How I suck less at exercise — Super Serious Health

“Progress is the LIFEBLOOD of sustained motivation.”—my brain in a rare moment of profundity

How I Suck Less at Exercise

How I suck less at exercise can be boiled down to this…

Pick an exercise—I pick an exercise that is simple & safe, but good bang for my sucking less buck (like, no thanks on the functional twisting kettlebell lunge with a turkish get-up)
Start easy AF—I start with a VERY easy workout incorporating that specific movement (and sometimes only that one movement)
Make TINY increases—I then make the smallest, most incremental, tiniest, itty-bittyist (ok you get it) increases in volume, intensity, or weight from workout to workout
Repeat—I do this over and over again until I see the results I want, or I plateau in my gainzzz (or I get bored)

The end.

Want more?

You savage!

Okay, here’s more…

With exercise, the name of the game is progression

“Progress is the LIFEBLOOD of sustained motivation.”—a thing my brain just thought in a rare moment of profundity

Here are a few ways I incorporate progression into exercise:

Adding weight
Adding volume (reps or sets), and
Reducing rest time (between sets)
Increasing intensity (think like jogging at a faster pace)

I ALWAYS start with much lower weight, lower reps, less total sets, and more rest time than I know I can do.

Example using Bench Press:

-Let’s say I think I can…

Lift 145 lbs
For 8 reps
For 3 sets
With 2 minutes rest in between

-If that’s what I think, I will START with:

135 lbs
For 5 reps
For 2 sets
With 3 minutes rest

-Once I’m able to do that…

I start adjusting the parameters mentioned above (and ideally you just start with 1 of them)
Meaning… do the same exact workout but do 6 reps per set instead of 5
The point is this: I make the SMALLEST incremental increases as humanly possible.
Why?
- Because progress is the LIFEBLOOD of sustained motivation
- I want to keeping making progress perpetually so that I always feel like I am #winning
- The last thing I want is to hit my “plateau” too quickly which is super defeating and de-motivating
- And I could also hurt myself (and still do so way too often)

***

Okay, now that we have that sh*t out of the way…

…let’s talk about actual things I do:

But first!

*BEWARE* The below is extremely pared down and simple. Remember, I try to do only the most impactful stuff in exchange for the least amount of time and effort. Why? Because I’m tryna live my life and not make this my life. Obvi there is WAY more stuff you could (and probably should) do than the below if your goal was to not suck at all. But for me, I just wanna suck a little less. Capeesh?

1. Resistance Training

Body weight stuff

Push ups
Pull ups
Air squats / box jumps

*Will often do variations of these movements to “mix it up” (lol)

With weights/in a gym

Bench press / dumbbell press (sometimes with an incline)
Weighted pull ups / pull downs (with various grips)
Goblet squats (basically a “front squat”)
Walking lunges while holding weight

*Will also do variations of these movements

**This is about 90% of what I do with resistance training as of 2019 (except when I’m at Koko FitClub)

Wanna try to implement progression into these exercises?

Exercise Challenges

2. Cardio

In my world, there are two types of “cardio”:

The mindless moving around randomly stuff just to get heart rate up (walking the dogs, jogging slowly, “hiking”)
The intentional, deliberate, trying-to-improve-my-cardiovascular-fitness stuff (e.g., programed treadmill workouts, timed runs, etc.)

#1 is pretty self-explanatory, and has its place (especially in stress management)

For #2, examples of the intentional stuff usually looks like this:

Timed runs—Running a specific distance for time (ideally the exact same course)
- Pick a distance (e.g., 1 mile), run/jog it and time yourself
- Keep doing that same course/distance over the next weeks/months
- Try to shed off the smallest incremental bit of time you can each time (or said another way, run at a TINY bit faster pace)
  - Why? ‘memba the whole soliloquy I gave you above about progression?
15 minute interval training—typically on a treadmill or elliptical like high-intensity-interval-training (HIIT) sessions
- If you really do a HIIT (like a Tabata), you won’t wanna do another session.

Before I wrap up this section about cardio, I feel the need to say this…

HERE’S THE THANG ‘BOUT CARDIO:

Intense cardio suckkksssss.

Like when you’re heaving for air in that random spin class that Karen invited you to. (damn it Karen!)

That makes you NEVER want to do it again.

Suffering sucks shit (especially when you gotta get out of your warm bed to do it)

And so you aren’t gonna do it again until you wait long enough ‘til you forget how much it sucked.

And then Karen asks you again in January and you go and hate yourself all over again.

I personally avoid the Karen scenario by starting WAY below my pain threshold and then SLOWLY adding intensity/effort/volume over time (progression).

You can do this with so many different variations of cardio.

I’ve seen epic gainz in cardio fitness with this simple strategy.