Show me your habits, and I’ll show you your future.”
Or so the saying goes. It begs an urgent question:
Are your daily lifestyle habits giving you more life, leaving you stagnant, or are they slowly killing you?
You are the product of your daily habits. Your entire life is the result of the thousands of decisions you’ve made, but none more so than what you do everyday. These small changes to your lifestyle can help improve every aspect of your life.
Are you living, staying stagnant, or dying? Before you answer, take a hard look at your daily habits. If you want to see your future, you can disregard your beliefs, values, and pointless platitudes you recite to sound deep. If you want to see your future, look at your habits. Does your day to day give you more life, or does it suck away at your life? It’s true that how you do anything is how you do everything.
What if you changed a few things in your daily life that pushes you towards your goals a little bit each day? Simple things can make drastic improvements to your health and outlook on life. Here are 3 high-impact lifestyle habits that will give you new life.
1. Sweat, train hard, & lift weights
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates
There is no argument about the evidence. Physical activity is essential for optimal health. Poor fitness and strength will plague your elder years if you don’t address them early. Exercise, particularly intense strength training, will improve the health of your musculoskeletal system, joints, and essentially every organ system.
But let’s set aside the “scientific” benefits for now. How will it affect your day to day life?
Regularly exercising at high intensities will give you more energy. It will make everything feel easier. It will teach you discipline.
Intense physical training will show you what your body is capable of. We often never learn what our body’s full potential is. How strong can you get? How fast can you really run? What are you actually capable of achieving if you learn to stick with an exercise program?
How long can you play with your kids? 5 minutes? 30? 60? What about for the next 10 years? How happy and full of life and energy can you really get?
These are things we often value but completely neglect when it comes to taking action. It’s hard to fully embrace living when it takes multiple attempts to stand up from a chair or having to sit out from running around with your kids, and it’s scary how quickly these situations creep up on us.
Get outside. Run hard. Jump. Lift heavy weights. Learn to live.
2. Eat good quality food
Recent inflation numbers aside, we are fortunate to live in a time when we have abundant and affordable access to good food. Even the run-of-the-mill, non-organic foods that Hacky-sack John scoffs at is miles better than what was regularly available a couple hundred years ago.
Unfortunately, with the boom in the food industry came a boom in highly processed foods.
These foods have much of their nutritional value stripped away in favor of texture and flavor.
I won’t lie. I love me good bowl of cereal, some chips, or chicken finger from time to time, but we need to exercise caution so these foods don’t make up the vast majority of our nutritional intake. It is easy to consume an excessive amount of calories and it’s hard to get the right combination of macro and micronutrients from these highly processed foods. What is more, we tend to lose a lot of food variety when eating a high volume of processed foods.
We tend to fare better when we eat a large variety of real, whole, and unprocessed foods. An easy way to add more variety is substituting certain portions of your current meals with items such as sweet potatoes, rice, salads (the possibilities with salads are endless), fruits, vegetables, good meats, and fish.
All of that being said, remember that the most important tenet of changing your body composition is still caloric balance.
3. Sleep well. Really well
Everything will get better or worse with sleep. When you sleep better, literally everything about your health improves.
Sleep impacts every system in the body. Disruptions to sleep can severely impact cognitive abilities, hormonal profile, emotional regulation, and physical performance. For gym rats, sleep deprivation will destroy your recovery and degrade your gym performance. Some studies cite a 20% reduction in cardiovascular capacity following a night of poor sleep.
If you neglect your sleep, no amount of bandaid interventions during the waking hours will reverse the damage done. There is no exercise program, nutrition plan, or supplement that will fix a lack of sleep.
Just go to bed on time. Here are some guidelines to get you started.
Go to bed before 11pm. The profile of sleep changes with different bed times, and tend to get worse with later bed times.
Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Cover bright LEDs with foil and tape. Use a sleep mask.
Make your bedroom as cool as your can tolerate.
Make your bedroom as quiet as possible. Use earplugs if needed. I recommend Mack’s Ultra Soft Earplugs.
