Fitness Archives | The Art of Manliness https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/ Men's Interest and Lifestyle Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:58:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 10 Exercises You Can Do With a Medicine Ball https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/medicine-ball-exercises/ Thu, 06 Nov 2025 20:18:37 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191473 Long before the advent of barbells, dumbbells, and hi-tech fitness gadgets, there was the medicine ball. This simple piece of exercise equipment has been around for over 2,000 years. Ancient Greek physicians used weighted animal bladders to rehabilitate injured warriors. Hippocrates — the father of medicine himself — was said to have his patients toss […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Illustration of a muscular man holding a medicine ball, featuring the text "Medicine Ball Exercises" to highlight effective exercises with medicine ball, plus a small logo in the bottom right corner.

Long before the advent of barbells, dumbbells, and hi-tech fitness gadgets, there was the medicine ball.

This simple piece of exercise equipment has been around for over 2,000 years. Ancient Greek physicians used weighted animal bladders to rehabilitate injured warriors. Hippocrates — the father of medicine himself — was said to have his patients toss stuffed skins for therapeutic benefit. The term “medicine ball” dates back to the late 19th century, where it gained popularity in American physical culture circles and old-time gymnasiums. Teddy Roosevelt reportedly trained with one. So did turn-of-the-century prizefighters, soldiers, and circus strongmen.

Today, the medicine ball is often an underrated and underutilized implement. If you’re like a lot of gym-goers, you probably see the rack of medicine balls but aren’t entirely sure what to do with them — beyond maybe throwing them against the wall and slamming them on the floor.

But there’s much more you can do with medicine balls than that, and their variety of uses parallels their variety of benefits: medicine balls add resistance without the rigidity of weights and train not just strength, but speed, coordination, balance, and rotational power. They’re an ideal tool for developing explosive strength — a vital yet often overlooked dimension of fitness that not only supports overall health but helps stave off powerpenia, the age-related decline in muscular power that’s key to aging well.

Below, we’ll break down some of the best medicine ball exercises to build power, athleticism, and all-around old-school vigor.

Basic Guidelines

  • Choose the right weight. For power and speed-based movements, lighter is better (6–10 lbs). For slams or strength exercises, you can go heavier (12–20+ lbs). The ball should challenge you without slowing you down.
  • Choose the right kind of ball for the exercise. Use a softer ball for slams or partner work (a.k.a. wall balls or “D-balls”), and a hard rubber one for bounces and floor drills.
  • Maintain form. The goal is explosive, controlled movement — not flailing or jerking.

1. Chest Pass

A person in athletic attire performs a chest pass, one of the classic medicine ball exercises, by pushing a medicine ball from chest height toward a wall.

  • Targets: Chest, triceps, shoulders
  • How: Stand 3–5 feet from a wall or partner. Hold the ball at chest level and forcefully pass it straight out, like a basketball chest pass.
  • Why: Builds upper-body power and coordination. Great warm-up for pressing days.

2. Rotational Throw

A muscular person in gym attire prepares to throw a weighted ball against a wall, demonstrating a rotational throw with a red arrow showing the movement path—an excellent example of medicine ball exercises.

  • Targets: Core, obliques, hips
  • How: Stand sideways to a wall, holding the ball at your hip. Rotate through your torso and throw the ball into the wall as hard as possible. Catch on the rebound or retrieve and repeat.
  • Why: Mimics the rotational power used in punching, swinging, or throwing. Builds athleticism.

3. Overhead Slam

Illustration of a person in athletic wear holding a medicine ball overhead, preparing to slam it downward with force. Text below reads "Overhead Slam"—a powerful move often featured in medicine ball exercises and workouts.

  • Targets: Lats, core, arms, legs
  • How: Raise the ball overhead with arms extended, then slam it down into the ground with everything you’ve got. Squat to retrieve and repeat.
  • Why: A total-body power movement that builds explosiveness. A great workout finisher — and stress reliever.

4. Front Squat

Illustration of a person in a blue outfit performing a front squat as part of medicine ball exercises, holding the ball with a large red upward arrow in the background. Text below reads "Front Squat.

  • Targets: Quads, glutes, core
  • How: Hold the medicine ball at chest height. Squat down, keeping your chest upright and elbows tucked in. Drive back up through the heels.
  • Why: Adds load to a bodyweight squat and forces you to brace the core.

5. Russian Twist

Illustration of a man performing a Russian Twist as part of a medicine ball workout, highlighting the twisting motion with arrows. Perfect for learning exercises with medicine ball to strengthen your core.

  • Targets: Obliques, abs
  • How: Sit on the floor with knees bent, feet hovering or planted. Hold the ball with both hands and rotate side to side, tapping it to the ground each time.
  • Why: Builds rotational core strength and stability. Can be scaled up by adding speed or weight.

6. Wall Ball Shot

Illustration of a person in a squat holding a medicine ball, preparing to throw it at a wall—an effective exercise with medicine ball. Red arrows show the ball’s path. Text reads "Wall Ball Shot.

  • Targets: Quads, glutes, shoulders, cardio
  • How: Stand facing a wall with the ball held at chest level. Squat down, then explode up and throw the ball at a target on the wall 8–10 feet high. Catch and repeat.
  • Why: Blends strength, power, and cardio. A brutal conditioning tool.

7. Medicine Ball Push-Up

Illustration of a person doing a push-up with one hand on a medicine ball and the other on the floor, showing directional arrows for movement. Text reads "Medicine Ball Push-Up"—a challenging addition to your medicine ball workout.

  • Targets: Chest, triceps, core
  • How: Place one hand on the ball and the other on the ground. Perform a push-up. Switch hands each rep or after a set.
  • Why: Increases instability and range of motion, hitting smaller stabilizer muscles.

8. Medicine Ball V-Up

Illustration of a person performing a medicine ball V-up; lying on back, lifting legs and arms to touch the ball to feet, with red arrows showing movement. Great for adding variety to your medicine ball workout.

  • Targets: Abs, hip flexors
  • How: Lie flat, holding the ball overhead. Simultaneously raise your legs and upper body, touching the ball to your feet at the top. Lower under control.
  • Why: Demands coordination, flexibility, and core control.

9. Lunge With Twist

Illustration of a person doing a lunge with a twist, holding a medicine ball—arrows highlight arm, torso rotation, and lower body movement, demonstrating medicine ball exercises for full-body engagement.

  • Targets: Legs, core
  • How: Holding the ball, step forward into a lunge. At the bottom, rotate your torso (and the ball) away from your front leg. Return to center and step back. Alternate legs.
  • Why: Adds balance and core engagement to a classic leg movement.

10. Scoop Toss

Illustration of a person performing a scoop toss, throwing a medicine ball underhand against a wall with a red arrow indicating the motion—perfect for demonstrating medicine ball fitness exercises.

  • Targets: Glutes, hamstrings, back
  • How: Face a wall or partner, hold the ball low, then explode upward and forward, tossing the ball with a scooping motion.
  • Why: Mimics the hinge-and-extend pattern of jumping or Olympic lifting. Builds lower-body power.

Incorporating Medicine Ball Exercises Into Your Workout Routine

Medicine ball work makes a great supplement to calisthenics, sprinting, or kettlebell workouts. Or you can do them at the end of a weightlifting workout to build conditioning. If you’re going to use medicine ball work for that purpose, combine movements that supplement your strength workout. For example, if you hit your upper body that day with the weights, select medicine ball exercises that emphasize the upper body, like chest passes and overhead slams. On lower body days, do front squats and lunges with a twist.

You can even do a workout that consists entirely of medicine ball exercises. Here’s one short, intense circuit workout that hits every part of your body in just 20 minutes.

Medicine Ball Circuit Workout

Do 3–5 rounds of the following, resting 1 minute between rounds:

  1. Overhead Slams – 10 reps
  2. Front Squats – 10 reps
  3. Rotational Throws — 10 reps (5 each side)
  4. Russian Twists – 20 reps (10 per side)
  5. Wall Ball Shots – 15 reps

For an added challenge, finish with a 2-minute max-rep slam test.

The medicine ball is an old-school fitness tool that still carries currency today. Once used by warriors, boxers, and strongmen, it remains a valuable, and honestly fun, training implement for developing explosive strength and vital conditioning.

Illustrations by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> What My Workout Has Looked Like Lately https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/brett-mckay-workout/ Mon, 29 Sep 2025 21:45:59 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190902 If you’ve been following AoM for a while, you know that strength training is a central part of my daily life — the thing, other than my faith and family, that brings me the most joy and satisfaction. Back in my 30s, I trained to hoist as much weight as possible. I did some amateur […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A person wearing a yellow bandana and glasses is performing a deadlift with a loaded barbell in a home gym, showcasing their dedication to fitness and exercise.

If you’ve been following AoM for a while, you know that strength training is a central part of my daily life — the thing, other than my faith and family, that brings me the most joy and satisfaction.

Back in my 30s, I trained to hoist as much weight as possible. I did some amateur lifting competitions, so my goal was to maximize my one rep max on the main barbell lifts. My workout sessions would often last an hour and a half. I really enjoyed that season of my life, but the intensity of the training started to take its toll on me physically and psychologically as I entered my 40s.

I’ll be turning 43 here in a few months. I’m not the man I was a decade back. Life’s busier, and I have a body that’s not quite as forgiving as it once was. Long sessions leave me rundown instead of built-up. Training at this stage of life requires a different approach.

My longtime coach, Matt Reynolds, has helped transition my training for midlife. Since I know many of you reading AoM have grown up with me and are entering your 40s too, I thought it would be helpful to share what my training has looked like lately. Maybe it will give you some inspiration for your own programming.

The Program Framework

I do a strength-training workout 4X a week, using an upper/lower split, with each workout capped at 60 minutes. And I do a cardio workout 2X a week. Sundays I rest, except for taking low-key walks.

Here are the components of my routine:

Strength workouts:

  1. Heavy main lift. Every session starts with a big compound movement: squat, deadlift, bench press, or shoulder press. I go heavy — something in the 3-5 rep range. I’ll occasionally do a heavy single. It scratches the itch to keep strength as a central part of training without beating me up with endless sets.
  2. Backoff volume. After the heavy top set, I do 1-2 backoff sets at a lighter weight. This allows me to accumulate volume while staying within a recoverable zone.
  3. Supplemental Lift. I’ll then do a supplemental lift. If it’s squat day, I’ll do a hamstring-focused supplemental lift like Romanian deadlifts or good mornings. If it’s bench day, I’ll do a shoulder-focused supplemental lift like dumbbell shoulder presses. Enough load to matter, not enough to wreck me.
  4. Circuit. Each session finishes with a circuit — upper or lower, depending on the day. A mix of dips, chins, curls, rows, split squats, leg extensions, or whatever I have equipment for. The goal is simple: get the heart rate up, build some muscle, and walk out with a sweat.

Cardio

As I’ve gotten into midlife, I’ve put more emphasis on heart health. Three mainstays: Zone 2 cardio two times a week for long-term conditioning, rucks for a blend of endurance and load-bearing strength, and one weekly HIIT session to keep the higher gears sharp and to improve my V02 Max (I’ve got an article about VO2 in the works).

Adding Weight and Reps for Progressive Overload

On the heavy lifts, I add about five pounds a week. When I stall out, Matt will lower the weight, and then I start working my way back up.

For the supplemental lifts and circuit work, my goal is to be able to do three sets of 10-12 reps. Once I reach that goal, I’ll add weight to the lift and then do as many reps as possible until I get three sets of 10-12 reps again, and then I add weight again, and the cycle repeats.

Here’s what programming looks like specifically right now for me:

Monday (Lower Day)

Deadlift

  • 1 set × 3 reps @ 500 lbs
  • Backoff set: 1×5 @ 455 lbs

Box Squat

  • 4×3 @ 365 lbs

Lower Circuit

On all circuits, I do the 3 exercises back-to-back, then take a 2.5-minute break, then perform the next circuit, repeating the circuit 3X

  • Leg Press: 3×12 @ 285 lbs
  • Leg Curl: 3 x AMRAP (as many reps as possible) @ 140 lbs
  • Kettlebell swings: 3×20 @ 70 lbs

Tuesday (Upper Day)

Shoulder Press

  • 1×3 @ 195 lbs
  • Backoff sets: 2 x AMRAP @ 180 lbs

Machine Incline Bench Press

I use iso arms on my squat rack for this

  • 3 x AMRAP @ 170 lbs

Pendlay Row

  • 3 x AMRAP @ 260 lbs

Upper Circuit

  • Cable Fly: 3×12 @ 250 lbs
  • Overhead Cable Tricep Extension: 3 x AMRAP @ 150 lbs
  • Dumbbell Curls: 3×12 @ 100 lbs

Wednesday

Zone 2 Cardio

  • One hour walking on an incline treadmill

Thursday (Lower Day)

Hatfield Squat

  • 1×6 @ 350 lbs
  • Backoff sets: 2 x AMRAP @ 325 lbs

Good Morning

  • 3×5 @ 95 lbs

Lower Circuit

  • Leg Press: 3×12 @ 290 lbs
  • Seated Leg Extension: 3 x AMRAP @ 160 lbs
  • Hanging Knee Raise: 3×12 @ bodyweight (195 lbs)

Friday (Upper Day)

Bench Press

  • 1×3 @ 270 lbs
  • 2 x AMRAP @ 235 lbs

Dumbbell Press

  • 3 x AMRAP @ 145 lbs

Upper Circuit

  • Lat Pulldown: 3×12 @ 285 lbs
  • Lateral Raise: 3×12 @ 35 lbs
  • Incline Dumbbell Curl: 3 x AMRAP @ 70 lbs

Saturday

Cardio

  • 30 minutes of Zone 2 cardio

HIIT Workout

  • 4×4: 4 minutes hard, 3 minutes rest (repeated four times)

I sometimes substitute a one-hour ruck for this Zone 2 + HIIT routine. Just depends on what I’m feeling.

Daily Morning Routine

Lessons From Midlife Training

A few takeaways I’ve learned as I’ve adjusted my training for midlife:

  • Strength still matters. I like keeping a heavy barbell movement at the center of each session.
  • Adjust the main lifts as needed. Barbells can be hard on a middle-aged body. Feel free to adjust your technique for the barbell lifts as needed. For example, I no longer do traditional barbell squats and instead use a Hatfield squat due to issues with my shoulders and knee. If you can’t do a conventional barbell deadlift, swap it with a trap bar deadlift. Can’t barbell bench? Do dumbbell bench presses instead.
  • Efficiency is king. I don’t need marathon sessions. Short and focused beats long and meandering.
  • Make time for cardio. Adding consistent cardio has been a game-changer for my overall health and energy levels. It’s helped lower my resting heart rate, and it’s given me more work capacity. I don’t gas out anymore. Walk a lot for that cardio base and include one session of HIIT a week.
  • Don’t be afraid to take time off. I’m still really religious about my training, but I’ve learned not to be afraid to take time off. If I’m feeling beat up or tired due to increased stress, I’ll swap out my usual training session for a walk or a ruck. If I’m on vacation, I don’t train; I just enjoy myself.

This isn’t the strongest I’ve ever been. But that’s alright with me. My thirties were about building a base of strength. My forties are about maintaining it while making sure I can still hike with my family, play pickup ultimate frisbee without wheezing, and avoid slipping into soft suburban dad syndrome. I train to stay healthy and because I enjoy it an awful damn much.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,086: Build Muscle Without the B.S. — A Straightforward Guide to Size and Strength https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/podcast-1086-build-muscle-without-the-b-s-a-straightforward-guide-to-size-and-strength/ Tue, 23 Sep 2025 13:15:27 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190784   Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works. Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]>  

Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works.

Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a grounded, field-tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular — without burning out. Paul is a strength coach and the author of Radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle. We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why Paul modified the classic Starting Strength program, the strength benchmarks men should be able to hit, when to shift from powerlifting to bodybuilding-style training, why you should train your lower body like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows you’re in shape, the body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

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A muscular, shirtless man flexes his arms and smiles on the cover of a book titled "Radically Simple Muscle" by Paul Horn—your guide to get big and lean.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room, or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works today on the show. Paul Horn offers a grounded field tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular without burning out. Paul’s a strength coach and the author of radically Simple strength and radically Simple Muscle. We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why. Paul modified the classic Starting strength program. The strength benchmarks men should be able to hit when to shift from power lifting to bodybuilding style training. Why you should train your lower body like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows you’re in shape. The body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life and more after the show’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/SimpleMuscle.

All right, Paul Horn, welcome to the show.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you are a barbell coach. We’ve met at a Starting Strength conference a long, long time ago. You’ve actually helped me with some, when I was doing the low bar squat, I was having some issues with shoulder tightness getting under the bar, and you were very kind to give me a tutorial on a stretch on how to make that happen. 

Paul Horn:

For myself, that is my biggest contribution to the literature. I figured out a shoulder stretch and made a YouTube video, and to this day it’s my most popular YouTube video I’ve ever put up. 

Brett McKay:

It’s important information. Well, let’s talk about your background a bit. You’ve been training for decades and you’ve been a coach for a long time too. How did you get started with barbell training? What were you doing before that? When did you decide I got to pick up the iron?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, well, I was wasting a lot of time in the gym. Most young guys are when they start lifting. The short version is I was a vegan in college and I’m six one. I weighed about 160 pounds and I was a camp counselor and some of the other coaches were older and kind of bros and thought, we’re going to take you to the gym and try and bulk you up a little bit. And I went and absolutely loved it. Got hooked on the training, but my muscles were seizing up. I was cramping a lot and my buddy in his bro frat boy wisdom was like, Hey man, I think maybe you need some protein.

And so it went from being a vegan to eating tuna fish and then chicken and then full carnivore now. And so that was great. Towards the end of college I had bulked up quite a bit and just again, doing bro workouts and things that you find on the old bodybuilding.com and T Nation and all the websites that we used to go to. And then I got hurt and I ended up having my first shoulder surgery from bench pressing. So I was out for three months for the first time since I had started lifting. And I thought I should try and figure out why that happened and maybe if there’s a right way to bench press because when you’re a college guy and you’re just screwing around in the gym, you just look at what the other bigger guys are doing and copy them and they don’t know what they’re doing.

So in that hiatus, I stumbled across this book called Starting Strength. And since I couldn’t lift, I just read about lifting and it was, as you know, the best book on how to do the basic barbell lifts and why you should do them that I’ve ever read. And it blew me away. I was like, I’ve never heard it explained this clearly. So I went back to my college gym after I recovered from surgery and I started doing the Starting Strength program. And this was a time when the gym had one squat rack and no one was ever in it and no one had seen a pair of weightlifting shoes, belts were Velcro and nylon. And I just started doing this thing where you squat three times a week, which was crazy. We’d squatted maybe if we squatted, it was like once a week and you did seven other leg exercises.

And so I started doing this simple starting strength program and all of my gym buddies were like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You’re squatting three days a week. And I was like, I don’t know, this crazy guy in Texas told me that I should do this. And within about three months I was probably one of the strongest guys in the gym, which wasn’t saying much at the time. But then people started asking, okay, what is this program? What are you doing? Started asking me questions about lifting shoes and technique, and then I got really into it and my girlfriend at the time as a gift sent me to the Starting Strengths seminar in Wichita Falls just to, I just wanted to meet Rippetoe and he was like my hero. I had been reading all of his books. And so I went to that and back at that, in those days, they just kind of pulled you aside and said, we think that you should take the test for coaching.

We’ve been watching you and we think you might be a good coach and do you want to take this coaching certification test? Which was a very difficult test, but I thought, yeah, sure, what the hell? And ended up passing, I was one of two guys from that group that passed and came back to LA and thought, well, that was cool. And they emailed me and said, your name’s going on a coaching registry. I was like, okay, whatever. And I went back to my, at that time I was working a marketing job for a tech company and then within about a month I started getting emails. The book started gaining more popularity. People were buying it on Amazon, seeing how dense and technical it was, and then going to the coaching registry. And I was the only starting strength coach in Los Angeles. And so I just would get these emails all day like, Hey, I see you’re a coach.

Can you help me out? Can you help me out? And I’m like, I mean, I’m not really a coach, but I know a little more than you do. And so it just became so frequent that I asked my wife then at the time, if I could convert the garage into a personal training studio a little put two racks in there. And I just started training people before and after work and it just kept growing. And within about a year of that, I quit my job and opened up Horn Strength and Conditioning, which was the first starting Strength affiliate gym on the West coast. And it just blew up from there. I ran that gym for about eight years and then the pandemic happened, and the rest of the story is me moving to Idaho and all that stuff, but that’s my little bio.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, you’re starting Strength Coach, and while you’re coaching, of course you continued to train. You did some competitions, some amateur stuff, I believe.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, I was what we would call a recreational power lifter.

Brett McKay:

Recreational power lifter. So you’re doing the main lifts and then you talk about in your books we’re going to talk about today, it’s radically simple muscle and radically simple strength. You reached a point with your training journey as people say, where you started shifting goals for a long time, and I had the same sort of thing. It was just chasing numbers. How much more can I squat? How much more can I deadlift? And then you reached a point it’s like, man, this isn’t doing it for me anymore. And you kind of became a bodybuilder. Tell us about that.

Paul Horn:

I mean, that is, in my experience, the evolution of most lifters. Most guys get into it, they want to get laid and they want to look good with their shirt off and they just want muscles. And then a lot of it had to do with changing trends. CrossFit came out around this time at the same time starting Strength came out and there was this push away from machines and bro splits to like, Hey man, how much can you deadlift? And it became a thing. Strength training became real popular. And so a lot of us got into it and realized that, oh, this is now I have a real goal. It’s like a tangible concrete number, and it keeps going up. If I keep training and maybe you do a power lifting competition and you’re like, who cares about how big my arms are? How much can you squat?

But then there’s this point where when you start strength training as a novice, it’s fun. Every time you go to the gym, you put more weight on the bar and the stronger you get, the harder it becomes to put more weight on the bar. And so you reach this point where you’re like, you know what? I am not really enjoying this. What it would take for me to put two and a half more pounds on my press, it might not be worth it. And who cares? It’s two and a half pounds. It’s not a motivating training goal anymore. On top of that, again, as you may have experienced, most of us who were pursuing the strength thing got fat and we got hurt. 

So you get older and the weights are heavier, they’re beating the crap out of you, and it’s not fun. And you put on all this body weight, everyone’s telling you, you got to weigh 275, and you just don’t feel good. You don’t feel like you look good, you’re hurting and you’re like, what am I doing? And we all seem to have the same epiphany around that moment in your training journey, as you said, where you look at the machines and the Hammer strength bench presses and the lap pull downs and the cable and you’re like, those look pretty fun.

Maybe I should mix it up a little bit. And then you sort of move back into bodybuilding. And if you look at the history of the trend in fitness culture, that’s how it went. The nineties was all about the bodybuilding, and then the two thousands was CrossFit and strength training and starting strength. And then everybody started shifting back to a little bit more bodybuilding. And now if you go on fitness Twitter, it’s just threads of guys posting, no one’s doing a squat at all anymore. It’s all leg extensions and rows and isolation work. And so I like to, I think what I landed on with my books and what works for me now as an older lifter is a mix of hypertrophy, training, bodybuilding stuff, but you still, there’s a part of me deep, it’s an intrinsic thing of I still have to squat and deadlift. It’s not a real workout. You’re not on a real program unless at least once a week you’re getting under the bar and picking something heavy up off the ground. So I assume that your fitness journey was very similar to that.

Brett McKay:

Very similar. So back in the 2010s I got really into barbell training, Starting Strength, did recreational competitions like yourself and just chasing numbers. And it was great. It was fun. It gave me direction. I enjoyed it. But yeah, I reached this point. It was probably 2021, 2022 where I just started hurting. It was like tendon stuff. It was just like the tendons, it’s just really hard, the tendons. And then I was just looking haggard and I was fat. And my wife, I remember she looked at me, she’s like, what’s the point of this? You’re like, Sisyphus just pushing up that boulder. You just go down to the garage gym and just go up and down. That’s all you do.

Paul Horn:

You come in and you tell your wife like, honey, I pulled 505 today. And she’s like, okay, is that good? You’re fat.

Brett McKay:

Right? And I was just tired and beat up. And then also I just started not enjoying lifting. As you said, once you get really strong, there’s diminishing returns on your training. It just takes a lot more effort to just add five pounds to the bar.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, the commitment, it is just you have to say, is it worth it? Okay, my last squat PR was 465. I went on vacation, I got sick. I’m at 405 now. Do I want to do what it takes to get to 470? Is that going to be fun? And a lot of times it’s not. And that’s okay. We hammered people so hard back in the day on, the only thing that matters is the number on the bar. It doesn’t matter how fat you are, it doesn’t matter if you’re having fun. It just matters that you put five more pounds on that bar. And I can tell you what changed my mind was owning a gym and relying on paying clients to keep coming back and paying me. And you lose a lot of clients if you’re like, look, I don’t care about your goals because my goal for you is that you lift more weight. And they’re like, great, I’m going to go to someone else. So yeah, it’s a balance. And that’s okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So what I hope we can do this conversation is talk about your philosophy towards strength training and then muscle building. It seems like you’ve landed in a nice happy medium. That’s kind where I’ve landed as well with my training. And I think this conversation will be useful for people who maybe have been lifting for a long time doing the barbell lifts, but I really hope we can get these guys who haven’t started strength training or weightlifting at all and get them into it. Because what you talk about in your books, it’s all about your goal with your clients is getting a little bit stronger, getting a little bit more jacked, more muscle, and then leaning out. And that is possible with barbells, along with some hypertrophy stuff, some bodybuilding stuff with a few dumbbells and a few machine exercise. And I’m going to talk about that. Let’s talk about for the rank beginner, when someone comes to you and they’re like, I want to get strong. I want to start strength training, I’ve never really done it before. I might’ve messed around with some program that I saw. People don’t read muscle magazines anymore on Instagram. What are the common misconceptions guys have about strength and muscle building when they first start working with you?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, well, there’s a couple. One is that, I mean, I tell them all the time, you are not going to look like you take steroids unless you take steroids. I mean, I don’t care how good you are at this. There is a difference between the guys. The Instagram influencers, like you said, are back in our day, it was the guys on the covers of the magazines and the bodybuilders drugs work. And there’s a reason that those guys are on the cover of that magazine. So one of the misconceptions is like, oh, I just have to lift some weights and I’m just going to be 250 pounds at 4% body fat. It’s like, it’s not going to happen. So there is that layer of misconception, but I think the big one, the practical one that most guys have to accept and they’re going to learn it one way or the other, is that you can’t get big and strong and lean at the same time.

You have to do them in order. And if you’re not big and strong yet, you got to get big and strong first. You have to build a foundation so that when you go into a fat loss phase, you actually have something to show off. And so many times I’ll get a young guy who’s a buck 50 and he’s talking to me about wanting to cut and wanting to see his abs. And I was like, and it’s just like, dude, you’re going to look like you’re sick if you cut anything off of your frame right now, you don’t have any muscle mass, so you have to spend a period of time, I use the word bulking cautiously because you can definitely get too fat and you don’t have to do that, but you do have to get bigger in order to get stronger. And that comes with a little bit of body fat hopefully.

And if you do it, you can skew it. So most of every new pound you put on is muscle. And so you still look bigger, you don’t look fat because you’re kind of filling out your frame. And then after you’ve spent a year, two years maybe working on your form, learning how to lift, adding muscle mass, all that stuff, then you’ve sort of earned the right to cut. You’ve earned the right to say, okay, I’ve hit some benchmarks with barbell training and I’ve put in my time and now I feel like I’m getting a little chubby and I want to spend six months trying to take as much fat off as I can while preserving the muscle mass. And that understanding the order and the importance of the order is like that’s the number one thing that most guys who haven’t done it think they can do it all at the same time and it never works. So they either figure that out or they never make any progress. They just kind of don’t look really jacked and they don’t look really lean and they’re not very strong.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine too, I had to learn this. That stuff takes time. You can’t expect this stuff to happen in less than a year, do the putting on mass and then cutting. I mean, you can make significant gains if you’re first starting out with your strength and your muscle mass, but really the secret sauce to getting stronger, getting more jacked, it takes time. You’re not going to see instant results after you after your first couple sessions.

