Ep 2. Fitness Primer

An explanation of basic fitness concepts and simple explanations of how to accomplish common fitness goals. Goals explored include: getting stronger, getting healthier, improving performance, getting leaner, getting more muscular, and a few more. 

The second half of the episode contains potentially triggering discussions of body fat, weight loss, food tracking, and other concepts that could be difficult for people with disordered eating, body dysmorphia, or low self-image issues. There will be an announcement during the episode when this section is about to start. 

Transcript

Hey Hi Hello bros and themes This is Gay Bro Shit- A Pocast about body image, fitness and gender in contewmporary queer life

I’m Dan- as a reminder from the INTRO episode- I was a trainer for 10 years, and Im a rugby coach, I have an MBA, a BFA nand have started multiple businesses- and most of the time I feel like a complete fucking failure. 

Fitness Primer- practical advice for those getting started

This is meant to be a general playbook for how to accomplish some common objectives- and it’s something I can refer back to in future episodes to say ‘here’s how you can x…y…z” but know that my understanding our understanding is going to evolve. 

I'm being very intentional with the amount of information I'm giving. As this episode could easily have been like 6 hours long and I just don't think it would be practical to act on that much information. People do better getting a little bit of information they can put into use and then getting a little bit more and continuously refining. 

Not meant to be prescriptive- just things that work for many/some people but not for everyone. 

Anyone who tells you something works for everyone is either trying to sell you something or doesn’t know what they’re talking about (or both)- dont ever buy into a one-size-fits-all all solution or program. 

We live in the age of the influencer where people who look good are sort of automatically assumed to be an expert when they probably mostly look good due to genetic factors, quality camerwork and lighting and very commonly- some drug use- 

In pscyhologoy this is called the halo effect- where we assume expertise or achievement or quality based on asthetic factors- so dont just accept the advice of someone because they look good onb the internet- 

Conversely I’ve been in the fitness industry for a long time- but because I’ve always been a naturally fatter person people look at me and sometimes assume I dont know what I’m talking about- when I actually held multiple certifications and had a ton of experience working with real world clients. 

I literally just had this experience the other day where someone in my rugby club discord posted a random hot youtuber as a good workout for rugby- when I, someone whos played and coached for years and has been a trainer had literally already written a rugby specific training program but because Im just their coach and not some hot guy on the internet- I couldnt possibly be an expert. 

Fitness is a process, and it's a lifelong one. There is no destination

You may set goals only to reach them and be unsatisfied. That's existential. So you often just pick a new goal and it can feel sisyphian

Fitness is a luxury. And the best fitness for you is going to be the fitness you can afford.

Fitness as a concept is only a century old because before that it wasn't something we had the resources or time to pursue it..we walked everywhere, we had physically demanding jobs, we were constantly pregnant…

Pursuing fitness requires free time, it requires disposable income, it requires an able body,  

Having free time and disposable income is a modern feature, and many people still don’t have those and so the pursuit of fitness is very heavily linked with class. 

Eating clean is expensive, working out with a trainer is expensive, supplements are expensive, and getting plastic surgery is expensive, there's a reason that the rich and celebrities look a certain way, and thats by design and a feature of capitalism

Don't go into debt to pursue fitness, don't spend beyond your means. 

Before you begin pursuing fitness, if you have the means, 

Identity a goal, most common goals:

Functional:

1. Be healthier
2. Gain strength 
3. Gain endurance 

Aesthetic :

1. Gain muscle size
2. Lose body fat (or even gain)

You can do multiple goals at once… but it's a lot harder. You can even do all four at once, but your progress on one or more area might be slower than if you focused on one thing at a time. 

Be healthier - 

This is the easiest goal. 

Doing something is better than doing nothing. 

Yoga, CrossFit, orange theory, Barry's, running, and playing a sport are all equally good. 

Just walking is great for you. 

Once a week is 100% better than no times a week. 

Twice a week is 50% better than once a week

Three times a week is 33% better than twice a week. 

Diminishing marginal returns with additional workouts. 

The best workout for you is the one you enjoy and can do and can afford. 

So doing anything will lead to positive increases in mental health and sense of well-being, better sleep, better stress management, and improved cardiovascular function. 

If you have more specific health goals-  such as controlling blood pressure or blood sugar, then the modality may need to change

Get stronger

Any strength training will you stronger ever a small amount..