Try and keep your bedroom for sleeping only. Keep work material and bright screens out if possible.
Go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday.
Try and get 7-9 hours of sleep every night.
You will be pleasantly surprised at how much better everything becomes when you regularly sleep well.
Give yourself new life
A better life is only a few habits away. Think about how different things can potentially be if you spend a little bit of time everyday to move towards your goals. Where can you be in a week? Month? Year?
If you want to see your future, just take a look at your daily habits and the group of friends you hang out with.
The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40 This book outlines a solution to a pervasive problem of aging: fragility brought on by the loss of strength and muscle mass. Lifting weights and strength training is for everyone. If you are a budding trainer or clinician, this should be required reading.
Association Between Purpose in Life and Objective Measures of Physical Function in Older Adults Kim ES, Kawachi I, Chen Y, Kubzansky LD. Association Between Purpose in Life and Objective Measures of Physical Function in Older Adults. JAMA Psychiatry. 2017;74(10):1039-1045. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.2145 Correlation is not causation. However, we know that older adults who have a sense of purpose in their life tend to live longer and happier lives. This study explores whether having a sense of purpose in life is associated with improved physical function.
Effect of Weighted Exercises on Bone Mineral Density in Post Menopausal Women A Systematic Review Zehnacker, Carol Hamilton PT, DPT, MS1; Bemis-Dougherty, Anita PT, DPT, MAS2. Effect of Weighted Exercises on Bone Mineral Density in Post Menopausal Women A Systematic Review. Journal of Geriatric Physical Therapy 30(2):p 79-88, August 2007. More research is needed, but there is good hope for those who have osteoporosis or osteopenia. There is evidence to suggest that heavy weight training exercises can increase bone density in post menopausal women.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End What matters in the end? Medicine has performed miracles in improving and extending life, but even the experts often do not know how to talk about the end. Being Mortal explores the successes and failures of medicine in managing end of life matters. Perhaps the ultimate goal is not unnecessarily push away death, but to ensure that we live a good life until the very end.
This question will inevitably cross a beginner’s mind at some point. If a program says to do 5 sets of 5 on the incline bench press, do the warm up sets count towards those 5 sets?
Simple. No. You only start counting the 5 sets once you get up to your working weight. You can take as many warmup sets as you need, although I will recommend that you don’t get excessive about it.
A sample progression will look like this. Let’s say someone is performing their sets at 225 lbs on the incline bench press.
Morning rituals and routines are the trendy things to do. Every self-help guru and “entrepreneur” can’t stop talking about their importance. Wake up before the rest of the world. Meditate. Journal. Read a book. Go on a walk and listen to a podcast.
A lot of it is just horseshit and busy work. Morning routines have become a way to make people feel like they’re better than everyone else.
Our brain power is the most important biological asset we possess. It controls our thoughts, cognition, and perception of the world. It’s no wonder we spend so much time and resources optimizing brain function and eliminating brain fog.
Nootropics and brain supplements have been becoming all the rage lately. While there is some evidence to support their use, I don’t think they have any value if you’re using them as a crutch to offset bad habits. It’s like trying to make up for an atrocious diet with some omegas and a scoop of protein powder.
If you aren’t doing the minimum of maintaining your body’s function, no amount of supplementation will help you. So, here are 4 easy ways to eliminate brain fog before you even consider expensive supplements.
Jet lag is awful. I’m writing this at 5am after returning to California from Japan. Yesterday I woke up at noon. This morning I woke up at 3am and couldn’t fall back asleep.
Jet lag typically hits hardest when you travel east and cross two or more timezones. The resulting chaos on your circadian rhythm can wreak havoc on your health and routine, especially if you need to return to work quickly after traveling.
Thankfully, there are ways to quickly mitigate the effects of jet lag and getting your circadian rhythm back on track.
