Fitness 101

Fitness can be boiled down to three main ingredients:

  • Cardio

  • Resistance training

  • Recovery

While each can be quite complex if you’re willing to dig into the weeds, they can also be pretty simple. Let’s break down each one.

Cardio AKA Aerobic Activity

While words like “cardio” and “aerobic activity” might sound confusing, they’re fairly simple. According to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, any movement you do that takes you above sedentary counts. So, here’s some things that count as movement:

  • A walk in the park

  • Playing with your kids

  • Walking your dog

  • Grocery shopping

  • Chasing your cat around the house to brush her (personally relevant)

That’s right, even doing chores counts for movement. Gotta vacuum, clean the kitchen, or do some gardening? That is movement, and any of it is better than none. One of the greatest risk factors for a multitude of diseases, including cancers, is a sedentary lifestyle.

The current recommendation for aerobic activity is for an average of 150+ minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week. That’s a little more than 20 minutes a day. But what, you might ask, does “moderate-intensity” mean?

For a complicated answer, moderate-intensity means any activity that gets your heart rate up to 50-60% of your resting heart rate. For a 101 answers, any activity that gets you breathing a little harder and your heart beating a little faster. As an example, if you were afraid you might miss your bus and had to walk a bit faster, that would be moderate-intensity.

An alternative to 150+ minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week is 75+ minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise a week. That’s a little more than ten minutes a day! It’s harder, but if a ten minute jog or run sounds more up your alley than walking, go for it.

You can also mix and match. If you do two thirds moderate-intensity (100 minutes) and one third vigorous-intensity (25 minutes), that works too.

Examples:

  • Moderate-intensity: 30 minutes walking MWF, grocery shopping 30 minutes Tuesday, playing tag with the kids for 30 minutes Saturday

  • Vigorous-intensity: HIIT training class 30 minutes on Tuesday, jogging 30 minutes Thursday, a run through the park for 15 minutes on Saturday

  • Mixed intensity: 25 minutes walking MWF, grocery shopping 25 minutes Tuesday, HIIT training class 25 minutes Saturday

However you choose to get in your movement, if you’re getting close to these goals, you’re already more fit than most Americans.

Resistance/Strength Training

Resistance training is any kind of activity that causes your muscles to work against or hold an applied force. This may make you think of lifting weights in the gym, and that is one good example of strength training. However, you can do this kind of training at home with bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, or other methods. You could also take up a hobby like climbing, jujitsu, or something similarly difficult.

You’ll want to work all your major muscle groups a recommended twice a week. If you can only manage once a week, that’s still far better than none at all. What are the major muscle groups? According to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, they are:

  • Legs

  • Hips

  • Back

  • Chest

  • Abdomen

  • Shoulders

  • Arms

This may seem like a lot to keep straight, but compound exercises hit multiple muscle groups at one. A push-up hits chest and arms, a pull-up arms and back, and so on. You can easily cover your major muscle groups focusing on five main movements:

  • Squat

  • Hinge

  • Push

  • Pull

  • Lift

So if you do body weigh squats, Romanian deadlifts, push-ups, bent over rows, and overhead presses, you’ve covered everything you need. There’s nuance and some movements, such as a vertical pull, worth consider. But for the basics? That’s all you need.

How heavy is heavy enough? So long as the exercise feels heavy, you’re in the ballpark for an appropriate weight. Progressively make your exercises a little harder or heavier and if you guessed a little shy of heavy, it will all sort out in the end.

Recovery

Recovery is mostly about two things: eating mostly healthy food and sleep. Exercise burns calories and your body needs calories to fuel itself throughout the day. Eat protein, plenty of fruits and vegetables, and whole grains for as much of your diet as you can. You can still eat some junk foods, just try to keep them to a minimum. So long as you are eating adequate calories and a healthy mix of the foods listed, then you’re doing great.

As for sleep, most people function best with between 7 and 9 hours of sleep a night. Your needs may vary, but aiming for 8 hours is a good idea. If you feel that you truly cannot function without a lot of caffeine throughout the day, it’s likely you’re not sleeping enough. This can feel impossible, but adequate rest is incredibly important.

Putting it all together

You can certainly go pretty nuts with all of these topics. Cardio can start to include zones, or heart-rates, or VO2 max stuff. Strength training can get into the weeds of hypertrophy vs strength vs power. Building the perfect diet is so vast a topic that no one has managed it yet. Sleep is an entire thing that I could and likely will go on about for so long as I live.

But you can also set a daily step count of 6-8k steps a day, do two thirty minutes gym sessions, eat and sleep well, and never worry much beyond that. The barrier to entry is not difficult to get past, and I suspect you are more than capable of it.

If you would like more help on any of these topics, set up some time with me and I’d be happy to see if I can help.