Paul Horn:

No, it does take time. You’re literally building tissue. It’s a biological process that it does take time. The cool part is it’s persistent. And as you add on those layers, and then with intelligent bulking and cutting strategies, the first run in both the bulking phase and the cutting phase is the longest because you want to get as much out of your novice phase as you can in terms of strength and size. And so if you’re a true novice, that can take six months a year just to run out the novice phase, maybe early intermediate phase. And then the first time you cut, especially if you’re 25, 30% body fat. And if you’re going to try and cut down to where you can see your abs, which is around 10%, you got a lot of fat to lose. So that first block, their cycle of bulking and cutting is the longest one.

But then once you get through that, the cycles get shorter because you don’t put on as much fat, so you don’t have as much fat to take off. And the cycles get more fun because, or your training overall gets more fun because you see a light at the end of the tunnel for each phase and okay, a couple more weeks of this and then I can do something different. But yeah, it’s getting people through that first phase. And I’ll tell you, in my gym, it was the end of the novice phase, usually around the six month mark where they’ve been focusing on just driving up the numbers on squats and deadlifts and presses. And at that point it starts to get hard. They start laying awake at night thinking about their next workout. It’s a grind every session. It scares the hell out of you. And if they can make it through that and keep coming and not quit and get to the intermediate phase, they’re lifters for life. But I’ve lost a lot of clients where they’re just like, I don’t dunno, man, this isn’t fun anymore. And it’s grindy and then that’s it. They go sign up for jujitsu or something and we never see ’em again.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. So for someone who’s first starting out lifting, they want to get bigger, they want to get jacked, they want to get awesome, those death star deltoids.

Paul Horn:Is that a thing?

Brett McKay:

I think I’ve heard that somewhere. Death star deltoids. I think a lot of guys, that’s their goal. They’ll immediately go to sort of a bodybuilder hypertrophy program where they’re doing four day splits, six day splits where they’re working one body part a day. You take a different approach. It seems like your first priority, someone who’s first starting out is just to get generally strong in big first. So what is the best programming for that?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, I mean the idea here is we’re going to spend some time laying down a foundation. We’re going to build a foundation of just strength and size. You’re going to learn how to lift. You’re going to be doing these basic barbell lifts for your entire training career. They’re always a part of the program. You may add other stuff, but this is really what’s causing the most stress and doing the most work is squats, deadlifts, benches, presses, stuff like that. So we need to spend some time getting proficient at those lifts. You need to learn how to push yourself. You need to learn how to unrack a weight that scares you and try it anyway, and then learn that you can do things that scare you and all of that. So you need a lot of reps. You need a lot of practice time under the bar.

And so a basic linear progression where you’re just, you come in and you lift one day and then you try and beat it the next time. So it’s five pounds, it’s two and a half pounds, but the program is very boring and very repetitive. It’s just a couple lifts. And the only variable we’re manipulating is how much weight’s on the bar. So very, this is why software developers love programs like this. They get it. They can wrap their head around it. It’s like, oh, I came in. I could bench press 95 pounds. Now I can bench press 185. I guess it’s working

And we want to keep it simple. You don’t need all that stuff. You don’t need six different chest exercises and you don’t need to be in the gym six days a week. You just need a simple program where you’re getting better at the compound lifts and just driving the weight up. And so the Starting Strength Program is a fantastic beginner program, novice program. My version that I put in my book, A Radically Simple Strength, was just a modification of that program based on training real clients in the gym and needing to get them in out in an hour, keep them excited, keep them interested in training, not to beat up, not dreading their workouts. So I mean, do you want me to get into the details of my Novice program?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, let’s talk about the general programming. Let’s talk about Starting Strength first. It’s really easy to explain whenever someone comes to me like, Hey, Brett, I want to get strong and bigger and jacked. I’m like, you need to start with Starting Strength.

The reason I tell ’em that, because it’s literally, it’s the best weightlifting program for a beginner, and I’ll tell you why first, because it’s just so simple. There’s just four lifts you have to do. That’s it. It’s just deadlift, it’s squat, it’s bench press and shoulder press. You’re only going to train three times a week. Anyone can do that. And then the workouts are easy. It’s just like you’re going to squat at the beginning of your workout three times a week, and then one workout you’re going to do bench press and then the deadlift, and then the next workout you’re going to do press. And then the next work you do bench press and deadlift, and then it just kind of alternate. You alternate between the bench and the press and you’re getting a full body workout. You’re going to get really strong. And it’s just so simple. It’s fast, especially when you’re first starting out. You’re going to be in and out of the gym in 45 minutes even. I mean, I’ve got my kids doing Starting Strength. They’re like teenagers, for them the weight’s really light so they can get done in 30 minutes.

Paul Horn:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

And for a person who’s first starting out, I think one thing that keeps people from being consistent is just workouts can be too complex. They’re doing too many lifts and it just takes forever because doing seven different exercises with three sets of 10 with Starting Strength, you’re doing three exercises in your workout and it’s three sets of five. So the simplicity of it, I think is one of its virtues. And then also with the linear progressions where you’re just adding weight to the bar, incredibly motivating. I remember when I first started my novice linear progression, I was excited every workout, I was like, man, I’m going to add more weight to the bar. This is exciting. So you get that dopamine rush and that dopamine rush gets you motivated, and it just helps build that consistency for training. I was not someone who trained consistently before I started starting Strength after that. I am a guy, I am a guy who trains. Even though my training has changed, I’m doing different stuff now. Starting Strength helped establish that foundation because motivating and it’s super simple, and I think that’s really important for a beginning lifter. 

Paul Horn:

As you said, this is something that takes time. And so you need quick wins. If you’re not going to be satisfied or excited about your training until you can deadlift 4 0 5, you’re going to be miserable. But it is a long journey. And so you need those little victories, those small victories of like, Hey, you know what? Today I might not be where I want to be. I might not be at my ultimate goal, but I’m better than I was last time and I can see it. And so you’re right, you get those little daily workout victories of lifting five more pounds than you did last time are enough to keep you going. And then by the time, for me, the big shift, what got me hooked was you do it long enough and then you look in the mirror or you look at your training log and you go, damn, I just went into the gym for an hour three times a week and I picked up some heavy stuff and my physical body has changed. I mean, it gives people agency. You realize, look, I might not be where I want to be in life, but I’m not useless. I have a say in how I present myself to the world, and it’s very motivating. And if you can get the guy to that point where you have this realization that I can actually change my own reality just with work, just with effort, it’s a part of you. You’re in the brotherhood of Iron for Life. It’s very powerful.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so starting Strength, it’s three sets of five. You’re doing three workouts with these four different lifts, you’ve modified it. What is your version of sort of a novice program?

Paul Horn:

So my take on the novice program, the main difference with how Starting Strength approaches it and how I approach it just again from it was a more practical strategy for running clients through a commercial gym. And that was starting. Strength is like the novice phase is your most productive phase. You eek out every little bit of progress that you can for as long as you possibly can. No matter how hard and grueling and grindy it is, if you can press two and a half more pounds, you do it. I look at my novice phase as the way that we’re going to get you to the intermediate phase because if we can get you to the intermediate phase of training, that’s when we get more variety. That’s when things get more fun. Everything becomes less grueling. You space out your workouts, you maybe have upper and lower workouts.

So my novice phase was like, let’s just learn how to lift. Let’s get a lot of reps in a lot of practice. Let’s build a reasonable foundation of size and strength, and then let’s move on. So I do ascending sets of five instead of three sets of five. So this is an old Bill Star thing. Rather than do all your warmups, take a five minute break and then do three sets of five at the same weight with a five minute break in between each one, we just do the bar and then we do a set of five at 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, a hundred percent done. So your warmups kind of count as sets

And it’s real fast. And is it as productive for as long as the Starting Strength novice program? Probably not because at some point those ramping sets tax you a little too much, and so you’re kind of tired for your heavyset, but it’s good enough to keep the workout really short and make a lot of really good progress and build that foundation. And it’ll take you, you’ll be able to run that for about three to six months before it kind of stops working and you have to make some modifications. But every guy I’ve switched over to that program after running the Starting Strength Program was like, God, this is so much faster. It’s just like, I like going to the gym just, and again, if that keeps you training that little modification, then great, you’re going to end up in the same place eventually down the road. So that’s really the big one is we start out squatting, benching, and deadlifting, but we’re just doing ascending sets of five.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. That makes sense. 

Paul Horn:

And then we move on in the second month of workouts, we start adding in some chin-ups and lap pull downs, so we’re not deadlifting every time. And then in the third phase of the novice program, which is like workout 25 till it stops working, I start adding in some curls and tricep extensions just because curls are awesome, guys want to curl. So by that point, I think you’ve earned the right to curl, to throw a couple sets of curls in at the end of the workout. And again, just to keep it, you give people a lot of what they need and a little of what they want and they’re happy. So that’s really the difference between my novice program and the starting strength. And again, Starting Strength is a fantastic program and it works really well. I’ve used it for decades.

Brett McKay:

And so again, the goal here is just getting bigger and stronger, putting on muscle mass, full body, the focus isn’t hypertrophy per se. There will be hypertrophy, your muscles will get bigger, but it’s not like that’s your main focus, just get bigger and stronger. 

Paul Horn:

Learning again, and learning the technique, like five sets of five ascending is that you get a lot of reps in there, you get a lot of practice, and we need that early on. And then again, it’s also learning how to grind, learning how to push yourself, and you have to learn how to do that. And so you need a lot of time under the bar and exposure to those sets that scare you towards the end of that novice phase.

Brett McKay:

For a guy that first year when they’re just starting out, they’re doing that novice phase, they’re learning the lifts, getting bigger and stronger. What are some good goals a guy could get to? What should they be going after? Are there any specific numbers you found?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, yeah. I mean the first tier of goals in my book are what we call plate goals, a 45 pound plate. So you want to be able to press 135, bench 225, squat 315, and deadlift 405. So it’s one plate, two plate, three plates, four plates, and that’s for one rep. So that’s the first benchmark that any guy can hit.

Brett McKay:

And if you do that, you’re going to be stronger than a lot of people.

Paul Horn:

Oh yeah. I mean the bar is so low, and especially now with the influencer trend away from heavy lifting and back to the machines and stuff, there was a period in probably 2010 where if you went to a gym, those numbers weren’t that impressive. And to competitive lifters, they’re not impressive. But to the average gen pop gym goer, especially these days when all the machines are coming back, if you could squat 405, you’re in the 1% of people at that gym and they’re very reasonable goals. They’re not hard to do.

Brett McKay:

And I think what it also, it makes you generally strong for life, generally strong and healthy for life. If you get those numbers, you’re not going to be beat up, you’re not going to hurt, but you’ll be able to help move your buddy on the weekend. And it’s not hard because you’re stronger.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, it’s a solid respectable foundation of strength and it’s attainable to anyone. And the thing is that, as you know, the numbers don’t matter. I don’t care if you can squat 315. I care that you’re doing a program and you’re trying to get a little better every time and you’re pushing yourself, but you do have to have a target. Guys need to have a goal because if you’re just training and you don’t have a, there’s no lighthouse you’re sailing towards, it’s hard to stay motivated. So that’s the starting point. And then once they hit those, we can either move on to what in the book, I call ’em hundo goals. So two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred. Lately what I’ve been doing is just saying, let’s take those plate goals, one plate, two plates, three plates, and let’s just, instead of your goal being to do ’em for one rep, let’s try and do ’em for five reps. So you’re going to end up you deadlift 405 for five. That’s your sort of phase two target. And then from there, there’s more goals, but most people never even get there. And that’s okay when as we talked about, start asking about more bodybuilding stuff, right?

Brett McKay:

We’re going to get to that in a second before we do. We’ll stick on this mass phase, getting generally strong, getting bigger when you’re first starting out, nutrition plays an important role. And the thing I noticed with a lot of guys that start training is they’re doing the program, but they’re not eating to fuel the gains. And what’s interesting, people have a lot of misconceptions about diet. I think people have more misconceptions about nutrition when it comes to training. Then the programming itself, because there’s just so much stuff out there. But really simply, what does a good diet plan look like when you’re in this beginning phase?

Paul Horn:

Well, the high level concepts is protein is the biggest thing. And you’re right, the hardest thing to do is not the lifting, it’s the eating because you have to eat three or four times a day every day, even if you don’t want to, especially if you’re a skinny guy, you got to eat more food than you want to. And when you get into a cutting phase, you got to eat less food than you want to. Diet is the hardest part of this whole thing. But the number one mistake guys make is they don’t eat enough protein. And it’s just if you’re not, I used to tell my guys all the time, if you’re not eating enough protein, then you are wasting your time in the gym because the protein literally builds your muscle tissue. So you’re doing all the hard work, you’re busting your ass in the gym, and then your body’s trying to rebuild, repair and add more contractile tissue, and you’re not supplying it with the bricks it needs to build.

So undereating protein and then undereating calories, if we’re talking about the novice sort of bulking phase for an underweight male lifter, they don’t eat enough food and specifically they don’t even eat enough protein. So carbs and fat, I try and keep this as simple as possible, just hit your protein goal. And at this point in my coaching career, I just tell everybody, your goal is 200 grams of protein a day more is better. If you’re 200 pound guy, fine, 220. If you’re 185 pound guy, 200’s, great. So for most guys, just hit 200 grams a day and then with those meals will come carbs and fat. And then just check your weight. If you get on the scale every morning after you go to the bathroom naked and look at the number, and if we’re in the novice phase or we’re in a bulking phase, that number needs to be going up every week.