We see these trends everyday. Do this everyday to live longer. The one exercise to ensure your longevity. The one habit to a healthier life. This is the secret to live a long and fulfilled life…
And I get it. Reducing everything down to a single habit or product to ensure our health and longevity is an attractive proposition, but most of these people are just trying to sell something or drive more views to their website.
While I can say that the secret is that there is no single secret, I won’t. We already know from extensive investigations into the Blue Zones of the world that longevity comes down to numerous factors such as nutrition, physical activity, community, and many more.
However, there is one thing that seems to be repeating theme everywhere.
Why do you live?
One of the crucial factors of longevity and satisfaction with quality of life is purpose. Why are you alive? Do you feel like your life has meaning?
This was largely an unsatisfying answer for doctors and scientists for a long time. How is it that something as simple and abstract as life’s purpose can be more important than something like medication? After years of study, there isn’t much argument against this.
Study after study shows that outcomes in nursing homes and assisted living facilities significantly improve when the residents feel like they have a purpose for living.
Think about it. As we grow older and more frail, our independence seems to get taken away from us. This is a common pattern. As our memory fades and our physical abilities lessen, our locus of control contracts. Once safety seems to be compromised our home, privacy, possessions, and purpose get stripped of us as we are placed into the care of an institution.
This isn’t without wholesome intent. We care about our elders, which is why safety is such a paramount concern. However, this makes the sunset years of our lives completely devoid of meaning.
Why do you live? Why do you wake up every morning? A notable study once showed that simply giving a nursing home resident the responsibility of keeping a plant alive can have significant positive impacts on their quality of life.
Lessons from the Blue Zones
For those unfamiliar, blue zones are areas in the world with unusually high concentrations of individuals who live past 100.
Numerous studies have been conducted in these regions to find the “secret” to their longevity. The mistake was that their focus was too narrow. They tried looking for the hidden formula for nutrition or the holy grail of exercise programs. It turns out that there is a large cluster of factors that contribute to their longevity and wellness.
This supercharged wellness extended far beyond the physical. These people were much happier and fulfilled than most around the world. We can easily replicate nutrition and exercise, yet results did not seem to translate very effectively. So what was missing?
Delving deeper into the common themes of these regions, almost every elder in these regions maintained a purpose and meaning for their life. Whether that meant they had a hobby, family, job, or engaged in their community, these people still had a reason to wake up and get out of bed each day.
A lifeless atmosphere
Think about it. If all it took to live a long and fulfilled life was to make sure that our meat suit was well taken care of, longevity would not be a mystery. Imagine a life where your daily living was reduced to eating a square meal, staying hydrated, exercising, and taking medication. Your bed time and wake up time is strictly regulated. You’re prohibited from engaging in anything remotely risky. You no longer have any privacy and can’t even lock the door to your residence.
You only get to keep what can fit into a small dresser and cubby. Entertainment and recreation is determined by a committee that only has a small interest in what you’re interested in. You’re not even sure if you like the people you’re surrounded by.
How long would you last here?
When purpose and meaning are stripped away from our lives, our lives have no meaning. These folks tend to do very poorly in their elder years.
Dr. Bill Thomas came up with a simple but elegant solution: inject life into the lifeless atmosphere of nursing homes. He transformed the entire culture of a nursing home by bringing animals, living plants, a garden, and children into the facility. The change was staggering. The residents who never socialized with anyone started to speak. They volunteered to care for the animals. It seemed as if they had come back to life.
The important part is to not get confused with the deeper principle. It wasn’t that the place became more fun (although we have to admit, that is probably part of it). These residents were given a purpose for their daily life.
Live a life of meaning
This is easier said than done, especially in one’s later years. Most of us have some sort of purpose in our daily lives whether that is a career, caring for family, personal projects, side hustles, or even getting together with friends to engage in a shared hobby.
The secret that we need to put forth more effort into implementing is making sure we don’t strip our elders of their purpose and independence. This can be as simple as letting them stay in their own home. Allow them to engage in hobbies with their community. Let them go to church. Listen, and let them lead their lives.
