly taking sets to failure will prevent you from accumulating the most amount of volume. Like we’ve discussed, that’s the primary driver of hypertrophy.

If you take an accessory set, like bicep curls, to failure, that’s not a big deal. If you accidentally overshoot and fail on squats or deadlifts, just be mindful of how you feel. It may be a good idea to cut some accessory work on that day or get some extra sleep or nutrients.

Conditioning

The last piece is conditioning. Conditioning refers to the amount of work we are capable of getting done in a certain timeframe. A well-conditioned athlete could knock out 3x10 squats with 2 minute rests easily – a poorly conditioned one would need 5 minutes.

Conditioning should be part of any program, but it’s extremely useful when talking about body composition. Conditioning work is a very effective way to up the calories burned in a workout. It also just… works. There’s something that just happens to your physique when you start training with a conditioning aspect. I don’t know what it is, but it works.

Here’s ya boy Brian Alsruhe with more:

Recovery

I’ve left the most important for last. Recovery is the single most important factor in your ability to make progress. You break muscles down at the gym, and you build them back up at the dinner table and in bed (get your mind out of the gutter). Adequate nutrition and adequate sleep are crucial for muscle growth.

Most decent exercise programs will include a period of deload – an intentional reduction of volume to drop your fatigue, allow you to recover, and repair the wear and tear you’ve put on your body through the weeks of hard training. This is usually about a week long, and reduces volume and intensity by between 30-50%. Deloads are essential for continued progress, and if your program doesn’t have them, you know it’s a bad program.

Other aspects of recovery:

• Sleep. Sleep at least 8 hours a night, with more if you need it.
• Diet. Try and eat right.
• Life stressors. Stress is cumulative, so life stressors like exams, sickness, or breakups will add to the load your body has to recover from. If you have a rough week, it’s totally fine and even advised to go, get in your 3 sets of compounds, then get out and let yourself recover.

Supplements

Supplements are easy. If anything is promising “crazy results”, it’s either illegal or snake oil. If it’s not steroids, then it’ll make minimal difference.

The two worth taking are the two C’s: caffeine and creatine. Caffeine reliably increases power output, can decrease how hard a workout feels, allows you to accumulate more training volume, and diminishes the feeling of fatigue. Caffeine is dead easy to supplement: just have a coffee before the gym.

Note: Caffeine has a half life of about 6 hours – that means that after 6 hours, your body has removed half of the caffeine you’ve taken from your body. It’s probably a good idea to limit your caffeine intake after 12pm to avoid it interfering with your sleep.

Creatine is cheap and effective. It’s a molecule that’s a precursor to phosphocreatine, an energy source for high stress, anaerobic activity like lifting. So when you’re lifting mid-set and you’ve exhausted your muscular glucose and phosphocreatine, having more creatine in your body allows your body to synthesise a bit more energy and finish the set.

Supplementing creatine will allow about a 5% increase in the amount of volume you can push per workout. That might mean one extra bench press rep per workout, but over a training cycle it will add up.

To take it, take 5 grams a day. No need to creatine load or any of that. Just take it.

Protein powder can be another useful supplement, but is not essential. If you can get your 2 grams of protein per kilo of body mass with your usual diet of food, you don’t need it. If you’re struggling to fit that amount of protein into your diet without going over your daily calorie count, then consider taking a scoop or two.

Sources

Here are some reliable sources of information if you want to learn more:

https://www.strongerbyscience.com/
http://www.jtsstrength.com/ and their youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/calgarybarbell
https://www.reddit.com/r/weightroom/ (my fave)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Rt7E2JVz4fPmC8AhjDoaA

Exercise Guides

How to Trap Bar Deadlift:

How to Squat:

How to Bench:

(this is one of a three part series that is probably the most comprehensive and clear one I’ve seen. Watch it. Also Brian is a legend and has heavily influenced my programming).
How to Overhead Press: