This is a post on a health-related topic. We are not medical or other trained health professionals. The information presented here is what learned about ourselves on our journey. Your journey is different and it is best to consult your doctor or other medical professional before making a change. Please see our disclaimer at Before Making Lifestyle Changes before making any changes to diet, activity, etc.

As with many health topics, this one proved to be subjective. We will divide recovery into three categories to provide a frame of reference.

• During workout recovery, this relates to the amount of time between sets. This is based on personal workout styles, physical health, age, etc. 
• Immediate post-workout recovery, which includes things like post-workout eating and rest.
• Intra-workout rest is defined as the amount of time between workout periods required to allow us to heal the damage done.

We found the first two so specific to a person’s goals, health, sport, etc., that they should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. While there are similarities across all recovery for all sports, they are such generalizations we didn’t find them helpful. Here is why there isn’t an easy button for those two items:

• Those two things are the uniqueness of the person and their goals. 
• All sports and fitness goals have different training paradigms. 

The Bodybuilder vs The Sprinter

To explain why we say that, let’s talk about two types of athletes: bodybuilders and sprinters. These two athletes’ goals will have similar but different approaches to training. Bodybuilders will use bulking/cutting cycles and heavy lifting to increase lean muscle mass. A sprinter is attempting to increase power and stamina in their legs while maintaining a lighter overall body. The during-workout and immediate post-recovery routines will be similar but not the same. 

This is why we are not covering those two specific topics in detail. However, this write-up addresses many of those points. 

The Wrong Answers

The biggest challenge we found in addressing this was the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy of unavoidable degeneration at age. After 30, we know we start losing muscle as part of aging. Most people are advised on how to stem that loss rather than how to address growing muscles. That turns muscle loss into a reality when it doesn’t have to be. You can gain muscles as you age. That doesn’t mean you will be able to grow 22-inch biceps if you are just getting started at 50, but it is more of a numbers game that requires a separate post.

That doesn’t mean you can push your body like you are younger and growing. This is where the idea of increased recovery time comes in. As we age, we have injuries to contend with, sleep challenges, stressors, etc., that compound these recovery times. You can still improve your strength and mobility but must do so via proper recovery.  

Building vs Remodeling

A good example of how we handle aging and recovery is similar to building vs. remodeling a house. If you are building a home from scratch, you lay out plans, start construction, and continue until finished. It is very straightforward. Let’s consider adding a new addition to an existing house that is still occupied. 

You start with a plan, but as soon as you dig in, you may find sections of plumbing that need to be redone to come up to code. Certain sections of that house will be off-limits when construction occurs. You may find dry rot or even asbestos that requires special handling. That is the reality of not only remodeling but working out at a later age. You have to account for it because if you don’t, you can get injured. This is why recovery matters. 

Recovery Times

We found that recovery time is directly related to the intensity of the workout. For most people, the rest period is 1-3 days, depending on many factors, including fitness level and age. For people over 50, it is common to see 2-3 days between training to prevent injury. This is due to everything from reduced healing capacity to diminished protein synthesis. All of that can lead to overtraining, no matter your age. Conversely, atrophy and muscle loss become a reality if you never push yourself. 

Instead of offering opinions, we will point you to different options to explore. Recovery turns out to be a complicated personal thing. Many people have already written volumes on this. We wanted to put the context here to reduce the noise.

•  One extreme is Bodybuilding’s take on recovery.
• The other extreme is Second Wind Movement’s Guide to Recovery
• Good RX’s write-up on recovery is somewhere between the two.

Wrapping Up

As with all things health, workout recovery times are personal. In this post, we have given reasons for this and some useful links to material on why. In our opinion, the biggest challenge we have as we age is misinformation. Another is not being realistic about overcoming age-based challenges while recognizing we need to do them in new ways, which can lead to overtraining. Somewhere between these two is the correct answer for you. 

The post Your Muscle Recovery Need Is Unique first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

With winter and holidays, many of us find ourselves eating above our calorie budgets. That is easy to do considering what fall and the holiday cycles bring. We find ourselves tempted by the treats, and for most a bit more sedentary due to the weather changes and decreased sunlight. Instead of denying this or worrying about it and feeling bad when we go over it, let’s embrace it for growth.