So total it up over the course of the week. And if you’re a pound heavier than you were last week, you’re doing great. If you’re not and you go two weeks in a row, you need more food, it’s a math problem. You’re not eating enough calories. So the mistake that they make is usually it’s gaining too much weight too fast. So when you first start training, if you’ve never lifted, I always tell people in the first two, three weeks, don’t worry about the weight on the scale. Because a lot of times when a guy starts picking up a barbell, he’ll gain like 5, 10 pounds within a matter of weeks after the first month. That should start to slow down. And you want to hit an average of about a pound a week. If you’re a little fluffy coming into it, maybe you’re going to maintain depending on how much body fat you have, but if your body fat’s a little high, maybe shoot for half a pound a week while you’re trying to build this foundation of strength. But if guys, if you’re six weeks into the program and you’re gaining three pounds a week, you’re just getting fat, unnecessarily fat, and you’re going to end up getting to the end of your novice phase and thinking, well, this strength training just makes me fat. It’s like, you don’t have to do that. It’s a very, very modest amount of weight gain that you need to build that muscle tissue. Only so much muscle tissue you can build in a month, unless you’re taking drugs and it’s like two pounds of actual lean tissue. So that comes with other stuff. So at most, you’re looking at four pounds a month. Anything beyond that besides a rank, novice, underweight, 17-year-old. It’s like if you’re gaining more than four pounds a month, you’re getting fat.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, the trick is you want to gain weight, but keep fat gain to a minimum. You’re going to gain fat as you put on mass. There’s no escaping that. But the goal is make sure it leans more towards muscle tissue and less towards body fat. And I think, I know back in the day, starting strength, got a lot of flack for the goad gallon milk a day and all these guys just getting really fat and eating sheet cake.

Paul Horn:

Dude, we were so fat, we were so fat. 

Brett McKay:

You don’t need to do that. You don’t have to get fat to get big and strong. You can get slightly bigger week to week.

Paul Horn:

So my first, I looked around at, I remember being at the Starting Strength Coaches conference and looking around and we had some real strong guys there. I mean real good lifters. And Matt was one of ’em, Jordan was one of ’em. And I looked around and I thought, I’m trying to make a little niche for myself in this community, and I’m not going to be the strongest guy. In fact, someone had totaled up all the training logs on the starting strength forms and ranked all of us coaches. And I was like, my strength was dead center. I was totally like mediocre. And I thought, okay, I’m 252 pounds. I’m fat. I mean, I feel fat. I’m never going to be the strongest coach, so let me see if I can just lose, lemme see if I can get down to 10% body fat. I’ve never done it. Lemme see if I can see my abs. And so I did and it took, but I think I was the first coach in our community to do that. And I remember texting Grant Brogue, a fellow coach, and I had just hit 10% body fat, and I took a picture in the bathroom mirror and I sent it to him. I was like, I’m thinking about putting this on Instagram and it feels kind of lame. It’s a picture of me shirtless. And he just texted me back, he’s like, dude, post it. And I did. And within a matter of a year, all these other coaches and lifters started just shedding body fat. And that became starting strength. As we’ve said, it’s fantastic for lifting. It is a horrible book for nutrition unless your goal is to be a 275 pound fat lifter. 

Brett McKay:

Power lifter. Yeah,

Paul Horn:

Because a gallon of milk a day works. I’ve done it and it works, man. It’ll put weight on you real quick. But most guys, my average client is like, he doesn’t want to be a power lifter. He doesn’t want to be a bodybuilder. Just like I said, he wants to be a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, not fat and not hurt. And so that first time through of learning how to manipulate my diet to actually get down to 10% body fat was sort of what I thought I could contribute aside from the more abbreviated novice program and stuff to fill the hole in sort of the starting strength community of like, Hey, if you guys want to really talk about strategies for getting lean, maybe I have something to offer. Done it. And then I did it a couple more times and I’ve gotten a lot better at it. 

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re first starting out, put on some mass and if you’re underweight, make it your goal to put on one to two pounds a week maybe. And then if you’re already coming into it heavy, there’s a lot of guys who they’re starting out but they’re overweight, they’ve got a lot of fat tissue. You just reduce your calories, so you’re losing about a pound during that strength phase. If you’re bigger, you can get away with some recomposition, so you can put on some muscle mass while losing body fat at the same time. So yeah, you can get put on muscle mass while reducing body fat as well, but it’s going to be a gradual thing. You don’t want be no severe cuts where you’re reducing calories way low. You just want to lose a pound to a 0.5 pounds a week.

Paul Horn:

In my book, I sort of break the novice lifter into three categories. The underweight guy, the sort of fluffy untrained guy, and then the overweight guy. So if you’re coming in and you’re just a rail, you have a high metabolism, you’re a skinny dude for the novice phase, for the first couple months of the program, your goal should be to gain 20 pounds. And then if you’re kind of in the middle, maybe it’s gained 10 pounds, slow it down, go half a pound a week instead of a pound a week. And then if you’re coming in carrying a lot of body fat, what I say is just maintain, don’t try and gain weight. And because you will be able to recompose, so the only time you can add muscle and loose fat at the same time, there’s three scenarios. You are a brand new lifter, you’re already carrying a lot of body fat or you’re taking drugs.

So outside of those three states, you’re doing one or the other, you’re building muscle or you’re losing body fat. But so yes, for the guys who are coming in who have a high body fat percentage, just eat enough to kind of maintain, if the scale goes down a little bit, that’s okay. If it stays the same, that’s okay because if your weight stays the same but you put a hundred pounds on your deadlift, you obviously gained muscle and lost fat. And that happens all the time. Every time I have my guys do body scans at the beginning, like body composition scans at the beginning of their training when we start and maybe at the six month mark and so many guys are able to just recompose and it’s amazing and then it goes away.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you got to do something different. Alright, so we’ve been talking about just getting for first guy, starting out, you’re going to do the basic barbell lifts, squat, bench, deadlifts, shoulder press. You’re going to work out three times a week. You’ve got your version of what a linear progression looks like, sending sets of five on the lifts, and the goal is to add weight each workout. Let’s say you’ve been doing this for a while, and then you have to kind of modify your programs. You can keep driving weight at the bar. Let’s say a client reaches the point is like, you know what, Paul, I’m happy with how strong I am. I’m generally strong. I can deadlift 4 0 5, I can squat three 15. I’m not going to do any recreational power lifting meets. I want to start getting jacked. I want to get those death star deltoids. What does your programming look like for these guys? Because it sounds like you’re going to keep doing these barbell lists, but you’re going to add in some other stuff. What does that look like?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, so like I said, the intermediate program is where things get more fun. There’s more variety and it’s less grueling. You have hard workouts, but you’re not squatting heavy, benching heavy and lifting heavy in the same workout. So my go-to intermediate program in the book, it’s called the Intermediate B program, and it’s four workouts and I have my guys run ’em over a three day week. We’re staying consistent with the three day training schedule that they’re used to, but we move from full body to upper lower splits. Now on Monday you’re going to bench press and then you’ll do a light overhead press, and then you’ll do some arm work, tricep extensions. On Wednesday you’re going to squat and deadlift. So I have you squatting heavy and deadlifting light, and then some chin-ups or something. And then the Friday you’ll flip Monday’s workout. So you’re going to press heavy and bench light and then do some curls and bro stuff just for fun.

And then the following Monday, so the fourth workout would be deadlifting heavy and squatting light. So it’s upper, lower, upper, and then the next week is lower, upper, lower. So you have one hard week where you have two lower body workouts, and then you have one easy week where you have two upper body workouts and one lower body workout. And so we’re spreading out the frequency. You’re not hammering yourself all the time. And the beauty of that is it’s flexible. So with upper lower splits, you can train two days in a row. You don’t need a day off in between upper and lower, which is nice. It’s a lot more flexible that way. And then the other thing I start incorporating, and this is where I sort of branch off from starting strength, but it’s something that I am very passionate about, is introducing rep ranges.

So before when you were a novice lifter, it was like, no, you get five reps. Your goal is five reps. If you don’t get five reps, you failed. Okay? And that’s okay. We all fail. You’re going to fail, but you have that target and you need to push yourself really hard. If you want to add more weight next time you got to get that fifth rep. When we get into the intermediate phase, I like to pump the brakes a little bit on the intensity of the live and die by the fifth rep mentality because guys are burnt out by that. And it’s like you don’t want to hate your workout. You work all day, your boss is yelling at you, your kids are running around screaming, you go to the gym and then you get four reps instead of five, and you’re like, can I do anything?

Right? It’s demoralizing. And so the rep range, what we’ll say is, for example, you’re going to squat. So you’re going to go in and you’re going to warm up, and then you’re going to do one set of squats and the rep range is three to five reps. So you have a minimum and a max, your goal is five. But hey, look, today, if you only have three or four, that’s okay. You’re in the range, you still had a good workout. The next time you just try again. What you’ll find is we all have bad days. Doesn’t mean your training isn’t working, doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, whatever. But you walk out of the gym going, look, at least I got three, so that’s okay. And the mental shift of taking that pressure off, it’s like one of the things I get emailed about most when guys switch from the Texas method where it’s like five sets of five rigid to this flexibility, it’s a mental, it takes a lot of pressure off and it keeps them really enjoying their training more and pushing.

If I tell you like, Hey man, let’s see what you got. Maybe you only have three today. That’s okay. A lot of times guys will, when they know that that pressure’s off, they’ll push themselves harder for five. It’s a surprising psychological thing. So we work up, you do one set of three to five, and then we do a back off set. So instead of doing sets across, we’re going to do one heavy set and then we’re going to take some weight off about 15%. And then you do another set for if it’s the squat, it might be five reps or five to eight reps or something like that. But if it’s the upper body stuff, maybe you push for as many reps as you can, but that other shift of you have one hard set, okay, you’re going to warm up and you have one hard thing to do today, especially on those lower body days where it’s like the deadlift.

Okay, look dude, you got one set of three to five today, and then after that we’re going to pull a little weight off and then you squat light, everything gets easier. And so just giving guys that everybody can do one hard thing. I don’t care how tired you are, I don’t care. Can you just get it together to do this one hard set? And then you move on. And those two things, the rep ranges and the one hard set, and then a back set is what I’ve found kept my clients and my current clients training with me. They’re not constantly failing.

Brett McKay:

So you’re going to shift to a four day split. That means you’re going to train upper body one day, lower body, upper body and lower body, something you’ve set in radically simple muscle. If your goal hypertrophy is like we’re not just working on getting generally big and strong, we’re actually going to do some bodybuilder stuff. You talk about your philosophy is train your lower body like a powerlifter and train your upper body like a bodybuilder. What does that look like?

Paul Horn:

So we’re talking about a trainee who’s gotten to the point, like we said, where they’ve established that foundation of strength, so they’re moving heavy weight. So these workouts can be stressful and a lot of them are like, okay, I did the boring workouts, I built this foundation. I’m strong and I want to mix it up. I’m feeling beat up. I’ve accumulated some injuries. And so the radically simple muscle program, which was just supposed to be A PDF, but ended up turning into my second book, I have guys shift to, especially if their goal is now like aesthetics. I’ve got this mass that I’ve built, but now I want to kind of shape it. So training your upper body like a bodybuilder and your lower body like a power lifter. There’s a number of reasons for that. One of them is exercise variety. So bodybuilding typically uses lots of different exercises, isolation movements, and that’s primarily because your upper body muscles can be segmented into basically pushers and pulls.

You’ve got your lats and your pecs and they do opposite things. So if you do a bunch of seated cable rows that doesn’t build your chest, you have to do some type of pressing variation, and those presses don’t really build your back and the upper body demands that there’s a reason for it. If we contrast that to the lower body, you can think of hamstrings and quads as pushers or pulls and pushers, but they’re both covered by the squat and the deadlift. Both of those functions happen in both of those lifts. So let’s just squat and deadlift. I don’t want to do seven leg exercises when squats and deadlifts work everything all at the same time versus, like I said, I can’t just have you curl because it’s not going to train your triceps. So that’s one part of it. The other part of it is aesthetics. When you size a guy up and we all do it, you see a guy and he’s like, that guy’s jacked. You’re looking at his upper body, right? You’re looking at those landmarks, those desirable aesthetic features, cap shoulders, a vein in the bicep, things like that. Okay, that shaping that is a bodybuilding. If you just focus on overhead presses, I promise you, you will not have shoulders. Would you say death star?

Brett McKay:

Death star deltoids.

Paul Horn:

Yeah. I mean, my shoulders never looked worse than when I was just pressing 200 pounds over my head. It just didn’t fill out the deltoids the way that something like very light lateral raises do. So there’s a bunch of different examples of that with the upper body. You need to do some curls. Chin ups are great, but curls, tricep stuff, it makes those muscles pop. And that’s what we want when we talk about an aesthetic physique versus the lower body. Unless you’re walking around with your pants off, your lower body just needs to be big, right? You need to have big legs and a big butt. And you could do that with just squats and deadlifts. So again, that will just squat and deadlift for the lower body and we’ll spend some time doing bodybuilding stuff for the upper body. And then finally it comes down to high reps versus low reps.

Bodybuilders use high reps. Traditionally power lifters use low reps. Your upper body joints are much smaller and much more sensitive. They don’t have as much structural integrity as the lower body. If you think about your hip joint, it’s like a sturdy ball and socket, your G glenohumeral joint in the shoulder. It’s like a shallow cup. And I’ve had three shoulder surgery, so I can tell you that is a very unstable joint, just banging out, grinding out heavy triples with bench presses and stuff like that, your wrists are going to hurt. Your upper body joints are not as tolerant of heavy weights as your lower body where you have more sturdy joints and a lot more muscle mass helping move the weight. So when you get into that phase of like, do I really care? Am I a powerlifter or do I just want to look good and feel good? Then maybe you spend some time bumping up the rep range in the upper body, taking the stress off a little bit with loads that are less likely to sort of fall out of the groove and end up tweaking something. And then the lower body, I dunno about you, I do not want to do high rep deadlifts.

