Jul '24 • General discussion
General Questions for Beginners
One of our new members , a dear friend of my wife and I, has asked some wonderful questions that probably a lot of people who are considering biting the bullet of making health/fitness changes are also thinking about.
This seems like a good opportunity to start answering and defining these issues and get the ball rolling for a lot of you!
Q: What am I supposed to be doing in the gym? The equipment is confusing because I don't know what parts of my body I should be working on.
A: This can be very scary. Most of the machines ARE designed to isolate one part of the body from another, but the good news is, even though these exercises are effective for certain goals, none of them are necessary for ANYBODY regardless of their fitness goal.
For newbies, you shouldn't be concerned about any part of your body at all, actually. You should be concerned about your whole body! And a better way to think about picking exercises for your whole body is to think about MOVEMENTS.
There's honestly only a few movement patterns that your body does on a daily basis: push, pull, squat, bend over, jump, walk, and twist. And it just so happens there is a piece of equipment that is perfectly designed to ergonomically and incrementally load all of these normal human movement patterns... the barbell!
Honestly, if the only piece of equipment in the gym that you touch is the barbell, it will be more than enough.
So to get comfortable in the gym, and it may take some time, its just going to be familiarizing yourself with the barbell lifts. And Ashley and I are more than happy to do this for you! MUCH more info to come on this.
Q: Should I do cardio, strength-training or both?
A: It depends on your goal and why you'd do any of it.
If you were to put a gun to my head and ask me 'what is the single most important physical trait to improve for general fitness,' I would say 'strength.' It affects and improves every other aspect of your fitness, balance, endurance, bone health, EVEN CARDIO.
However, I don't have a gun pointed at my head, and as usual, the correct answer is a little more nuanced than that.
Let me add a little tangent in the middle of this one: exercise DOES NOT cause or lead to fat loss in the absence of dietary intervention.(In the short term... btw, you certainly can build a body that is less likely to be fat in the future) So if you're asking what type of exercise helps with that, the answer is neither.
The key here is that there is a difference between exercise and training.
Exercise is something you do for the benefit of having done it, because it's fun, because you were hanging out with somebody, etc.
Training is something you do to cause a change in your body over time. This is how progressive overload works with strength training.
You kinda need both, but you should think about them differently.
You only NEED to strength-train 2-4 times per week (or more if you enjoy it) but you SHOULD exercise every day. Exercise is where most of your cardiovascular fitness will come from.
So, in a perfect world, you strength train at the gym 3 times per week, BUT every day, you play with your kids, or you garden in your yard, or you play a sport with your friends from work, and that is MORE than enough cardio for you.
Q: Should I lose fat or gain muscle first?
A: I think you worry about FEELING BETTER first. Being weak and being fat are symptoms of lifestyle choices that make you unhealthy and make you feel bad. Becoming healthier is not linear necessarily.
If you make nutritional choices and train in a way that will make your body BETTER at living, period, then the fat and the muscle will sort itself out.
Does that mean there is no place for 'bulking' or 'cutting' for certain people? Not at all. Those things can be extremely useful...
But for most people, if you start eating MORE nutritious foods, FEWER trashy non-foods, and TRAIN to get strong, you'll be very surprised at how dramatic the change will be.
Once you feel amazing, have gotten a lot stronger, and developed some great eating habits, then we can worry about tinkering to push bodyweight up or down.
Q: Which foods are healthy? Which diet is healthy?
A: Wow! This topic deserves multiple dedicated posts to answer precisely, but we can give a short overview here.
You're going to need to define 'healthy' and this may mean something different for everybody. For example, the young man who is dramatically overweight needs to eat whatever will help him gain weight, and that is the 'healthy' diet for him. For someone else, that's definitely not true... haha
To be succinct, I define 'healthy' as meeting at least these three criteria:
a) must contain large amounts of essential human nutrition (bonus points if humans can thrive eating ONLY this food) - any situation where you have too little essential nutrition is unsustainable at best, and catastrophic at worst
b) must NOT contain either objectively, universally harmful toxins and substances that would hurt any person OR any chemical or substance that causes personal health issues or gastrointestinal complications for you - its no secret that chronic disease and metabolic syndrome are everywhere today, it's my belief that our trash diet is to blame
c) must not give false data to your brain about how hungry you or how much you have eaten, some foods encourage hunger and bingeing, and some foods discourage eating altogether, it is best to avoid both of these so that you can get the amount of nutrition your body needs
What does that leave? Single-ingredient foods, like meats and vegetables, that you can either eat raw, or with minimal cooking and processing such as, grilling, salting, or adding water.
As far as transitioning to eating these healthy foods from how you eat now, or learning what foods cause personal issues and disruption for you, reach out to us and we can help!
Please respond with any other questions you have about these...
For real, we are super nerdy about this stuff.
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General Questions for Beginners