Grow, cut, maintain, then do it again. That is a very oversimplified way to think about how bodybuilding works. Yes, there are a lot of nuances and other parts to body building but let’s use this over trivialization to simplify our holiday eating dilemma. Let’s use this type of formula to talk about a yearly cycle as if we were going to train for a yearly competition. 

Most of us want to maintain some sort of mobility and physical capability. For many, it starts with a New Year’s resolution. Other people may have a life-changing event or news that challenges them to do something. That was my case. In any of these cases, the catalyst and starting point are usually random. 

Because the starting point in the year can be so random, we can end up fighting things that we don’t need to. Let’s be honest, cutting weight during holidays is harder than when we have a more fixed diet. You can do it, but it will be harder. What if your goal was to grow in size? That seems like it would be a no-brainer to do in the fall. If you are trying to gain, the longer and more active days of summer create other barriers. 

A Year At A Glance

Let’s try and bring some order to the year to stop making it so hard. What if we looked at the year as if we were training for a competition? We will use the idiom ‘Sun’s out, guns out’ as our goal where the beginning of summer is our ‘competition’ we are training to be in shape for. This is how we define our year:

• October to February: Use the additional treats and food to build lean muscle.
• March to May: Work on the definition of body structure by cutting unneeded fat. 
• June to September: Maintain target weight while working to increase mobility

In the sequence above we are working with the seasons to make our goals easier.  Whether you are gaining weight or losing it, each season can help you in your goal. We would assert that this is what most of us want to accomplish. We want the strength and mobility of increased muscle while limiting the unneeded fat which is not considered healthy. 

It’s Your Routine Not Ours

There is no way we can write a routine for this. Why? It’s your body and your goals. This is a roadmap for us to think about our goals and easier ways to attain them. For example, we can give an idea of why this helps with an imaginary routine set to those periods.

• October to February:
  • Increase time under tension and progressive overload to grow lean muscle.
  • Expect to gain 2-3% of body weight as a mix of lean muscle and some additional fat.
  • Use additional sedentary periods as recovery cycles to push muscles to grow.
• March to May:
  • Lower working weight and increase reps as well as tempo to increase calorie burning.
  • Manage a diet closer to the calorie budget for weight loss to reduce unneeded fat to achieve the body weight you desire.
  • Use improving weather to increase activity levels outdoors.
• June to September:
  • Focus exercise on full range of motion and optimizing for proper form.
  • Monitor weight to verify it is not spiking high or low and adjust the calorie budget as needed.
  • Work to improve symmetry over producing more lean muscle to recover for the next year. 

But I Don’t Want To Get Swole Bro! 

This is what we hear commonly from many people as soon as we say anything about gaining lean muscle and increasing weight. It seems counter-intuitive but we are not talking about bodybuilding to gain size per se. Bodybuilding uses these phases very efficiently to train for a competition. We can use that format but for a different purpose.

You can choose the intensity of your workouts to create the muscle structure you want. We don’t feel most would argue that increased lean muscle helps us. That being said, I don’t want 23” biceps so my muscle goals are not about bulk. I want to be able to lift a bag of concrete and carry paint cans up a ladder and not feel worn out the next day. That can be achieved by simply having more lean muscle over fat. At the end of the day, you do you is what this is about.

Back to the Cycle

Our point is that if you are in a seasonal cycle like many of us, why not simply adjust your goals to take advantage of it? Trying to exchange fat for lean muscle through body recomposition is not realistic for many of us. You will find sources that say you can but the devil is always in the details nutrition and exercise-wise. It takes a great deal of dedication to make body re-composition happen.

We know bodybuilders increase their lean muscle over time through a cycle of building and cutting.  Also, we know that we can’t always be building as we need recovery to maintain our healthy bodies and mobility. If you are going to gain muscle you will probably increase your overall fat which means you will likely want to cut size at some point.

We feel having a yearly goal that is seasonal helps structure the cycles of gain and loss. Every season brings different benefits and challenges. We can use them to our advantage to optimize for our goals if we are aware of them and can align to their benefits. While it is a bit of planning in advance, we feel it can help you avoid the opposite problem which is seasonal failure and giving up during certain parts of the year.  