Brett McKay:

No, that’s not fun. 

Paul Horn:

They’re miserable and you don’t have to, could just do a set of five, a set of three. So squatting sets of eight is just, I mean it’s brutal and I use it sometimes for cardio development, but ultimately I have a hard time counting past five for lower body stuff. So that’s the philosophy is we’ll do the bodybuilder stuff for the upper body. It works better for the requirements and the demands of that and the lower body, we just take care of by training like a powerlifter. And at that point in my training, one of the biggest shifts that I’ve made is squatting and deadlifting heavy every other week, which I thought would be counterproductive, but it’s actually been, I mean, my lips have never been better with only squatting heavier every 14 days, but you’ve got to get to the point where you can make that work and we can talk about that another time. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I mean, it’s interesting. My programming has kind shifted to that train your lower body, like a powerlifter upper body, like a bodybuilder. So my current split that Matt Reynolds has me on, it’s Monday is a lower body day, and I start off with a heavy set of deadlifts, and then I do accessory work after that for the quads. So I’ve got a leg extension machine in my garage gym. So I do some leg, not high rep, it’s like 10 reps, but going on heavy, do some calf raises, and then my upper body day on Tuesday, I start off with heavy bench press, just typical bench press workout. And then after that I’m just doing bodybuilder stuff. So I’ll do some shoulder work. So I do shoulder dumbbell presses, maybe some lateral raises. So the assessor work is more shoulder heavy. And then I’ll throw in the curls, tricep extensions, lap pull down, and then Thursdays is my next lower body day. I’m squatting, I got my first lifts to the squat. Then after that I do assessor work for the hamstrings. So I’m doing a RDL, and then I’ll do some leg curls for the hamstrings. And then Friday it’s upper body start off with the press. So I’m doing barbell press and I’m not doing a lot of sets. I do one heavy set and then two back off sets that are as many reps as possible. And then my bodybuilder stuff, it’s more chest focused, so I’m doing an incline dumbbell bench press,

And then some cable flies or maybe some dumbbell flies, and then I’m doing a curl. 

Paul Horn:

Great exercise. 

Brett McKay:

Then a curl variation, and then another tricep exercise variation and then a row for the back, just get a different, and that’s it. And yeah, my lower body days are fast because really there’s not much there. The upper body days take a little bit longer because like you said, you can do a little bit more variety on the upper body.

Paul Horn:

I’ll have to send you my, so at the end of, I added a program after radically simple muscle came out because I did an experiment. I was at a point with my training that I was just, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time. As my buddy says, my training partner, he says, man, I hate training. I just hate not training more that feeling when you haven’t worked, but it’s like training just got after decades, just I just hate it. So I was like, how can I make this fun? Let me try something. And so I decided to see how little I could get away with. So I just picked a couple bang for your buck exercises. I think I did a bench press, a row, a squat, a deadlift, a pull up, overhead press, curl lateral. I just one exercise for each thing. And then I just started doing one set and I was like, I’m going to try and hit eight reps. If I hit eight, that’s it. I’m done for the day with that exercise.

Then my rule was if I don’t hit eight, two workouts in a row, then I’ll do a second set. I’ll do a back off set. I’ll go in thinking one set, and it worked for a couple weeks. It was like, I’m getting eight every time it’s going up. This is great. And then I’d stick for two weeks. And so I’d do a back off set, and then the week after that it would move and so cut the back off set. And so I’m just literally, the workouts are like 30 minutes. It’s one set, and man, I’m having a great time in the gym again. 

Again, it’s that mental thing of like, look, I’m only doing one set, so I got to make it work. But that type of program, and I always tell guys who email me about the book, the reason that it works is because I’ve put in the time to figure, to learn how to grind, to learn how to really push yourself, and it just takes time to understand what you’re capable of, that you have a lot more in you than you think. But if you’re a novice lifter, you don’t know how to push. So one set isn’t going to work because that one set isn’t going to be very stressful. But if you get to the point that you’re at where I’ve seen your deadlifts and stuff like that, and you’re like, look, Brett, you have one set, that’s it. That will be a very stressful set for your body. And it was totally an experiment. I put up a YouTube video about my new training experiment, and I’m never going back. It’s so fun. And the programming is so simple. Programming people make programming so complicated. It’s like, look, here’s the weight. Did you get all the reps you were supposed to? Great go up. Next time you didn’t. Okay, well, you need to add a little bit more stress. Then do a second set. Did it go up next time? Good. That’s it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no. Okay. So once you get to that point where you’re working, hypertrophy, workouts can become a lot of fun and it can also become really fast. Sounds like you’re kind of doing some Mike Metzner heavy duty type stuff there with the one rep or one set workouts with the exercises. I’m curious, guys, if their goals now physique at this point in their training when you’re lifting for strength, the goals are pretty easy. It’s like, well, if I just get more weight. If you’re working on physique, what are some good physique goals or benchmarks to hit for the average dude.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, so there’s two in my book, I talk about getting your bicep vein, getting arm vein lean.

Everybody always talks about abs, but you’re walking around with a shirt on most of the time, but you see a dude at the coffee shop and he’s got a big snake running down his bicep. You know that guy’s in good shape. It’s cool. So I much prefer that metric, and that’s just reaching a certain level of body fat. So numbers wise, I always tell guys that your first goal when you cut is 10%. You want to get down to 10% body fat. You should get down to 10% body fat once in your life to figure out how to do it right, because hard, I mean, for some guys, they walk around at 8% body fat, whatever. I hate you, not me, it’s not you. Most of us are very happy. Our bodies are very happy to not be 10% body fat. So you cut down to 10% and that’s usually where you can see your abs and your lean, but you’re going to look kind of skinny with your clothes on. You look pretty ripped at the beach, but once you get down there, now when you bulk back up, you’re going to skew more towards muscle gain than fat gain because the nutrient partitioning changes once you get that lean. So your body, it’s much easier to put on muscle and not as much fat once you strip it off. So the first goal is 10%, and then once you get sick of restricting of being miserable and dieting for that long, because getting to 15% is not hard, but as you start getting close to 10, your brain starts messing with you. So that last 3% is can be brutal. Of course, now we have these miracle GLP drugs that just make this whole process super easy. But yeah, my goal is you get down to 10% body fat, you can see the veins in your arms. That’s a good measure and pay attention to when that comes, mind pops up around 13%.

So that’s kind of my gauge. Do DEXA scans. So you want to get good at understanding your visual cues of your level of leanness, and then you’re tired of that. You want to go back, start moving weight again, setting prs, bulking back up. So we’re going to bulk back up until we hit 15%. That’s sort of my cap. Of course, I’m saying that to you right now at like 18% because I have not been taking my own advice, but traditionally you want to just cycle between 10 and 15%. That’s my approach to this. 15. You still look good. You still look athletic. You could still see maybe your top abs and it’s a healthy athletic physique. You’ll look good with a shirt on. You’ll look like a big dude. And then every so often you got a vacation coming up or a high school reunion or something. Maybe you use that as motivation to try and cut back down to 10 or 12% or something like that. And then you just keep cycling as you want to. But hitting that first 10 is hitting those first barbell goals, those tier one goals.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I did a pretty big cut in 2023.

Paul Horn:

How lean? Did you get to 10?

Brett McKay:

I don’t think I got to 10. I probably got down to 11.

Paul Horn:

Okay. It’s fun, right? Yeah,

Brett McKay:

No, it was awful. It was terrible. And then after that, I’ve just been bouncing back between, I’ve been hanging around like 15 to 12 is where I’ve been hanging out at.

Paul Horn:

That’s great. That’s great.

Brett McKay:

It seems to work for me. And the physique part, you got to to keep training hard because you want to maintain muscle mass, but a lot of it’s just nutrition. It’s just learning how to learn to reduce calories and be okay with being hungry and things like that. But again, it’s a skill that you develop and once you develop it, it’s pretty easy.

Paul Horn:

Yeah. You learn how to deal with the cravings, that you don’t eliminate foods, you replace them if you have a, I mean, have a habit of having a cocktail at the end of the night. It’s like you don’t just try and sit on the couch and stare at the wall, get a sparkling water and put lime juice in it and make it, there’s little psychological hacks for that last part, but man, yeah, it, it’s no fun. Your training, a big misconception guys have is, well, if I’m cutting then I’m going to get weaker. That is not true. I find that most guys can hang on to their strength in the gym. I mean, at least maintain. I’ve had plenty of guys set PRS during a cut, but it’s usually once it gets below 15%, 14, 13, then all of a sudden your strength just falls off a cliff and you feel like you’re a hundred years old and then you just got to ride it out and do the best you can to finish the cut and then get back to eating like a normal human.

Brett McKay:

Well, Paul, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go learn more about the books and your work?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was fun. I’m glad we got to reconnect. Everything is on horn strength.com. That’s my website, and you can find links to books and all my stuff there. 

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Paul Horn, thanks for time’s. Been a pleasure.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, same. Thanks for doing what you do, man. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay:

My guest today is Paul Horn. He’s the author of the book’s, radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle, both available on amazon.com. Check out it website@hornstrength.com and also check out our show notes at aom.is/SimpleMuscle. Find links to resources we candel deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a free newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. They’re free. The best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. Take one minute to give a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think was something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay. And remember, don’t just listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> How to Turn Treading Water Into a Legit Workout https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/how-to-turn-treading-water-into-a-legit-workout/ Thu, 21 Aug 2025 13:44:28 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190452 When you think of water workouts, your mind probably goes to lap swimming, water aerobics, or maybe some high-octane Navy SEAL pool drill. What probably doesn’t come to mind is treading water — something you learned in swim class as a survival skill and haven’t thought much about since. But treading water isn’t just for […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Illustration of a man treading water in a pool, with text reading "The Treading Water Workout," highlighting an effective aquatic fitness routine, and a small circular logo in the corner.

When you think of water workouts, your mind probably goes to lap swimming, water aerobics, or maybe some high-octane Navy SEAL pool drill. What probably doesn’t come to mind is treading water — something you learned in swim class as a survival skill and haven’t thought much about since.

But treading water isn’t just for passing a Red Cross test or keeping yourself afloat while waiting for a lifeguard. With a little intentionality, it can be turned into a surprisingly effective — and satisfyingly challenging — full-body workout.

Why Treading Water Is Good Exercise in General

Let’s first look at what makes treading water beneficial even before you try to level it up:

  • Full-body engagement: An efficient tread uses your arms, legs, and core in coordination. The flutter kick, scissor kick, or eggbeater motion all activate your lower body, while your arms sweep and stabilize.
  • Cardiovascular and muscular endurance: Staying afloat taxes both your aerobic capacity and your muscular endurance, especially the longer you do it.
  • Low impact: It’s easy on your joints. If you’re dealing with nagging injuries or trying to stay active during recovery, it’s a solid option.
  • Real-world utility: Treading water builds the kind of practical fitness that could one day keep you alive — or help you save someone else.
  • Mental toughness: There’s a primal discomfort in the feeling of not being able to rest — of having no edge to lean on, no ground to stand. Learning to push through that discomfort builds your poise under pressure. 

How to Make Treading Water a Legit Workout

Most people tread water inefficiently and lazily — just enough to keep their nose above the surface. But that doesn’t activate the full potential of this exercise. Mixing in these elements will:

1. Add Time-Based Intervals

Instead of aimlessly bobbing around, structure your session like you would a gym workout:

  • Warm up: 3 minutes easy treading
  • Main set: 5 rounds of 1 minute hard treading, 30 seconds easy
  • Cool down: 2 minutes easy

“Hard treading” means using faster, more forceful movements — like exaggerated eggbeater kicks and aggressive arm sweeps — to keep your upper chest and even your shoulders above the waterline.

2. Go Hands-Free

Cross your arms over your chest or raise them overhead while kicking. This forces your legs and core to work overtime and completely removes the assistance of your arms. Try to hold for 20–30 seconds, then recover with normal treading.

3. Hold a Weight

Grab a 5-10 lb object like a dumbbell or brick and hold it at your chest or overhead while treading. This instantly boosts the difficulty and mimics classic lifeguard or military pool drills.

Warning: If you’re not a strong swimmer, make sure a capable buddy or lifeguard is watching while you do this. It’s no joke.

4. Perform Water-Based “Strength” Moves

Mix in controlled movements to target different muscle groups:

  • Water pushdowns: Push the water down as hard and fast as you can with straight arms.
  • Flutter kick sprints: Keep your legs straight and kick rapidly without using your hands.
  • Bicycle kicks: Mimic riding a bike while staying upright — harder than it sounds.

5. Set a Distance Marker

Pick a pool lane and tread from one side to the other without swimming — just vertical movement. This forces forward propulsion through awkward, inefficient movement, taxing your stabilizers and coordination.

Sample 20-Minute Treading Water Workout

Here’s a simple beginner-to-intermediate routine:

Time Activity
0:00–3:00 Warm-up (easy treading)
3:00–4:00 Hard treading
4:00–4:30 Rest (light treading)
4:30–5:30 Hands-free treading
5:30–6:00 Rest
6:00–7:00 Treading while holding weight
7:00–7:30 Rest
7:30–10:00 Intervals: 30s sprint treading / 30s rest x 3
10:00–12:00 Pushdowns and flutter kicks
12:00–15:00 Distance tread (cross pool vertically 2–3 times)
15:00–17:00 Hands-free or overhead hold challenge
17:00–20:00 Cool down (easy treading)

Final Tips

  • Stay upright: The workout is in the vertical position. If you’re angled back like you’re floating in a La-Z-Boy, you’re doing it wrong.
  • Don’t touch the bottom: Treading only works if you’re off the ground. Deep end only.
  • Work up gradually: You’ll be shocked at how tiring this gets. Ease in and build your capacity over time.
  • Use good form: Lazy flapping wastes energy. Focus on strong, intentional movements.