Further Reading
Gawande A. Being Mortal : Medicine and What Matters in the End. Picador, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt And Company; 2014.
AshaRani PV, Lai D, Koh J, Subramaniam M. Purpose in Life in Older Adults: A Systematic Review on Conceptualization, Measures, and Determinants. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022;19(10):5860. Published 2022 May 11. doi:10.3390/ijerph19105860
Musich S, Wang SS, Kraemer S, Hawkins K, Wicker E. Purpose in Life and Positive Health Outcomes Among Older Adults. Popul Health Manag. 2018;21(2):139-147. doi:10.1089/pop.2017.0063
Kim ES, Kawachi I, Chen Y, Kubzansky LD. Association Between Purpose in Life and Objective Measures of Physical Function in Older Adults. JAMA Psychiatry. 2017;74(10):1039–1045. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.2145
Kim ES, Shiba K, Boehm JK, Kubzansky LD. Sense of purpose in life and five health behaviors in older adults. Preventive Medicine. 2020;139:106172. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2020.106172
Everyone wants to get jacked but no one knows where to put forth their time and energy.
The 80/20 rule remains true for fitness. A vast majority (about 80%) of your gains will come from about 20% of what you do. This means that there are endless gimmicks in the other 80% that will distract you and waste your time. Focus on these 5 high impact pillars of fitness to get the most out of your efforts.
The 5 Pillars of Being Jacked and Fit
I can simplify getting jacked and fit down to 5 things: lift heavy 3-4 times per week, do high intensity conditioning, eat well, sleep well, and manage your stress. If you neglect any one of these things, your results will take a large hit. There are an endless number of extra gimmicks like massage guns, red light therapy, overpriced supplements, cryotherapy, and rolling around on foam tubes to distract you. If you don’t take care of the 5 pillars first, then none of the extra gimmicks will make any difference.
Supplements can be helpful, but not if your nutrition isn’t dialed in.
Massage guns, foam rollers, and cryo can all be helpful, but not if your sleep isn’t taken care of.
And all of the “corrective” exercise in the world won’t help you if you’re not on an intelligently designed training program.
I repeat: a vast majority of your gains and results come from the core behaviors and principles of training, nutrition, and recovery. We need to differentiate that from the fluff.
So let’s dive in.
1. Lift Heavy 3-4 Times Per Week
In order to get strong and jacked, we need to be lifting heavily and focus on the large compound exercises. These include squats, deadlifts, lunge variations, presses, pull ups, and rows.
Compound exercises are more effective than isolation exercises. The big movements are the core of your training program. Curls and triceps extensions are the icing on the cake. You don’t get dessert before your protein.
We should also be lifting heavily. A vast majority of people will make incredible gains lifting within the 5-10 rep range. I will sometimes push that to 10-20 reps for certain phases and exercises, but most of my sets are done between 5-10 reps.
There is no way around progressive overload. If we want our muscles to grow in size or strength, we must be doing more in the future compared to now. This means doing more reps per set, more sets per exercise, or lifting more weight.
Lifting about 2 times per week is the absolute minimum dosage for strength gains, but 3-4 days seems to be the optimal range. I advocate for an upper/lower split. This is how most athletes train.
If you train 3 times per week, your training schedule may look like this:
Monday: Upper Body 1 Bench Press Emphasis
Wednesday: Lower Body 1 Squat Emphasis
Friday: Upper Body 2 Overhead Press Emphasis
Monday: Lower Body 2 Deadlift Emphasis
Wednesday: Upper Body 1 (The cycle begins again)
A 4 day training week may be distributed to Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.
High Intensity Conditioning
Don’t do cardio. Perform conditioning.
Low intensity cardio will only yield disappointment when it comes to performance gains and body recomposition. High intensity interval training and sprint interval training are both vastly superior in terms of performance and fat burning.
We don’t need to look much further than Olympic sprinters to have a visual understanding of this.