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed how to take advantage of seasonal changes to optimize your body goals. We talked about how you can approximate a bodybuilder’s build and cut cycle to increase your lean mass and reduce unwanted fat. By doing this you can optimize your workouts while handling seasonal changes gracefully. 

Also, just because it is similar to bodybuilding doesn’t mean you have to ‘get swole’ as some call it. Lean muscle and what your ‘guns’ look like are personal choices. But, by taking a yearly seasonal approach, you can be ready for the time when ‘Suns out, guns out’ comes around. 

The post How To Make Fitness Seasonal first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

In a previous post, we talked about how creating new habits takes courage, dedication, and discipline. Waiting to figure out what worked and didn’t was maddening. When we started, we figured it was going to be simple; change calories and we change our weight. In this post, we will discuss why this approach didn’t work, what we learned, and how we have learned to iterate over small changes over going all in.

Our Simple Goals

 We wanted a weight change of 0.5 – 1 lb. a week for a sustainable goal. In transparency, our goal was to lose weight. We found that the same rules apply to gaining weight. It’s known as the 3,500-calorie rule. That goal equated to a change of 500 calories daily for each of us.  Like many things you will read in the area of weight management, it turned out to be more of a guideline. We will discuss this in another post.

Going all in Instead of Iteration

Of course, we didn’t just reduce calories. We went for low-fat, low carbs and high-protein meals. We also decided to increase our water intake. Further, we cut out sweets in exchange for fruits and nuts. If you read our post on hidden calories we would find we were simply changing one devil for another. And of course, we started exercising more.

We are aware that calorie counting is a pain, goes in and out of fashion, and doesn’t take into account nutrition. Still, if we hadn’t counted our calories we would have never learned that supposedly healthy food was a calorie-dense as unhealthy. We had found another place that we felt lied to by so many sources of information.

So What Happened?

  It took roughly 4 weeks to start to even kick in. Why? Because it wasn’t easy to reduce our calories to the desired level. It was very hard to believe the data of what that looked like portion-wise. We were also forcing our bodies to make changes. The faster you try and make the changes the more it will want to fight you. Our bodies tend to want to stay where they are at. 

Here is where the problem came up. After 4 weeks we saw changes. If someone asked us what caused the change and we couldn’t tell them with any certainty. Was it the reduction of fat or the lowering of calories? We didn’t know the impact of water on our bodies as discussed in this post. Maybe it was the increased physical activity. Like other dieters, we cheated a lot as we stopped eating the dopamine fun foods like chocolate.

Lack of Repeatability Left us Stuck

Remember our goal as stated wasn’t about nutrition or being healthy. Our goal was sustainable weight management. For our weight management to be sustainable, it had to be repeatable. If we didn’t know what impacted the changes, we had no way of knowing how to stay on track. At this point, it wasn’t a lifestyle change. After riding the roller coaster up and down, we decided to attack our goals more scientifically.

It is the lack of consistency and multiple changes that create the roller coaster rides. It is easy to lose or gain weight as we stated in our post on the Weight Management Equations. What is hard is controlling or sustaining it by understanding what works for a person. This is what we found from the empirical evidence from our journey.

Here is What We Found: 

• Cutting carbs meant taking away too much fuel for us to work out properly. The workout intensity diminished over time.
• Adding excess protein created a need for more water to digest which created other GI tract problems. 
• Eating healthy, before we started monitoring calories, was adding more calories instead of lowering them.
• We were overworked and didn’t have enough recovery capacity from the exercise. This reduced the dopamine hit that we all get from a workout.  
• We would get injured working out as our bodies couldn’t recover based on our new ‘healthy’ diet.
• The results were initially good, but plateaued quickly and we had no idea what change caused what result.

We found that this was becoming a bad cycle. The cycle reinforced that all the suffering was for nothing. If you don’t see results and are suffering for something, you will stop trying. While we lost weight, we failed to maintain it.

Applying an Engineering Mindset

Coming from the software world, we decided to apply agile practices to our weight loss. This meant changing a couple of things, getting feedback from the scale for a couple of weeks, learning if it worked, and adjusting the course based on our learning. Through this approach, we found a way to understand what worked and what didn’t.