There’s something satisfyingly fundamental about treading water. You don’t need equipment, music, or a squat rack. It’s just you versus gravity. As opposed to other workouts, where the fitness being built seems several steps away from what might be called upon in the real world, you can viscerally feel it building your survival capacity. So tread away — you’re getting harder to kill!

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Skill of the Week: Effectively Traverse the Monkey Bars https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/how-to-do-the-monkey-bars/ Sun, 10 Aug 2025 12:50:34 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=138365 An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]>

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

When you attempt to do the monkey bars, after taking an extended post-childhood hiatus from the practice, you’re apt to think one thing:

“$@%#! This feels awful!”

That terrible feeling is partly due to the fact that your arms have to support a lot more weight than they did when you were seven.

It’s also due to the fact that you probably don’t do much hanging as part of your fitness routine (even though you really should).

It’s worth getting over this shock to the system, though, and tackling the monkey bars more regularly. As an exercise that works your shoulders, back, arms, core, and grip strength, as well as your agility, there’s a reason the monkey bars are a standard fixture in both military and civilian obstacle courses. 

To make it across the monkey bars at all, you’re going to need a baseline of strength. General strength exercises like pull-ups will help get you there, but don’t ignore working on your grip strength; often the reason someone falls off the bars prematurely isn’t because their arms aren’t strong enough, but because their grip strength isn’t adequate. You can find a guide to strengthening your grip here.

Beyond general strength, traversing the monkey bars more comfortably and efficiently requires working on some foundational movements, as well as your technique.

On the former front, you’re going to want to start hanging on the regular, and Danny Clark, Master Instructor for MovNat, recommends these exercises in particular:

  • Upward Reaching (focus on allowing the shoulders to flex fully instead of compensating with spinal extension)
  • Side Hang (minimize “arching” the back and grip the bar with the pad of the hand; work up to at least 45 seconds)
  • Scapular Pull (work up to 5 reps)

When it comes to technique, there are a few different ways to traverse the monkey bars. There’s the side swing, where your body is perpendicular to the bars and your palms are facing each other; this approach can sometimes feel more accessible and stable to beginners. The Front Power Traverse is a good method for when you’re looking for speed. If you’re first starting out, or find yourself in wet, slippery conditions, you may want to grip each bar with both hands before moving one hand to the next bar; while this method can feel more stable, it does make the traverse harder, as it stalls your momentum, slowing your progress and sapping more energy. As you get more comfortable on the rig, move to alternating your hands on the bars (i.e., you only have one hand gripping a bar at any given time).

For smoothness and efficiency, use the Forward Swing Traverse which, with tips and instructions from Danny, has been illustrated above. This traverse allows you to do the monkey bars with true primate-like flow.

The more you practice the monkey bars, the less terrible this effective bodyweight exercise will come to feel. So don’t leave the monkey bars behind in your childhood, and instead jump on them the next time you’re at the playground (there are a bunch of other exercises you can do while you’re there, too). 

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> How I Turned ChatGPT Into My Personal Nutrition Coach and You Can Too https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/how-i-turned-chatgpt-into-my-personal-nutrition-coach-and-you-can-too/ Thu, 26 Jun 2025 16:13:02 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190104 We’ve discussed the many helpful ways you can use AI to improve your life One that’s been a game changer for me is using ChatGPT as my nutrition coach. Coach ChatGPT recently guided me through a successful five-pound cut. It adjusted my macros each week and gave me food suggestions on the fly. It was […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A person sits at a table eating a salad and using a smartphone, perhaps messaging their personal nutrition coach for tips, with a glass of water nearby. The focus is on their hands and the plate of food.

We’ve discussed the many helpful ways you can use AI to improve your life

One that’s been a game changer for me is using ChatGPT as my nutrition coach.

Coach ChatGPT recently guided me through a successful five-pound cut. It adjusted my macros each week and gave me food suggestions on the fly. It was super handy.

If you’re looking to lose some weight, put on some pounds, or change your body composition (more muscle, less fat), here’s how you can use ChatGPT (or another AI tool) to reach your goals.

Create a Dedicated Chat in ChatGPT That Will Serve as Your Nutrition Coach

Create a dedicated thread within ChatGPT that will serve as your nutrition coach. Name it “Nutrition Coach.” Whenever you have a diet/nutrition-related question to pose or an update to give, you’ll always go directly to this thread instead of creating a new chat.

Using a single thread as your nutrition coach keeps things organized and helps ChatGPT give you smarter and more helpful responses. ChatGPT doesn’t automatically remember what was discussed in another thread (though you can ask it to save things), and unless you explicitly re-provide context or refer to saved notes, it doesn’t know prior details. By keeping all your nutrition-related “journaling” in one chat, ChatGPT will retain the full context — every question you’ve asked, every answer it’s given, and any preferences you’ve shared — allowing it to avoid repeating explanations, build on earlier answers, remember nuances, track your progress, and offer refinements based on where you’ve been and how you’re doing.

When you initially create your chat, you want to prompt ChatGPT to let it know how you want it to act and give answers as your nutrition coach. I got this tip from AI expert Ethan Mollick in my podcast interview with him.

Here’s a prompt you can use:

I want you to act as my personal nutrition coach. I’d like you to be direct, practical, and evidence-based. Base your guidance on the latest research in fat loss, muscle gain, performance nutrition, and behavioral science. Help me stay consistent and make adjustments week to week based on my goals, training, weight, energy, and progress photos. Be concise, honest, and results-focused — no fluff. I’ll be checking in regularly. Treat this like an ongoing coaching relationship.

Upload a Selfie to ChatGPT to Get an Estimate of Your Body Fat Percentage

One of the lessons I got from my conversation with Mollick is to experiment as much as possible with AI to see what it can do because its capacities might surprise you.

Going into my recent effort to shed five pounds, I wanted to use body fat as a way to measure my progress, and I wondered if ChatGPT could estimate body fat percentage based on a picture of myself.

I set up a test to see how accurate ChatGPT’s estimate was by scheduling a DEXA scan. On the morning of my DEXA scan, I snapped a shirtless selfie and told ChatGPT my weight. I then asked it:

Based on my weight of 195 pounds and this picture of me, what would you estimate my body fat percentage to be?

Its answer? 13%.

I then went and got the DEXA scan.

My DEXA scan body fat percentage result? 12.6%.

ChatGPT got its estimate impressively close.

Instead of using complicated or expensive ways to measure body fat, you can just use ChatGPT to gauge it. It’s fast, easy, and pretty accurate.

Once you know your initial body fat percentage, you’ll have a starting point to measure your progress.

Ask ChatGPT to Estimate Your Macro/Calorie Goals 

After I got my body fat percentage, I asked my ChatGPT nutrition coach to calculate my macro/calorie goals based on my age, sex, weight, height, activity level, food preferences, and what I wanted to do — lose body fat.

It recommended I consume 2,400–2,500 calories a day and gave me a macro breakdown to follow.

Here’s the prompt I used. Copy and paste it into ChatGPT, changing the details so it matches your situation:

Calculate my calories and give me macro targets based on my goal and these other details about my life and training.

My goal is to lose body fat while maintaining as much muscle as possible. I’m a 42-year-old man. I weigh 195 lbs. I am 6′ tall. My body fat percentage is about 13%. I lift weights 4x per week and do zone 2 cardio 2x per week. I get 10,000 steps daily, but my job is mostly sedentary. I prefer higher protein, moderate carbs, and moderate fat. I eat mostly whole foods like eggs, meat, rice, potatoes, and vegetables.

Please give me daily calorie, protein, carb, and fat targets.

Start Tracking Food and Use ChatGPT to Help

Now that you have your estimated macros/calories, it’s time to put them into use.

Take the macro goals ChatGPT gave you and plug them into your food-tracking app of choice. I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for years. It makes tracking your macros super easy. Their database has over 11 million foods (including foods at most major restaurants) with their corresponding calorie count and macro breakdown. You can even scan the barcode of packaged foods with your smartphone, and their macro information will be entered automatically.

There are other macro-tracking apps out there. Pick one you like because you’ll be more likely to use it.

Once you’ve got an app, there are a few ways Coach ChatGPT can help you track your food and stay on track with your macro goals:

Generate meal prep ideas. If you’re stumped on what to feed yourself so you can hit your macro/calorie goals, ask your ChatGPT nutrition coach for ideas. Here’s a prompt you could use:

Can you help me come up with easy, cost-effective meal prep ideas for breakfast, lunch, and snacks that will help me hit the macro goals you gave me? I want to be able to eat flexibly with my family at dinner, so I’d like these earlier meals to be more controlled and high in protein. Prioritize nutritious, whole foods that are simple to prepare in bulk. I’m okay with eating the same thing every day. Please include estimated calories and macros for each idea. Generate a shopping list based on your ideas.

Estimate macros for home-cooked or restaurant meals. One challenge with tracking is estimating macros for home-cooked meals or items at local restaurants. Now, I snap a pic of the recipe or menu item and ask ChatGPT for a rough macro breakdown. It’s not lab-accurate, but it gets me in the ballpark — which is good enough. I enter the estimate manually into MyFitnessPal.

Suggest meals based on remaining macros. Let’s say your family is making an impromptu stop at Chick-fil-A for dinner. You’ve got 45g protein, 30g carbs, and 20g fat left for the day. Here’s a prompt I’ve used for this scenario:

Here are my remaining macros for the day: ______. What can I get at [insert restaurant] that will fit my macros?

Check in With Your ChatGPT Nutrition Coach

You will check in with your AI coach at the end of each week. You need to do this regularly if you want ChatGPT to be an effective nutrition coach, as it will help you make adjustments based on your progress/setbacks.

Here’s the prompt you’re going to use for your check-ins; also upload a shirtless selfie:

Weight: [X lbs]

Compliance With Macro Goals: [yes/no]

Training: [e.g., 4x/week lifting + 1 HIIT]

Please assess my progress and estimate my current body fat. Be objective and honest. Make adjustments to macros/calories if needed to progress with my fat loss goal.

Coach ChatGPT tweaks my targets based on my results. Over six weeks, I lost about a pound per week, dropping to around 11% body fat, without any guesswork.

Adjust Goals as Desired

Once you’ve accomplished your initial fitness goal with your ChatGPT nutrition coach, feel free to adjust it.

I’ve recently shifted from cutting to maintaining around 191–192 lbs. I asked my ChatGPT nutrition coach what my macros should be for this goal. I’m now eating 2,800 calories daily and trying to recomp — add muscle while staying lean. ChatGPT is helping me manage this transition, too.

Each week, I check in with a photo, weight, and notes on training. If my weight holds steady and I’m still lean, my AI nutrition coach keeps things the same. If my weight jumps too fast or I start looking softer, it reduces calories slightly. It’s pretty dang awesome.

Your On-Demand Nutrition Coach

Could you lose or gain weight without using ChatGPT?

Of course — people have been doing it for centuries.

I lost 30 pounds a few years ago by just gradually reducing my calories. I also did a 15-pound bulk last year. Didn’t use ChatGPT in either situation.

But using ChatGPT has made the process easier, more precise, and more consistent. It’s like having a nutrition coach in your pocket. It gives me solid suggestions, helps me troubleshoot sticking points, and lets me outsource some of the mental load. And, even though I know it’s a bot, the encouragement it offers is affirmative and motivating.

Whether you’re just starting your fitness journey or fine-tuning years of experience in the gym, ChatGPT offers a practical, no-fluff partnership to keep you on track.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Chains, Bands, and Bigger Gains: A Weightlifter’s Guide to Accommodating Resistance https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/accommodating-resistance-chains-bands/ Mon, 02 Jun 2025 19:43:42 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=189937 You’ve probably seen powerlifters deadlifting or squatting with chains draped from their barbells. It looks and sounds badass — but it’s not just for show. Putting chains (as well as bands) on your barbell is called accommodating resistance, and it can be a useful tool to help you break through lifting plateaus and hit new […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A person holds a barbell loaded with weight plates, heavy chains, and bands in a gym. Text at the bottom reads, "Lifting with Chains and Bands"—showcasing accommodating resistance training.

You’ve probably seen powerlifters deadlifting or squatting with chains draped from their barbells.

It looks and sounds badass — but it’s not just for show.

Putting chains (as well as bands) on your barbell is called accommodating resistance, and it can be a useful tool to help you break through lifting plateaus and hit new PRs.

As you lift a barbell to which chains have been attached, the chains gradually rise off the floor, increasing the load as the barbell gets higher.

You can also get this variable resistance by using elastic bands. You attach one end of the band to the barbell and the other end to an anchor near the floor. At the bottom of the lift, the bands are slack, but as you raise the barbell, the band stretches and increases tension, making the barbell feel heavier as you get to the top of the lift.

Back in my powerlifting days, my barbell coach, Matt Reynolds, incorporated chains and banded lifts into my programming quite a bit. I really enjoyed them because they added variety to my training and helped me get past some sticking points in my lifts that had plagued me for months.

To help walk us through the benefits of accommodating resistance and how to incorporate it into your programming, I hopped on the horn with Matt to get his insights and advice.

A Brief History of Accommodating Resistance

The idea of varying resistance through a lift’s range of motion has been around since the early days of strength training. Early 20th-century strongmen would use chains in their exercises to vary the load during the lift. In the mid-20th century, Soviet powerlifting legend Vasily Alekseyev would do his lifts in waist-high water to add some accommodating resistance to his exercise.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that accommodating resistance became a popular tool among powerlifters. And the man who had the biggest impact in spreading its use was Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell.

Simmons began attaching heavy chains to barbells to accommodate the body’s changing leverage throughout the lift. He later started using elastic bands with his lifters as an alternative way to provide accommodating resistance.

Why Use Accommodating Resistance

Here’s what accommodating resistance offers:

Matches Your Strength Curve. The biggest reason you would use accommodating resistance is that it makes the lift match your strength curve: you’re stronger at the top of lifts like the squat and bench press than you are at the bottom.