You can do as little if one set for every movement pattern a week and gain strength. 

Basic movement patterns: knee drive, hip hinge, horizontal push, vertical push, horizontal pull, vertical pull, core stability, rotary stability

Principal of Progressive overload

Its's really helpful to keep a notebook or use a document app and write down the weights you use and see how those change. 

Because you want to be able to track progress I highly recommend you don't change up your workout too much. It's definitely ok to switch out movements and add things or skip things. But you need to repeat lifts or exercises frequently enough and for long enough to see real substantial change. 

If you have access to a gym- using machines to guide your movements is q great way to get started because it's hard to do them wrong and it's very easy to add weight progressively.  There's some studies that show you can gain as much muscle from machines as free weights if not more- so there's literally nothing wrong with just using machines for however long you need to 

Free weights are a bit better for incorporating more stabilizer muscles and we should aim to progress towards them but it's much easier to get injured using them.

If you can't get to a gym a suspension trainer or some basic dumbbells will allow you to workout at home or on the road and you can still make the movements harder to induce overload. 

If you want to get super strong eventually you're going to want to progress to barbell training and it's very helpful to hire a coach or trainer to teach you proper technique

Certs to look for in barbell trainer: TKTKTKTk

Build endurance:

Add time or distance slowly  but don't feel bad if you never get to run a marathon and slap that 26.2 sticker on your car- some people are no built for endurance and that's a genetic factor and not a failing 

If you like running long distances that's great. If you don't that's also totally great. But you don't need to be able to run a long distance in order to be fit. It's just one metric

Additional functional goals:

 rehab from injury- too many specifics to cover so this is something that you're going to have to work with a physical therapist or trainer who understands your body and injury to get you rehabed

sports performance - again too many specifics to cover all of them but there's a good chance there's information on the Internet about how to train for the sport you want to be better at. 

I mentioned before in the into but I've played rugby for almost 20 years and it's kind of a hard sport to train for because you need to be able to sprint, to make quick direction changes, to tackle and be tackled, to push and drive and jump, and sometimes to lift people.  So you have to be strong, big, dynamic, fast and generally fit and that's a lot of different types of training to fit in. 

In perfect world we would do some excesisr that builds strength, some that builds endurance and gets your heart rate up and some that improves mobility to reduce injuries. 

Reduce body fat- stop listening here if you have any history of eating disorders or disordered eating. Come back for the next episode.

It is possible to safely lose a moderate amount of body fat, but…

Why are you looking to reduce bf??

Fatphobia and it's consequences.

Recommend maintenance phase for a deeper dive and perspective from people who are fat

Most likely you are looking to reduce your body fat because you think it will make you look better or be more attractive to potential partners- and that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, it just means you need to be honest with yourself about why you’re doing it 

If you're fat and have always been, you're probably not going to be able to lose more than 10-20 percent of your body weight and you'll be much happier if you accept that.  There has never been an intervention proven to cause that amount of fat loss universally. Bariatric surgery comes closest but that is radical and had a host of life-changing complications. 

Being fat is not unhealthy in and of itself.  And you cannot tell by looking at someone if they’re healthy or not. 

Eat intuitively, eat what makes you feel good, eat what you can afford, eat what your body can tolerate. 

Once we've unpacked that and we can accept why we might feel like we want to get rid of body fat then we can say how you could go about losing some weight. 

Run in the opposite direction of anything that promises rapid results over a short time period. 

The key to losing body fat is to create a mild energy deficit most days- i.e. eating a little bit less energy in the form of food than what you output in bodily activity.  

You've probably heard the phrase calories In- calories out to explain the energy system of the body- but that's a real oversimplification. And it's definitely the case that the more information you find the more confusing it actually gets because there's so many variables. So I'm going to simplify as much as possible - but oy- there's a good reason why most people have a really hard time losing body fat. 

So there's lot of problems with the calories In- calories out model but in terms of practical applications: The biggest problem with this is that most people have no idea what they actually consume and what they actually expend, and theres a pretty big learning curve that you have to overcome to be able to do this successfully- and thats probably why this won't work for many, if not most people. 