High intensity conditioning is more effective and time efficient than low intensity cardio. You can get a good HIIT or SIT session done in 20-30 minutes, whereas it can take up to that amount of time of jogging to even sufficiently reach a fat burning state for some folks.
Here is a good sprint interval training protocol to try:
Complete the following 2 times a week:
Week one: 4x10s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week two: 6x10s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week three: 8x10s, 2 minutes rest between each
Week four: 4x20s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week five: 6x20s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week six: 8x20s, 2 minutes rest between each
Week seven: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week eight: 4x30s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week nine: 4x30s, 2 minutes rest between each
Complete the following 3 times a week:
Week ten: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each
Dial In Your Nutrition
You must tailor your nutrition towards your goals. If you trying to gain weight, then you need to be in a calorie surplus. If you are trying to lose weight, then you need to be in a calorie deficit. And, if you trying to maintain your weight, you need to be at calorie maintenance. There is no way around this law of thermodynamics.
Gaining or losing 1-2 pounds per week is a healthy start. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. In order to lose about 1 pound per week, you need to be in a 500 calorie deficit everyday.
Gaining a pound of muscle requires about a 2800 calorie surplus. This means you should be in a 400 calories surplus per day if you are trying to gain weight.
The calorie surplus and deficit are the most reliable metrics of altering body composition. The next most important is macronutrient distribution. This is the ratio of protein, carbs, and fats if your daily diet.
The most important macronutrient to focus on is protein intake as this will help with building muscle during weight gain phases and maintaining muscle during weight loss phases. Once you have protein dialed in, you should focus on taking in more complex carbs than fats, as carbs will provide more readily available energy than fat.
This does not mean to completely eliminate fats! Fats are important for a wide array of functions throughout our body.
If you have your calorie surplus/deficit and macronutrient distribution dialed in, then you will have covered a vast majority of your nutritional needs.
Sleep Like You Mean It
Sleep is the foundation of all health. If you neglect your sleep, then you are essentially throwing away all of your hard work.
I cannot emphasize the importance of sleep. Sleep is usually the first thing that gets neglected when life gets busy and hectic. However, skimping out on sleep will negatively affect literally every aspect of your life. You will notice that you have less energy, are more irritable, make poor food decisions, perform poorly at complex tasks and at the gym, and have reduced vitality overall.
There is a reason why professional athletes obsess over their sleep. It is the foundation of their performance. Sleep is the time that our body repairs itself, the brain literally cleans itself, and balances our hormones.
I have written about the importance of sleep and how to optimize our sleep in previous articles here and here (don’t worry, they open in new tabs).
Here is the gist. You should sleep between 7-9 hours every night (children and teenagers will need more). Get to bed around the same time every night. Make your bedroom as dark, cool, and quiet as possible. Cut out screens and stimulating activities about 3 hours before bed time. Stop caffeine at about 1pm.
Don’t neglect sleep.
Manage Your Stress
This is a big one for the modern world. Our attention and focus are being stolen from us everyday from every direction and our jobs only get more stressful. Responsibilities quickly pile up.
If we don’t do something to manage our sanity, we are heading towards a world of anxiety, panic attacks, and depression.
All of these factors significantly impact our health and well-being. Chronic and high levels of stress will negatively impact our mental health, motivation, hormonal health, sleep, nutrition, and gym performance.
We are all wired to handle stress differently. Some people can manage loads of stress without any negative consequence, and others will fall apart at the slightest derailment of plans.
You must understand your needs and manage your stress or else suffer the negative consequences. Some strategies to help manage stress include meditation, journaling, exercise, sleeping enough, and making time for your passions.
Your life cannot just be your job and responsibilities. You need to make time for your tribe and community. You need to pursue your passions and hobbies. Go outside.
Spend Your Efforts Wisely
We only have so much time during the day. Ensure you are spending your efforts on the right things that will yield the most results.
Lift heavy weights.
Do conditioning.
Dial in your nutrition.
Sleep enough.
Manage your stress.
If you have these 5 pillars in check, then you are off to a good start.
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