As you lift a barbell outfitted with accommodating resistance, the chains gradually rise off the floor or the bands stretch, increasing the load as the barbell goes higher and higher and getting the heaviest at the top of the movement. Thus, the lift is lighter at the bottom, where you’re weakest, and heavier at the top, where you’re strongest. “By increasing the resistance as you move into the stronger parts of your lift, you recruit more muscle fibers, which helps with strength and hypertrophy,” Matt told me.

Increases Power and Bar Speed. “Accommodating resistance forces compensatory acceleration,” Matt says. “You’re kind of in a race to the top. The bar gets heavier as you lift it, so it teaches you to push harder all the way through.” This develops explosive strength by requiring a high rate of continuous force.

Overcomes Sticking Points. At some point in your training career, you’ll discover you have sticking points — places in the lift where you can’t seem to go any further. For example, I had a period where I was having trouble locking out my bench press. I started adding chains to the lift and because the barbell got heavier as it moved up, I was able to really train getting through lockout. Once I took the chains off, the barbell just felt super light throughout the lift.

As Matt explains, because accommodating resistance overloads the parts of a lift where you’re strong and keeps the weight light where you’re weak, you get “more velocity going into the sticking point; you often get higher up and in a better leverage position before the sticking point really catches up with you.”

Challenges your muscles in a different way. Accommodating resistance, especially in the form of bands, forces you to stabilize the bar. It also improves bar control and requires you to stay tight throughout the lift.

Chains vs. Bands: Pros, Cons, and Best Uses

There are two ways to add accommodating resistance: chains and elastic bands. Each one has its pros and cons:

Chains. Chains provide a resistance curve that deloads and loads in a more linear way compared to bands. As Matt explained, “They don’t actively pull down on the bar; standard gravity applies.” That makes them easier to control and more forgiving. Chains are easy to set up. Just hang some chains from the bar. (I’ll show you how below.) They’re ideal for beginners and excellent for matching the strength curve while still helping with sticking points.

Bands. Bands offer more extreme variable resistance. “Bands actually increase the speed of gravity,” Matt said. “What I mean by that is if you let go of the bar, it would fall faster than gravity alone because the band is actively pulling the bar down.” Bands also introduce horizontal forces, so if your form is off, you’ll know. They’ll yank the bar out of alignment, making them less forgiving but more effective for exposing weaknesses.

They’re also more intense, which makes them better for advanced lifters seeking explosiveness. The other upside of bands is they are cheaper and quieter than chains. You can use bands at a public gym without causing a clanging metallic ruckus.

One of the downsides of bands, I think, is that they’re kind of a pain to set up. You need a squat rack that will allow you to use band pegs. And you have to make sure you place the bands on the barbell evenly so that everything remains nice and smooth during the lift and you’re not getting pulled in different directions.  

When to Use Chains or Bands

Start with chains if you’re new to accommodating resistance. They’re more forgiving and help you build confidence in your lockout without compromising form. Bands are better for experienced lifters who want to train explosively and work on bar control and speed.

“When you’re really trying to get fast and explosive, bands are probably the better choice,” Matt noted. “But for hypertrophy and learning to get through sticking points, chains are awesome.”

How to Program With Accommodating Resistance

Here’s Matt’s guidance on programming:

  • Use accommodating resistance no more than once per lift per week.
  • Favor chains if longevity is the goal; bands for short bursts of explosive training.
  • Use bands for 4–6 weeks before deloading and taking a break from them.
  • Use chains for 6–8 weeks before deloading and taking a break from them.

The reason there’s a differential in the length of time you can train with chains versus bands is that bands are harder on the body while chains are easier.

Use Accommodating Resistance in Your Supplemental Lifts

Matt thinks one of the best ways to add accommodating resistance is to use it with your supplemental lifts. That’s how he programmed it for me when I was using it regularly.

A sample week of barbell training with accommodating resistance might look like this:

  • Upper Day 1: Main Lift — bench press; Supplemental Lift — chain shoulder press
  • Lower Day 1: Main Lift — squat; Supplemental Lift — chain deadlift
  • Upper Day 2: Main Lift — shoulder press; Supplemental Lift — chain bench press
  • Lower Day 2: Main Lift — deadlift; Supplemental Lift — chain squat

Setting Up Your Barbell for Chain and Band Work

To get the full benefit of accommodating resistance, setup matters. Here’s how to do it right:

Chains

I got my chains from Rogue Fitness. I got the 5/8″ chain kit, and it comes with:

  • (2) 15LB lengths of 5/8″ chain with carabiners. I’d get two more 15LB lengths of the 5/8” chain, so you’ll have 30 pounds of total chains to work with.
  • (2) 4′ lengths of 1/4″ chain with carabiners. This is your leader chain that you’ll hang from your barbell. Once you’ve got that leader chain hanging from the barbell, you’ll hang the heavier 15LB chain lengths on it.

In addition to a chain set, get yourself some EZ Straps. They make attaching chains for deadlifts a breeze. More on that in a second.

Secure the Chains to the Bar

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For bench, squat, or press, you’re going to loop the small leader chain around the barbell sleeve, like so.

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Then attach the big ol’ heavy chains to the leader chain with a carabiner. Attach the carabiner to the leader chain so that when you’re at the top of your lift, one or two chain links should still be on the floor.

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Should look like the above when all is said and done.

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For the deadlift, just place your EZ Straps on the deadlift bar and thread your chains through the rings.

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Super easy!

Bands

In my opinion, bands are kind of a pain in the butt to set up. If you don’t set them up evenly on both sides, your lift is going to be screwy.

You can also use bands on weight machines if you’re a machine guy.

Deadlift

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Anchor the bands to band pegs in your squat rack. You’ll need four pegs like above. If you don’t have band pegs, you can loop them around heavy dumbbells, but anchored bands are more secure.

Start with light or medium bands. When you set up your bands, the band should have slight tension, even at the bottom of the lift. This will typically require you to double up the bands.

Squat

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You’ll also need band pegs for the squat. Place the band pegs in the middle of the rack where your midfoot would be when you unrack and walk back the weight.

Remember, bands pull down harder than gravity, so you gotta stay tight and controlled during the lowering phase.

By incorporating accommodating resistance, you can train more explosively, recruit more muscle fibers, and bust through your sticking points.

And when you’re using chains, you’ll look like a badass doing it.

Give it a try and soon you might be hitting a new PR.  

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Can You Get Jacked at Planet Fitness? https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/can-you-get-jacked-at-planet-fitness/ Mon, 05 May 2025 14:52:46 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=189679 Planet Fitness — and gyms like it — have long been the butt of jokes in the fitness world. Full of purple decor, “lunk alarms,” free pizza nights, and “judgment-free zones,” but lacking in barbells, squat racks, and deadlift platforms, it’s known as the kind of place in which serious athletes and dedicated lifters wouldn’t […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Image1

Planet Fitness — and gyms like it — have long been the butt of jokes in the fitness world. Full of purple decor, “lunk alarms,” free pizza nights, and “judgment-free zones,” but lacking in barbells, squat racks, and deadlift platforms, it’s known as the kind of place in which serious athletes and dedicated lifters wouldn’t be caught dead. Planet Fitness has a rep for being the kind of gym fitness newbies join in January, aimlessly putz around in for a few weeks without changing their body, and then stop going to — while continuing to pay for a membership that is notoriously hard to cancel.

That was basically my take on Planet Fitness for a long time.

Though I had once been a member of one nearly twenty years ago — when Kate and I were first married and couldn’t afford anything else — I had subsequently become the kind of garage-gym-training barbell zealot who looked down my nose at so-called “globo-gyms.”

But, in middle age, I’ve been changing my mind about some things; for example, while I used to be a free-weights-only purist, I now think fitness machines can play a healthy role in building strength and muscle.

That got me wondering if I’d also misjudged Planet Fitness and similar gyms.

So recently, I decided to return to Planet Fitness for the first time in a couple decades to see what kind of training you can actually get done in a cheap globo-gym. I got a day pass to a nearby location to check it out and do a workout.

The experience surprised me.

Here’s my report.

Note: Because the internet has made us all so damned jaded and cynical, this is NOT a sponsored post for Planet Fitness. I have no relationship with them and have not received a dime from them. To get the day pass, I had to fork over my phone number and email, and I am now being bombarded with promotional texts and emails from Planet Fitness. Sacrifices must be made for journalism! I’m using Planet Fitness as a stand-in for all chain gyms (like 10Gym) that offer cheap monthly membership fees.

My Return to Planet Fitness: First Impressions

The Planet Fitness I visited sits in a strip mall and once housed a Walmart many years back.

Signing up was a breeze. I told the guy I just wanted to train for the day, and he said they had a free day pass for potential new members that I could use.

I said I wasn’t interested in joining, just training for the day.

“That’s cool. You can still use the free day pass. Have a great workout!” he replied. No upsell. No pushing me to join.

Nice.

Had I joined up, I could have bought a year’s membership for $15 a month, plus a $59 start-up fee and a $49 annual fee. Added altogether, that comes out to $24 a month for a year. It’s a good deal; many gyms are double and even quadruple that.

I walked around the facility to get a lay of the land.

My overall first impression of Planet Fitness after not visiting in nearly twenty years?

Surprisingly impressed.

This Planet Fitness was really clean and well-maintained — cleaner and better maintained than the $75-a-month gym I belonged to before building my garage gym.

Even the bathrooms/locker rooms were really clean.

I didn’t see anything about pizza night, but I wouldn’t be opposed to a slice of Papa John’s after a training session as long as it fits my macros. Pizza is a decent post-workout food — a nice balance of carbs, protein, and fat.

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They still have the “lunk alarm.” It never went off while I was there. I imagine it rarely, if ever, does; it’s more branding symbol than disciplinary device.

And honestly, as a curmudgeonly 40-something, I’m glad Planet Fitness has a rule against people being loud while working out. While there’s evidence to suggest that grunting and yelling can slightly improve your athletic performance, you have to balance that modest boost against annoying and distracting other people. One of the tradeoffs of working out in a communal space is that you’re honor-bound to act as a considerate communal citizen.  

Lunks who make a bunch of noise while training are, in the words of Mark Rippetoe, disrespectful “ostentatious, histrionic pussies, that are trying to make noise to call attention to themselves.”

I’m not a fan of dropping weights, either, unless you’re doing Olympics lifts.

As far as that third potential lunk-alarm-triggering infraction, I’m not sure how you judge whether someone is judging and if/how that’s enforced.

So overall, I find the idea of creating an alarm to police what should be implicit etiquette silly, but tolerable.

Now, what about the equipment?

Better than I remembered.

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While they are emblazoned in a garish purple primer, there were plenty of machines for every body part you’d want to train. Most of it was Precor, but they also had some Hammer Strength machines. All of the machines were in great condition. They looked new. Here are the machines you’ll find at most PF or 10Gyms:

  • Chest press machine
  • Shoulder press machine
  • Pec deck/reverse fly machine
  • Shoulder lateral raise machine
  • Lat pull-down machine
  • Seated row machine
  • Leg press and extension machine
  • Hamstring curl machine
  • Hack squat machine
  • Bicep curls and tricep extension machine
  • Calf raise machine

You can create a program that works your entire body with all those machines.

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Besides the machines, PF had several cable towers where you could do lat pull-downs and tricep pushdowns. There was a functional trainer (which we’ve written about before).

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Planet Fitness’ dumbbell selection was impressive. Their dumbbells were from American Barbell and felt nice in my hands. You could create a full-body workout with just the dumbbells they have.

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While they don’t have squat racks, they do have Smith machines. I’m not a huge fan of Smith machines (especially for bench press), but they’re a decent option for squats, RDLs, rows, and lunges.

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And, of course, they had plenty of treadmills and elliptical machines where you could do Zone 2 cardio while watching Columbo.

In addition to the absence of squat racks, there are indeed no barbells or deadlift platforms.

But, you’ve still got everything you need to create a well-rounded fitness program and get jacked in the process.

The Science of Muscle Growth Doesn’t Care About Your Gym’s Branding

Here’s the thing about muscle growth: it doesn’t care if your gym looks like Barney the Dinosaur, whether you’re using barbells or machines, or whether you’re paying $15 or $100 a month for a gym membership.

Your muscles respond to mechanical tension and progressive overload. Period.

When you subject a muscle to sufficient mechanical tension and then allow it to recover with adequate nutrition and rest, it grows. This process is the same whether you’re using a 500-pound barbell or a leg press machine with the pin set at 300 pounds.

Research confirms this. Studies have found that free weights and machines are equally effective in increasing strength and muscle mass. As long as you’re getting adequate mechanical tension to stimulate muscle growth and are progressively overloading your muscles workout to workout, you’ll get bigger and stronger . . . even if you use bright purple weight machines.

A Sample Routine You Can Use at a Cheap Globo-Gym

So you’ve got everything you need to get jacked at Planet Fitness or 10Gym.

I had a great upper-body workout while I was there. Got a fantastic pump with that purple Barney the Dinosaur equipment.

Below is a four-day upper/lower split you could do at any Planet Fitness across the country:

Day 1: Upper (this is the exact workout I did on my visit to PF)

  • Machine Chest Press: 3 sets of 8-12 reps
  • Seated Dumbbell Shoulder Press: 3 sets of 10-15 reps
  • Lat Pull-Downs: 3 sets of 8-12 reps
  • Machine Shoulder Lateral Raise: 3 sets of 12-15 reps
  • Pec Deck: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Machine Bicep Hammer Curl: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Cable Tricep Pushdown: 3 sets of 10-12 reps

Day 2: Lower (Quad focus)

  • Smith Machine RDL: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Hack Squat: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Bulgarian Split Squat: 3 sets of 8-12 reps
  • Seated Leg Extensions: 3 sets of 12-15 reps
  • Smith Machine Calf Raises: 3 sets of 12-15 reps

Day 3: Upper

  • Machine Shoulder Press: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Hammer Strength Machine Press: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Machine Seated Row: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Face Pulls: 3 sets of 12-15 reps
  • Dumbbell Curls: 3 sets of 12-15 reps
  • Dips: 3 sets of 10-12 reps

Day 4: Lower

  • Smith Machine Squat: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Single Leg Dumbbell RDLs: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Leg Press: 3 sets of 10-12 reps
  • Machine Leg Curls: 3 sets of 12-15 reps
  • Glute Machine: 3 sets of 12-15 reps
  • Machine Seated Calf Raises: 3 sets of 10-15 reps

I’d do this Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’d do cardio on Wednesday and Saturday.