We finally landed on the fact we had to be more scientific.  It took making a small change, waiting for a result, and then iterating over to learn what worked for our bodies and goals. By starting with simple, understandable, consistent changes, we learned what worked for us.

Tips for Keeping on Track:

• Eating well-balanced meals unless directed by a medical or similar health professional helped us. We found unbalanced meals such as fat-free or sugar-free will not necessarily be sustainable long term.
• Be honest. If you enjoy wine or beer you need to count them in your calculations. They add up quickly and can skew understanding if left out.
• Ask the portion size before you order something at a restaurant so you aren’t surprised.  
• Make changes 2-3 at a time. If you change too much all at once it will be hard to understand what happened. 
• Use fast food to your advantage when traveling. They have great nutrition information and their portions are consistent from restaurant to restaurant.
• If you have a bad day, don’t try to compensate. Compensating for a bad day puts noise in your data. Just chalk it up to learning. 

Iteration was Key

With an iterative approach, we found we were able to make connections faster. Connections became learnings we could use. With each learning, we could adjust our course faster. When we hit a plateau, and nothing changed for a few weeks, we knew we had to do some research. As a result, we also realized how much information we received was just wrong.

We learned If we do not see changes after week 3 to adjust our plan. After resetting our calorie budget by 100-200 we would watch it for another week. We learned as we went. If nothing is moving for you, look honestly at what you’re doing. It does take a while for your body to actively feed on its stored calories. Likewise, eating an extra 1000 calories for one day won’t have a permanent impact on weight gain. 

 To be successful we had to learn to do it little by little over time. That is how we got off the cyclical part of diet and exercise. It simply became a game of learning what works for each of us as an individual.  It was the iteration of small changes that allowed us to see and understand changes. These changes lead to sustainability in our weight goals.

The post It’s Best To Iterate Quickly first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

When you change your activity levels you change the amount of calories your body needs. Based on your goals, you need to adjust your intake accordingly. The goal of this post is to help you understand the impact of your activity levels on your goals.

Making it Personal

If you have gone through the BMR exercise in this previous post you know physical activity impacts how many calories you need. The more active you are, the more calories you burn. When first distilling this for our own needs, much of what we found was maddeningly unhelpful information.  

I like going to the gym and lifting weights. For me, it is a stress release. It is also a lifestyle choice because I want to be able to do certain things. If I have to move a 60 lb bag or concrete, I don’t want to have to call someone. It gives me independence. This has a direct impact on my weight and my calorie needs.

I can’t stand going to the gym and walking or running on a treadmill. I do it because I have to. My partner loves running on a treadmill or outside. That is her stress release. She can outrun me and doesn’t become as winded as easily. This activity has a direct impact on her calorie needs. Though she does it, she doesn’t enjoy lifting heavy weights. She can’t carry a 60 lb bag of concrete very far.

Different People, Goals, and Abilities

 Different people, different activities, different impacts on burning calories. We also have different goals and outcomes we want for our specific lifestyles. This is not a post on weightlifting or cardiovascular care so we won’t go into that. We also recognize that both are important in holistic health. Our point is simply both are activities and both impact calories needed and therefore our weight management plans.

Activity isn’t necessarily tied to a gym. Activity can be in multiple forms such as climbing stairs or mowing the lawn. This is what we read when trying to analyze our personal activity levels for the BMR and that makes sense. What we found missing in those explanations was the personalization. 

If you lead a sedentary lifestyle and you climb 2 flights of stairs, you may be winded. A person who runs all the time may be able to climb 50 flights of stairs and not feel winded. Let’s now add one person who is shorter than the other with a smaller step. Do they both get the same physical activity from walking up those steps? 

This is the main issue; we are not all the same. What is a hard activity for one person is not the same as another. This is another reason why people can fail at managing weight; lack of information specific to them. Here is an example of what we find. It gives information for someone who’s 154 lbs. I am not 154 lbs and I don’t want to be. If I was, I doubt I would be able to carry my concrete very far! I was there once and had no muscle structure!  

Ways to Define Activity

We like the definition given here on activity level that takes into account heart rate and breathing. That is for a later post. For those starting, the talk test provides very initial ideas about what moderate and vigorous activity is. It also will give you some idea of what others see as moderate and vigorous activity. This will help give you some guidelines as to how your weight management plan is affected by your activity levels. 