But our bodies are also very good at adapting to the energy we supply it with and will find efficiencies so this will stop working eventually.  But this is a strategy to help overcome this

So in an ideal system we would reduce our caloric intake by about 500 a day and lose one pound of body fat per week. You can push this up to a 1000 calorie deficit and you could maybe lose 2lbs week. It doesn't sound like a lot because it isn't - but it's sustainable and You're more likely to actually stick with it and actually accomplish your goal

So the amount of body fat you’re looking to get rid of is the amount of weeks you’re going to have to do this successfully for. So you can see how if you’re looking to lose more than like 20 lbs of body fat we are talking about a very long process that's probably going to be an utter slog. 

You could speed this up by having a bigger deficit- but you’re going to feel much more depleted and you’re probably not going to be able to do it for very long. 

IF YOU HAVE EVER HAD AN EATING DISORDER DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT THIS, focus on intuitive eating.

If you’re body fat percentage is already very low- then you don't need to be doing this unless you’re going to be doing a bodybuilding show. 

We also need to accept that what we are doing is approximate, we can't figure out our exact energy expenditure or consumption, but we can get close. 

First, we need to figure out our energy expenditure. The most accurate way to do this is through a wearable that measures your heart rate. These are not 100% accurate but they can probably get within a few hundred calories.  

These are not cheap, so if you cant afford one then there are some calculators online that can get you a decent approximation based on your weight and activity levels. So if I put my information into one of these calculators I get a daily need of 3100 calories - but according to my fitness tracker it's probably closer to 3300 on average and on days I'm working it's north of 4000

And for funsies I ended up doing a Little experiment 

So my phone has Google Fit and I've been using that for the last few years to measure steps and activity - and I knew it was probably not quite right but then I bought a fitbit- which is actually owned by Google and I'm assuming is sort of a big data source for the Google fit product on the phone - and the difference was pretty remarkable. 

Using the Fitbit I was logging about a quarter more energy expenditure per day and up to double the steps. That's a massive difference.

I had intended to compare a whole weeks of data but I gave up after only a few days because the difference was just sooo big. 

But I also referenced a few studies that were done- and while these were done a few years ago so it's possible that Fitbit has updated their accuracy - in the studies the Fitbit was found to undercount steps a bit. 

But back to the calorie expenditure number - theres been a few studies that have tried to figure out if that number is accurate..in a lot of studies the calorie expenditure was overestimated by the tracker and in some it was underestimated. And we don't know if the current models have been improved because these studies are a few years old and so it's really hard to say. 

I would say getting an activity tracker like a Fitbit or a Garmin or an omron is probably a good investment if you want an idea of energy expenditure. But remember that it may be wrong and there's probably going to be at least a few weeks if not months of trying to get dialed in and you might get really frustrated. 

But I will say that having this thing on my wrist really fucking annoys me sometimes. It will just vibrate intermittently for the most inane things. And I swear I've gone into the settings and turned these notifications off but it's still sending them. 

So like it will vibrate to tell me it's time to move and I'm just like 'Bitch I'm resting on purpose right now. Mind your own business'

And why are we on the topic, yes you can definitely lose body fat from working out but it requires a lot more effort and time than adjusting your food intake.  For me to use extra energy at the rate I could reduce by eating intentionally I would need to run an hour a day- and I just dont want to do that. 

So measuring output is relatively easy with technology- but measuring food is a bit harder. 

 Most people just don't know what they're eating and how much of it. Theres been studies that compared the amount of food that people thought they ate versus what they actually ate was off by at least 10% (underesdtimated). I found one study where people underestimate by 47%

So accept that you’re probably going to be wrong unless you weigh everything you eat with a food scale, and thats definitely a sign of disordered eating so accept being a little loose about it. 

The easiest way to figure out what you’re actually eating is to use a food tracking app- and to be very thorough with it and even report things like alcohol consumption. 

Two trcking apps that work for people are myfitnesspal and Macrofactor.

 Macrofactor is a subscription but has some nice features that my fitness pal does not. 

To start off with spend a week or more just tracking what you eat and drink without making any changes- but the reality is that tracking probably will change what you eat. Because you'll start to make value judgements about the food in to what fits best into what the app is telling you to consume. 

