Pursuing multiple avenues of self improvement can at times be very mentally exhausting. You need to keep track of multiple differing goals and slowly progress in each over time. Due to the day-to-day slow progress, sometimes it can lead you to question your efforts and start a negative spiral. In order to combat this, I think making a plan and acknowledging or tracking your achievements along the way is crucial. To that end, I’ll share my current goals and progression to both hold myself accountable, as well as share my current self-improvement plan.
Fitness Plan
I believe being fit and healthy is a necessity for a happy life. Not only does your physical health impact your mental health, but many of the lessons learnt through challenging yourself can lead you to grow in various other avenues. Your health directly impacts your mood, therefore impacting a great deal of your life. As Arthur Schopenhauer put it, “Health so far outweighs all other blessings of life that a truly healthy beggar is happier than a sick king”.
Gym Routine
If you read my previous blog post, you’ll know I lost 30kgs in as little as 3 months. While I can’t fully recommend the path I took as the healthiest, it did impact my life greatly and led me to fall in love with going to the gym. That initial step led me to slowly building a body I’m proud of, has led me to form new friendships in sports, and has changed my diet for the better.
Upper Routine
My routine currently is an Upper-Lower split. I dedicate 2 days a week to working out my upper body, and 2 days a week working out my lower body. Additionally, on occasion I’ll try to go for a short 3km run when possible. My upper body routine consists of 3 working sets of 10 of seated rows, lat pull downs, bench press, front raises, shoulder press and triceps pushdowns. When I say ‘working set’ I am referring to sets where you use the most manageable weight you can without compromising form of the exercise or time under tension (how slow you are doing the rep). This allows for you to do a few sets to slowly work your way up to the ‘working set’ weight and reduce the chance of injury by warming up and recruiting the required muscles for the task. Personally, I tend to lean towards more time under tension and higher reps (10), but occasionally when wanting to push my strength, I’ll drop the amount of repetitions and increase the weight. Once again, this is without compromising form!
My current routine has recently been modified due to an injury I sustained from Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and has focused a little bit more on recovery and strengthening weak muscles. That said, I did used to incorporate pull ups, bent over rows and Australian pull ups, to work towards improving my overall pull up numbers. Once I am fully recovered, I’ll look towards incorporating some of these exercises, as well as alternating between a ‘strength’ day using a 5 working sets of 5 repetitions with heavier weight, and a ‘foundation’ day which will be the regular 3 working sets of 10 reps. The reason for this, in my opinion, the science is still out about which method is the most effective, so hitting both types will not only provide variety for your routine, but hopefully cover all bases.
Lower Routine
My Lower Routine follows the same principals as my upper routine, focusing on time under tension and not compromising form. Unfortunately, when life starts to whittle me down, my lower routine is the one to suffer. That being said, when I’m most consistent, I still implement the ‘foundation’ day and ‘strength’ day.
My routine consists of starting with squats, Romanian deadlifts, lunges, leg press and calf raises. Once again, these are performed to focus on the time the muscle is under tension, and minimizing potential injuries by focusing on form.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
I also train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a grappling martial art. It focuses on using grappling techniques to control and submit an opponent. I originally signed up to get into a martial art that would provide me with a decent base to defend myself if the situation would arise, better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war right? But later in my journey I acknowledge that there is a lot of mental strengthening going on, becoming comfortable in uncomfortable situations, pushing yourself to your limits, and the hardest of all, wrestling with your own ego and understanding its power and influence.
While at times I get injured and have moments of doubt about continuing in the sport, the friendships, physical strength benefits, security benefits, and mental challenges outweigh the negatives at this point in time.
BJJ has greatly aided my journey in fitness. As I’m typing this, I’ve been off for about 2 months due to injury, and even though my diet and workout routine is the same, without BJJ I’ve put on ~5kgs. My advice to everyone would be to also find a sport you like as the extra activity definitely helps with staying fit.
Gym Philosophy
At this point it’s important to take note of my workout philosophy, for better or worse, so that you can understand my thought process and see if it’s suitable for you.
Time under Tension
Time under tension is the focus of stretching the muscle for a longer time period, putting it under more stress. I think this is a super important concept as the old adage is ‘your muscle doesn’t see what weight you’re holding’; it’s all about what your muscle feels and does. This concept suits me specifically as in BJJ you need to use repetitive movements and hold certain positions for an extended time. As it’s all about controlling the weight, I believe you’re less likely to injure yourself by monitoring your constant movement and avoiding any ‘spazzy’ movements.
Progressive Overload
While Progressive Overload is spoken about a lot in fitness, in my beginning years I didn’t fully understand the concept and just attributed overload to the specific weight of the load. As I progressed, and gains slowed down (goodbye beautiful nooby gains), I realised there are many factors to slowly tweak to push progress forward; Slowing down movements to put the muscle under more strain, alternating between low-weight, high-rep range to higher-weight, lower-rep range, cutting down on rest breaks, improving form to target the specific areas I want and minimize recruiting other muscles. If you keep tweaking and keeping track of your targets, you’ll continue to progress and minimize the risk of stagnating.
Rest Breaks
When resting in between sets, I try to focus on the 3 minute mark for Super-sets or compound movements, and ~2 minute mark for isolated movements. Sometimes, particularly on a rough morning, I’ll give myself more time. My belief is that giving yourself more time is okay when your objective is to do your best at the movement, keep the form without recruiting extra muscles or injuring yourself, and controlling the weight. I think most people’s egos get a hold of them and they recruit far more muscles than they are targeting to achieve an arbitrary number (looking at you gym guys who hip thrust on bicep curls).
Upper-Lower Split
I chose the upper-lower split as from my research you need to hit muscle groups at least 10 times in a week. For me this is easily achieved by splitting the aim for muscles groups into 2 lots of 5. While I’m always critical of fitness studies due to the methodology and extensive variables, I have seen decent results from hitting muscle groups twice in a week.
Diet and Supplements
When it comes to Diet, I’ve tried a lot throughout the years; Meatless Mondays, Keto diet, Carnivore Diet. My beliefs when it comes to what you should eat comes to your specific body, for me, I have landed on the Keto diet, and while at times I eat over the carb limit I should have, It’s a goal I use. My main reason for this is to focus on eating at least 2 grams of protein per kg of body weight, though I personally use this formula for my ‘ideal’ weight as opposed to current weight. I personally noticed a significant increase in muscle when consuming more protein, the hard part is trying to achieve that amount of protein every day. I also tend to avoid complex carbs and various vegetables as I’m slowly working out what specifically is negatively impacting my body.
To counter-balance this, I take a daily does of various supplements in order to combat any nutrient deficiency my diet would give me. At the moment, this is about 15 tablets a day, but this includes supplements for recovery aid, muscle growth, and nootropics, rather than just vitamins or minerals. The only supplements I use outside of this is my homemade pre-workout (much cheaper than store bought alternatives, and far more efficacious) and standard Creatine Monohydrate.
While this has mostly been an overview of my fitness journey and current beliefs, I plan to eventually go into detail with some sub-sections to highlight why I think certain diets/supplements are beneficial. Good luck!