Understanding what activity is to you based on your current abilities is an important piece. It will change as your body changes. You can change it as your goals change. By knowing what it means you can now do an apples-to-apples comparison for what it means to others, This allows you to make a more informed decision about how many calories you need based on BMR. 

This post gives you another tool in your weight management toolbox. You can define what you need to meet your weight management goals. You know what you need without activity and you know the impact of activity on the calories you need. The problem is becoming definable.

The post Easily Pair Your Activity To Goals first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Many of us want control over our weight. Some people want to lose weight. Other people want to gain weight. When we reach our target weight all of us want to maintain that weight. In this post, we will explore one of the most simple concepts in weight management. What we want you to walk away with is an understanding of a couple of really easy concepts to keep in mind the next time you think about your weight goals and meal planning

Consider the Following Traditional Axioms

The formula to gain weight is (Ci > Cn) * t == Wg. If you continually ingest (Ci) more calories than your body needs (Cn), over time (t), your body will store some of those. That is how you gain weight (Wg).

The formula to lose weight is (Ci < Cn) * t == Wl. If you continually ingest (Ci) fewer calories than your body needs (Cn), over time (t), your body will use what it stores to supplement those calories. That is how you lose weight (Wl).

The formula to maintain your current weight is (Ci == Cn) * t == Wm. If you continually ingest (Ci) the same calories that your body needs (Cn), over time (t), your body will remain in balance. That is how you maintain your weight (Wm).

That’s a VERY Broad Generalization

Those statements are very broad and sweeping. In reality, there are many factors to calculate how and why we gain or lose weight. We can’t start with all the nuances though. It is the nuances that take time to understand as they are based on your body and goals, not anyone else’s. This is also why so many people struggle with weight management.

Also, these axioms do not hold 100% true when applied to single forms of nutrition. Getting all of your daily 2,000 calories from bread is not going to have the same outcomes as eating 2,000 calories from fish. Here we need to make some assumptions at the beginning of our journey. These calories come from balanced sources including proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

We will revisit these nuances later in our journey because they are important. Right now there are so many they will become distractions.

Your Understanding of Yourself Is Key

Understanding what our bodies need in terms of calories to manage our weight is key. Everyone is so different with different lifestyles, body sizes, and genetics. You may be a male competitive gamer in your teens that incurs long periods of sitting. At the opposite end of the spectrum, may be competitive bodybuilding women over 50. You may drive a truck for a living. Someone else’s vocation may be a logger. Everyone requires something different calorie-wise.

Where to start then with the axioms? Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR. BMR is a calculation based on height, weight, gender assigned at birth, and activity level. The calories it calculates are what your body needs to survive (pump blood, breathe, etc.) plus the calories you need for the amount of physical activity you do.

How to Use the BMR

You must decide how to manage your intake to get the gains you want. For me, and my timelines, to reduce my weight I started with reducing by 1000 calories a day from roughly 2700 to 1700 to drop a pound a week. That turned into a roller-coaster ride of false starts and stops. It wasn’t sustainable. I would find out later that this was more about not being truly honest with what my intake and exercise levels were.

In the spirit of honesty that we learned the hard way, here is a link to what activity is and isn’t.

The key is time and consistency. You should keep a daily log of what you eat calorie-wise. You should pick a realistic amount under/over your BMR + adjusted calorie needs for activity. Too little and you won’t see enough change. Too much and it won’t be sustainable. This also means weighing yourself regularly.

Learn to Experiment

One thing we feel is an important thing to make this work for you. Think of it as an experiment, not something that is one-and-done. You gather data and look at it. There is no failure. If something isn’t working, change one thing, and re-evaluate in a week. Did that change help? If not, that is simply more data, not a failure. Experiment, collect data, evaluate, learn, and experiment again until something changes. In that change, you will see what works for you.

At this point, you have the tools to understand how to gain, lose, or maintain your weight. These equations were the spark of a bigger journey and life change for us. They were the realization that some of the most complicated things could be simplified and distilled.

After many years of trial and error, we started making powerful connections to other parts of our lives we could simplify through some basic research, understanding, and taking actionable steps based on the outcomes we wanted.

The post Managing Weight Is Easy Math first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.