Apps do very good with branded and packaged food, but dont do as well with homecooked food - which is kind of a perverse incentive because cooking is generally considered ‘healthier’ 

The apps also don't do well with "ethnic" food. The other night I had Pad See Ew and I just kinda had to guess if I was using the right option to log it- and this is a fairly common dish so if you're eating something not common in a white American diet you might have a harder time tracking it. 

The hardest thing is getting your measurements within a range of accuracvy- so knowing what a gram or an ounce or a tablespoon or a cup is a bit challenging and this is definitely where the learning curve is, so this is why we need to accept some degree of imprecision.

Once we think we have a decently good tracking going on then we can try and manipulate both overall calories consumed and the macronutrient mix. 

(macronutrient explainer- you’re body needs all of them)

 Ideally, you want 50% carbs, 30% fat, and 20% protein.

It is often effective for reducing body fat to reduce carbs to 40-45% and increase protein to 25-30% of your calories and keep fat the same

While it's probably best to eat minimally processed foods with lots of plants, don't focus too much on food quality because its a slippery slope. So its probably better to get protein from eggs and lean meat and fish, protein powder is totally fine because it's affordable and quick to consume. 

It's probably better to have fruits and vegetables and whole grains for your carbs- but not everyone has access to those - so white rice is fine, even sugar can be fine for some people- just not in huge amounts.

In general, we want to avoid giving value judgments to food such as good or bad for you, healthy or unhealthy, clean or unclean. Food is just food. 

So now we hopefully have figured out our daily expenditure and figured out how to alter our food to create a mild deficit- and this may take many weeks to get figured out. 

Now we execute this by keeping this consistent deficit most days- and I say most days because sometimes your just going to want to eat a pizza or go out drinking with your friends and thats totally ok. Allow yourself to deviate and then go back to your plan the next day or as soon as you can again. When we have an all-or-nothing attitude we are more likely to fail hard because if you have one off day you might want to give up because you think you blew it- and we have to turn our minds away from that notion and buy into the process of it. 

And as I mentioned before you’re only going to lose about 1-2 lbs a week doing this, so it may be weeks before you can see visible results when you look in the mirror, or the number on the scale shifts significantly- and again you just have to buy into the process of it. And if a month goes by and you’re really not seeing results than we might start to think something is off in your energy equation- either your expenditure is lower than you think or your food is higher than you think and so you need to take a pause, adjust and try again. 

Side note- your weight can fluctuate a lot- like 5pound or more during the day. One time i weighted myself before and after peeing in the morning it was almost 2 lbs. So we should weight ourselves first thing in the morning after peeing. But becuase theres still a lot of variability you want to take a rolling average by taking a few days worth of weights and averaging those out. 

And taking a pause brings me to my final piece of strategy here- which is if you have 10 or more lbs to shift, its actually a good practice to take one or two weeks of after like 4-6 weeks of cutting to just eat at maintenance and let your body relax and let your mind relax a bit. You dont want to just stop and eat whatever in whatever quantity- continue the habit of tracking but eat closer to maintenance and maybe incorporate more carbs or just food that you find pleasurable in general. 

And then after a week or two break you go back on your lower consumption plan and you stick with it again for 4-6 weeks. And every time you do this you can lower your body fat by a few percentage points and eventually with enough cycles you can get down to your end goal. 

If you're a naturally bigger person getting down to like 20% body fat might be a good goal- if you’re leaner then getting under 15% is a good goal- but getting under 10% is going to be significantly harder because your body is really going to want to fight that. 

And again, if you’re currently like 40% plus body fat, and would need to lose 50 or more pounds of fat mass to get even close to 20% that's probably not going to be something that will work for you. 

And ideally, we would all be happy with the bodies we have and nobody would feel any sort of pressure to change to conform to whatever standards or expectations we might have. 

But what about ozempic/wegovy? 

In studies, people have lost up to 20% of their body weight- 

Seems to work but it also seems to cause pretty serious lean mass loss which lowers your metabolism overall leading to a negative cycle. 

And this is another important general point about fat loss. Usually when people loose weight they're also losing some amount of muscle tissue. You want to preserve as much as possible by doing consistent strength training and getting sufficient protein- 

It's also definitely true that testosterone as trt can really help with this because in most cases you can actually gain a bit of muscle in a fat loss phase with trt. And testosterone is a future episode so stay tuned for that- but I've definitely seen blood work comparing natural bodybuilders to ones on TRT and the natural bodybuilders often have really low testosterone when they're dieting down…

For unnatural bodybuilders- a lot of then actually use more drugs during the cutting phase that. They do then during their bulking phase because of this exact reason. This will also be a topic I'll be covering soon. 

