Navigating the fitness industry

About 6 months I got quite interested in longevity, I red LifeSpan by David Sinclair, watched his videos on YouTube and also watched quite a few videos of Peter Attia (another longevity expert). If you're interested in this topic I would highly recommend you to spend some time looking at their content, it is excellent.

I learned that what and when we eat, exercise and quite a few other things which are in our control can have a massive impact on our life expectancy and also on the quality of our life when we get older. My dad died in his fifties and never got the chance to meet my kids. I really would like to have a chance to not only meet my future grand children, but also to spend quality time with them and for that I will need to be in good shape as I get older. Thinking about this really got me motivated about changing quite a few things in my life in a short amount of time:

I started fasting and eating only once a day (OMAD = one meal a day). I read that book before starting to understand what to do and what not to do.
I learned about nutrition, started cooking and focused on healthy food
I started exercising on a daily basis, initially walking and then running and also putting in place some daily workouts.

This combined got me to lose about 15kg in 3 months: I was 79kg and I've been stable around 64kg for the past 3 months. I'm also in much better shape now than I was 6 months ago, I sleep better, I feel more focused during the day and resilient to stress.

In this post I'd like to talk about the exercise side and what I did to go from no exercise at all (I didn't exercise at all for the past 20 years, I'm 42) to ~90min daily exercise. If this helps just one person out there then that will be great :)

Step 1 - planning my exercise

Since I had been sleeping quite poorly since I moved to Spain I decided that I'd try to kill 2 birds with one stone:

I would try to fall asleep before 11PM every night (weekday and weekends) and wake up at 7AM (i.e. aiming for 8 hours sleep)
When waking up the first thing I would do would be to put my running gear and go out for a walk

Putting together a plan like this is critical I think: if you say "I'll exercise" and don't commit to where and when you're going to do it, it's not going to happen. This is part of habit formation and I would suggest you to read Atomic habits if you've not read it yet, it explains how you can incorporate good habits in your daily life and also how to get rid of the bad one. This is really powerful stuff..

Step 2 - walk

For someone who had not exercised for decades and wasn't in good shape, walking was a great place to start. I'd initially go out for a 20-40min walk in the morning. There are quite a few hills where I live so even walking wasn't that easy for me at the beginning. I had to push myself for the first few weeks but after 2-3 weeks I really started enjoying that. It's really peaceful to go out for a walk, I find it quite meditative now. After a few more weeks it became addictive and I'd go out for a walk every morning and most evenings.

Then I got an Apple watch, which allowed me to track my steps, distance, pace, etc. I always thought these smart watches were pretty useless but now that I'm exercising, I think it played its role and helped me sticking to the habit: I've got daily goals to complete, it helped me push myself and get my 10,000 steps a day, meet my calories goal daily, etc.

Then what I did was simply trying to walk faster until I got in shape to be able to run. After a few months I was able to do my first 10km, I was pretty proud of myself :-)

I don't think I missed a single day walking / running for the first 3 months and I followed religiously the simple rule "wake up at 7AM and go for a walk no matter what". Now I don't even have to think about it, it's part of my normal rhythm and I'm doing it every day. It has happen that I've not done it, I had a few sleepless nights and I allowed myself to skip one but I'm following the rule to never skip twice: if I miss once, I HAVE to do it the next day (Atomic habits talks about that as well).

If you want to exercise and don't know where to start, I'd highly recommend to try walking. For me it got me into the habit of doing some daily exercise and is also helped me to lose weight much more quickly than if I had just focused on diet.

Step 3 - working out

I managed to find good resources on nutrition, longevity, fasting but when it comes to fitness and doing some work out, I have to admit I was completely lost. There is so much stuff out there that I had no idea where to start and who to believe. Given I had some recurring back problems (sitting at a desk in front of a computer every day doesn't help!), I decided that I would use a personal coach. I'm really happy that I made that choice and if you can afford it, this is something I would recommend. My coach, Xavier, put together a weekly plan which was always at the right level for me: I could do it but it would always be challenging. I find that having a coach also helps quite a lot with motivation: if you're putting a training plan together on your own it's probably quite easy to make it not challenging enough. It's also a bit like if I had a moral contract with him: if I agreed with the program, I really had to deliver. If you're looking for a coach let me know and I can put you in touch with Xavier.

Now that I have a bit more experience I've been doing more research about the different styles of training I could play with. As it stands I seem to really enjoy Calisthenics and more particularly basic exercises such a push ups, pull ups, squats, dips, etc. I'm not really into advanced techniques such as levers, planches, etc.. maybe later but as it stands that's not attractive to me. The Fitness industry is really a jungle and it's quite hard to navigate but now I'm starting to get my head around what I enjoy and who are the people I should listen to. If you want to give a try to Calisthenics and are looking for a place to learn from someone really competent, who goes straight to the point and is backed by science, I would highly recommend to look at the YouTube channel of Kyle Boggeman. I watched most of his videos and I'm in the process of watching them again at the moment. I'll publish a summary of the videos in an upcoming post.

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