And this drug is needed for diabetic and we in short supply so morally we need to leave it for the people who really need it right now. 

Getting toned - 

If your goal is to get more toned well congrats because you've already achieved that because there is no such thing as toning. Literally not a thing.

What people really mean is they want visible muscle definition without necessarily getting big.

How do you do this? You strength train so your muscles are a little bigger, and you lose fat so there's less other tissue covering your muscles. 

That's all.

Gaining Muscle Size

Yay, its bro shit time 

Again we have to ask why and embrace the origin of our desires to look a certain way. 

As with strength training we need progressive overload - add reps, add sets, add weight, add instability, slow tempo of reps

And you can do strength and size at the same time and for most people you don't need to pick one

If we're starting out doing any work will add muscle size if you don't have much

But to get size we need to train in a specific rep range of 6-20 reps (8-12) is a good general range for simplicity. 

And we also need to do a certain amount of sets per week. 3 per muscle group is a good minimum for beginners, 10 is ideal for fast growth, up to 20 sets for advanced lifters but each set provides diminishing marginal returns (1st set is most productive and every successive set is a little less productive)

Junk volume- beyond a certain amount of sets and reps it's basically either a waste of time or potentially harmful. I would put this around 20 sets per week and 200 reps for most people. 

Classic split- legs, back, chest, shoulders

Functional split - push, pull, legs

My split- push including lower, pull including lower

I think it makes more sense to try and hit muscle groups more than once a week because as long as you have decent nutrition and rest they can be trained more often and you'll probably see better gains by taxing muscles more often. On the flip side maybe you don't want to do every muscle group every day because some of our bigger muscles might want two days to recover.  But people definitely do this type of training and still manage to get bigger

I also think for most people working out 5 days a week is probably the most they can realistically sustain. There are people who can do 6 or even 7 but they're generally professional athletes with really good nutrition and recovery. 

Sleep is probably the most important aspect of recovery because our best repair and regeneration happens in your later sleep cycles. Meaning you generally sleep in 1.5 hour cycles and the more of the cycles you get in each successive cycle has more recovery potential. So our bodies release most of our growth hormones after 6 hours of sleep which is why you hear athletes who sleep like 10+ hours. But some people need less sleep and you probably already know that if that's you. 

Generally it's better to organize the individual workouts so that you start with the biggest movements using the most muscles, your squats, deadlifts, chest press, row. And the. After you move away from the center of the body to progressively smaller muscles. So you do your chest, then you do your shoulders, and finally you do your arms and maybe forearms. 

There's any number of free programs you can find online and some of them are a bit suboptimal but most are at least fine and many are quite good- do do what works for you but keep these principles in mind and feel free to alter the programs you find to better adhere to them. I can't recommend any specific ones because I've always written my own programs and so I just don't have much experience using others to point you to the best- but once in a while I look at some for either inspiration or confirmation of what I'm already doing 

Another big consideration is how hard you train for. If you're using a weight that's too light and you get to end of your set and keep going than it means you need to add weight until it becomes hard again. You know it's a good weight for hypertrophy if you train to near complete failure. You don't have to fail completely but you need to get to maybe only one or two reps in reserve - meaning if you had to you could do one or two more but your form would probably really suffer 

Aside from adding weight we can also slow down our tempo to increase time under tension. Each movement as an eccentric and a concentric phase - in the concentric your doing your main movement and then the eccentric is releasing it. So for a bench press when your raising the bar off your chest that's the concentric and if you're lowering it that's the concentric. Eccentric is building tension and concentric is releasing that tension through effort. 

You want to really emphasize the eccentric phase for maximum growth. You should take about one second for the concentric phase and a full two-three seconds for the eccentric phase. So a really slow lowering. Trusy me bros this is good shit. 

You also really want to emphasize full range of motion - which depends on the exercise but when You're exercising a joint it goes from basically all the way straight to all or nearly all the way bent. So if you're doing squats you need to get low enough that your hips are a little below your knees. If your doing a bench you want to get the bar down to nearly touching your chest. Etc. If you can't do full range of motion and you can't do controlled tempo than you need to drop your weight- even if it's means taking a hit to your ego.

But this is another big point - don't compare the weights your lifting to the people around you in the gym - and especially don't compare the way their bodies look. Focus on your own improvement and process. It's ok to be inspired by the people around you, or even notice how strong or big you might be compared to them- but don't use other people as an anchor for judging your own progress.

Food- increase food Intake by modest amount (100-300 calories per day with between 1.5 and 2g per kilo of bodyweight per day). If you do more than that you'll add fat that you then might need to lose later. 

Though just to repeat you can still gain muscle size in a fat loss phase if you're eating a lot of protein and especially with some hormone optimisation. 

One last thing about achieving asthetic goals: when you want to change the way your body looks its very important that you really moderate your alcohol consumption. Alcohol has a lot of negative reprocussions but its also kind of empty calories in the sense that your body doesnt really know how to use it for anything- it also seriously impares your recovery and your workouts and so limiting our drinking to maybe once a week or less is a great idea- if you have a hard time controlling your drinking than I would focus on that before anything else because it will improve your life considerably. 

And theres a lot to talk about with regards to alcohol consumption in queer social culture- and theres going to be a lot of talking about that in future episodes- so it can be really hard to balance moderation with an active social life and participation in culture- but more people are doing it these days and if your friends are pressuring you into drinking or doing anything else you dont really want to do than maybe these people arent going to be good friends for you. 

I definitely used to drink a lot- and i’ve cut back to probably 4 or so drinks a week and I’ll probably to continue to cut back- mostly because I would rather get a good night sleep than get drunk. I live in a state where marijuana is legal and thats been a massive help because rather than drinking I can just get a little high and even though the sensations are different it helps to satisfy that need to release built up stress or tension and allows me to process through feelings- and marijauana is way less harmful than alcohol so it can be a great harm reduction tool. 

Bonus: Gaining fat

This is definitely more of rare goal- but there are definitely people out there looking to actively gain fat- either because they're very underweight or because they like the way it looks. There's definitely a very strong online 'gainer' and 'feeder' culture of people who get off on this and if that's your thing than honestly good for you. 

I think in the gainer community and the bear community at large there's definitely an emphasis on having a large round belly- without adding a lot of fat in other areas- so like still having visible chest muscles and leg muscles. And the reality is that this is probably genetic. I don't think there's a way of eating or a type of food that would lead to more of a belly. 

I tend to add fat all over my body rather than getting a distinct belly so for me- I don't think this is a look I could ever achieve. I get big love handles and fat on my chest before I get a belly.I've heard people say that fat in your love handles is specifically from sugar and frankly there's zero fucking évidence for this being true- it's just one of those things people repeat because it sounds true. 

So in order to gain fat we basically just need to take what I said before about fat loss and invert it so that you're eating about 500-1000 extra calories per day. So knowing input and output is still important but you have a lot more freedom to just eat whatever whenever. I feel like probably keeping your protein and fat intake the sake and just adding more carbs is probably the way to go if you still want to look muscular. But I could be making that up 

I also should say that in terms of health concerns - it's considered to be healthier to have an even distribution of body fat rather than a lot of concentration around your mid section - the reason for this is when you get a big belly a lot of that fat is added underneath your muscles and inside your organ cavity. This fat crowds your organs and impaires their function so that's definitely a downside. But you're body and health are your own business and if you like looking like that and it makes you happy than that also probably has a really positive impact on your mental health that might be more important to your actual quality of life. So whatever - we live in a bleak helldcape and we need to embrace what joy we can find where and when we can find it 

OUTRO

So thats the fitness primer- 17 pages of notes and however many digressions and tangents we’ve reached the end of this epdiosde. I hope you got some value out of it even fif it might have been full of contradictions and sources of confusion- but the reality is that fitness and nutrition science is still very much in its infancy and theres just a lot we dont know or keep finding conflicting evidence for- so do your best- stick to the basics and do what works for you. 

Next episode will cover how you can identify and accept your genetic potential and limitations when it comes to what your body can do and what it looks like. That should be a shorter episode- but lol- I thought this one would be kind of short and I just kept adding to the script.

Someday I'll figure out how to wrap these episodes up in a cool way- but that day is not today…

Bye bros