You can also use this prompt for ChatGPT; it created a really solid upper/lower split for me:

You are an expert fitness trainer who specializes in hypertrophy. Create an upper/lower 4-day split using equipment that you can find at Planet Fitness gyms. Goal is to pack on as much muscle as possible.

If your budget or circumstances lead you to Planet Fitness or 10Gym, go for it. Train hard, be consistent, focus on progressive overload, and you’ll be surprised by what you can achieve in that purple and yellow judgment-free zone.

The iron doesn’t care where you lift it. And neither should you.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #955: The Power of NEAT — Move a Little to Lose a Lot https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/podcast-955-the-power-of-neat-move-a-little-to-lose-a-lot/ Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:17:40 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=180376   Note: This is a rebroadcast. Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more. And that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours — from walking to […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Note: This is a rebroadcast.

Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more. And that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours — from walking to the mailbox to fidgeting at your desk — can be just as important in winning the battle of the bulge.

Here to explain the importance of what’s called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, is Dr. James Levine, a professor, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Obesity Solutions Initiative, the inventor of the treadmill desk, and the author of Get Up!: Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It. James explains how much more sedentary we are than we used to be and what happens to your body when, as the average American does, you spend two-thirds of your day sitting. He shares how doing the lightest kinds of physical activity, even standing more, can help you lose a significant amount of weight and improve other aspects of health, from your sleep to your mood. And we talk about how to easily incorporate more NEAT into your day.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more, and that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours, from walking to the mailbox to fidgeting at your desk, can be just as important in winning the battle of the bulge.

Here to explain the importance of what’s called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, is Dr. James Levine, a professor, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Obesity Solutions Initiative, the inventor of the treadmill desk, and the author of Get Up, Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It. James explains how much more sedentary we are than we used to be, what happens to your body when you spend half of your day sitting.

He shares how doing the lightest kinds of physical activity, even standing more, can help you lose a significant amount of weight and improve other aspects of your health, from your sleep to your mood. And we talk about how you can easily incorporate more NEAT into your day. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/neat.

All right. James Levine, welcome to the show.

Dr. James Levine: Thank you so much for having me, Brett. So you have spent your career researching obesity, particularly how our physical activity levels can contribute to how trim we are or how fat we are. When it comes to the way our body burns or uses calories, you’ve broke it down in your work, and there’s basically three ways our bodies burn calories. What are those three ways our body uses calories?

Yeah, the three basic ways we burn calories are there is the basal metabolism. Basal metabolism accounts for about 60% of the total. The bigger you are, the bigger your basal metabolism, or more specifically, the greater your lean body mass, the greater your basal metabolism. Now what’s important is, yes, it’s actually the majority burn, but you can’t change it. So moving on, the next one is the thermic effect of food. It accounts for about 11% of the total. Now, those are the calories you expend when you convert your meal into intermediary metabolites like glycogen and glucose.

So, if you have three meals a day, you’re gonna have three thermic effects of food. It accounts for about 11% of the total. Guess what? You can’t really change it. Now, the remaining component, where we’ve done 60, we’ve done 10. So the remaining component is about 30% on average of the calorie burn is through activity. Activity is either non-exercise activity or putting on your lycra spandex shorts. I know, Brett, I think you adore those and going off for a run.

We all know what exercise is, but most people around the world actually don’t take purposeful exercise at all. So all of their calorie burn through activity is through non-exercise activity. And in terms of calories, we call that non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And Brett, as a micro sidebar, if I may, even if you do go and do pilates three times a week or whatever that may be, when you actually work out how many calories you burn doing those three classes, which are 30 minutes, and you’ve done the three times a week, you’ve driven there, and so on and so forth. That only averages out to about 100 calories a day, and that’s if you’re having a proper workout.

Dr. James Levine: And so really, for nearly everybody listening to the podcast, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis are the calories you burn through daily energy activity.

Brett McKay: So, okay, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, shorthand, it’s NEAT. It’s called NEAT.

Dr. James Levine: NEAT.

Brett McKay: So basically, it’s just anytime you move during the day, like I’m standing up while doing this interview, talking to you, I’m gesticulating. That is NEAT, correct?

Dr. James Levine: NEAT are the calories you burn throughout the day. That is exactly correct. And I’m also standing up, Brett. There we go. Twin standards. But yeah, it’s all those calories you burn throughout the day. And it’s the calories you burn sort of as you get out of bed and go make coffee and go and collect the mail from the mailbox. It’s the mooching around you do during your day. It’s even sort of the tapping on the table as you’re waiting for the website to upload. And it’s sort of chopping up vegetables in the evening as you’re making your dinner. It’s wandering around the supermarket. It’s all those things you do that aren’t sleeping and eating.

Brett McKay: And how many calories, you’ve figured this out… Like how many calories do we burn in a typical NEAT activity? So if we’re just walking from the couch to the kitchen or we’re doing laundry, like what do we, like how much does it actually burn?

Dr. James Levine: So let’s think about that. First of all, as you know, what’s your NEAT for the day, and then how do you actually get to that number? So as we sort of agreed, it’s about 30% of your calories throughout the day. So that’s gonna be about, for an average person, about 700 calories. Now, what’s really, really interesting about NEAT is if you sort of look at this, if you compare 100s of people, the data set is 576 people living in high-income countries.

What you can see is actually an astonishing variation. Some people will burn 2000 calories a day more NEAT than other people. Example, if you happen to be a mail person delivering mail on foot throughout your day, or you work in agriculture, you can actually be burning 2000 calories a day more through your NEAT than if you’re actually sitting behind your desk all day long and then sitting in the evening in your rather comfy armchair.

Now, how does that actually compute? Now, what’s most important about all of this is that the sort of the biggest way of burning calories through your NEAT is to get off your bottom and walk. And I don’t necessarily mean sort of striding around, I mean mooching around. So if you get up and just walk at one mile an hour, which we call shopping speed, that’s sort of the speed when you’re going through TJ Maxx looking for the best deal. You’re walking on average about one mile an hour. You double your energy expenditure. You’re burning an extra 100 calories an hour.

So, you can immediately appreciate if you spend two hours online doing your shopping, sitting on your bottom versus mooching around at the mall for a couple of hours, there’s 200 calories right there. Now, if you walk a little bit faster at two miles an hour, you’re at 150 calories an hour. So now, Brett, you and I are both upstanding as we’re doing this podcast. We could either sit down absolutely statically still and burn almost nothing above basal. Or we could sort of stroll at about two miles an hour, which is the speed of a walk and talk meeting, and burn 150 calories each.

And so, when you actually compare people with very high NEAT to people with very low NEAT, people with very low NEAT are sitting on their bottoms all day. People with the highest NEAT are up mooching around, doing stuff on their feet, whether that’s at work or at play.

Brett McKay: All right, today, what’s the typical amount of NEAT that most Americans get? I think you said 700 calories?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, that would be a reasonable number right there. But again, as you’re listening to this, remember the key thing, Brett, is that this is highly variable. So as you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re somebody sort of a bit like my job, which is 100% behind a computer screen every single day of the week, then you know intuitively that that’s too much sitting. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this now, if you look at job postings, they will even put as a warning on the job posting, this job requires excessive sedentary time. It’s actually extraordinary.

On the other hand, if you happen to have a job, whether that’s working in a warehouse, whether that’s working in a bakery, whether that’s working in fields, whether that’s sort of something much more ambulatory, that could even sort of be a greeter at Walmart, if you like, where you’re also mooching around. You can imagine having a NEAT five, six, 700 calories a day more than the person confined to a sedentary job.

Brett McKay: So there’s been a lot of talk about rising obesity rates in the United States, and there’s been different arguments put forth about what the cause is. It’s people are eating more, people are eating more sugary foods, people are eating more fatty foods. And you highlight research, but oftentimes it gets overlooked is that people are just moving less. Do we know like how much less we are experiencing NEAT in America today?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah. If you go back sort of 200 years to the Industrial Revolution, people moved from agricultural environments into the cities. And then what happened, of course, is there were production lines in the big factories. And then what happened, what, in the 1950s or thereabouts, people started sitting down working behind desks. And in fact, office desks were actually designed including the chair with the wheels, to stop people getting up and moving because the ergonomists back then believed that if you could stop people getting up and walking, they would actually be more productive if they sat behind their desk all day long. They were wrong.

But, that is exactly sort of how things have evolved to push us down in our chairs. And are we sitting too long? Oh, my goodness. Yes, we are. How do I know that? Is it just because of the rising obesity rates that you talk of? And there are really good data to the effect that we have sat progressively more and more and more over the last 200 years. But in fact, our calorie intake has not increased substantially. The only data showing that it has are actually from Australia.

So yeah, our calorie intake has been constant, but it’s too much for the degree of inactivity we have. And it’s not Brett, just about obesity. There are 27 other chronic diseases and conditions associated with sitting too much. And that means things like diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, even some types of cancer, and of course, musculoskeletal problems. And so, yes, on the other hand, you may be listening to this podcast and smiling. It’s quite interesting, but it’s bigger than that. It’s really serious stuff. And it’s not just our bodies we’re hurting. We’ve set up a society whereby our kids are gonna ultimately receive the world we’ve created for them.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s interesting you point out this lack of activity, physical activity on a daily basis is probably driving the obesity, a big factor in driving the obesity. You talk about, if you even look at office work, you talk about this in one of your books. If you look at office work 50 years ago compared today, you did a lot more moving in the office than today. You had to move even if you were just doing a desk job.

Dr. James Levine: This is a 100% correct. I think back to sort of when I started in the day. I’ll give you a fantastic example. My very first job was working for a really famous professor called Professor Davies, who is an osteoporosis professor. And of course, as you may be aware, osteoporosis is growing quicker and quicker, partly due to the lack of activity. And she asked me to gather papers about a certain document she was writing for the World Health Organization. I said, I’d love to.

Now, those papers were scientific articles. And in order to gather them, I kid you not, I literally had to get on my bicycle and cycle across London to probably one of 15 different libraries to gather all the articles she needed. Yes, it took a lot of time. But my goodness, I’d come into her office, sweat pouring down my back. Today, click, click, click, click, click, it’s done. And just taking that simple example, all of us listening who are of a certain age, remember how difficult things used to be where we used to have to go and get resources.

We used to… We even have to sort of walk to the printer, which was actually in the printing room. Yeah. Now we barely… We can actually spend our entire day when you think about it in the office at work. And if I need my lunch, click, click, click, DoorDash right to my desk and get home, drive through, click, click, click, Pizza at my door, and on we go. And if you sort of step back and actually think about how much time I spend sitting every day, if you think about it, what’s really interesting is you can’t really imagine a world where you don’t spend it sitting because it’s sort of a subsidiary symptom of how we actually live.

And so you don’t sort of analyze, Oh, I’m sitting a lot at the moment. You just live your life, you see. And so this is what’s happened. It sort of crept up on us. And all of a sudden, we’ve all become these terribly sedentary and rather unwell and sort of slightly blue, sedentary office workers, both in the office and at home.

Brett McKay: When some people, or I think when most people notice that I’m gaining some weight, I notice that I don’t move around all that much ’cause I have an office job that doesn’t allow me to move around all that much. They think, well, I can take care of this with just diet and exercise. But you argue that diet and exercise will never be enough to compensate for the lack of NEAT. The problem with dieting, just reducing calories, is that you can’t do that forever.

So, let’s say you reduce your calories and you do lose weight. Because you’ve reduced the amount of calories you’re consuming. But in order to continue the weight loss with calorie reduction, you have to decrease the calories even more because you’ve likely decreased your metabolic, overall metabolic rate, resting metabolic rate ’cause you’re smaller. So your body requires fewer calories. And so, it gets to a point where it becomes unsustainable. And I think…

Dr. James Levine:Let me jump in there, if I may, please. ‘Cause you’ve touched on a really interesting point. Not only is everything you just said correct, but it’s even sort of more subtle than that, if I may please. When somebody loses weight through caloric restriction, through cutting their calories down, yeah, body fat is disseminated. Somebody can also lose some lean body mass and body weight declines on a lower calorie intake. The trouble with this is the body is not a static system. The body, brilliant in its design, adjusts and actually becomes more efficient.

So in fact, once you’re at that lower caloric intake, the body is working more efficiently, making it actually more difficult to lose more weight. So you’re not even dealing with a sort of a simple mathematic is I’ve decreased my calories in, I’m now going to be able to maintain a lower body weight easier. That actually isn’t true because the body will sort of counter-regulate to make it more difficult to maintain your body weight.

Brett McKay: And then also exercise just relying on focused exercise activities to offset the amount of being sedentary. As you said earlier, it’s not gonna do much in the long run ’cause you might just burn 100, 200, 300 calories and that can’t make up for being sedentary every other hour you’re awake.

Dr. James Levine: Purposeful exercise for the sake of improving your health, like going to the gym or something like that, is fantastic if you like to do it. Let’s be clear about that. If you like to go to the gym, keep doing it, please. It’s really good for you. It’s really good for your health. But very interestingly, again, for even people who go to the gym, the harm associated with sedentariness, as you say, all the other time that you’re not at the gym, which is basically 95% of your week, the harm of sedentariness is still not eliminated.

So, if you go to the gym, great. But if you’re sedentary, you’re sedentary. And if you’re sedentary, it’s causing you harm.

Brett McKay: I feel like in the last decade or so, people, whether… You’re talking about dedicated exercise or just physical activity in general, people have been kind of down on physical activity as a method of weight management. There’s this idea out there that you can’t exercise your way or burn your way to weight loss. Diet is what really matters. If you move more at some times, you’re just going to slow down. At other times, your body’s gonna find ways to just compensate for that extra activity somehow.

But you did a study that proved, Yes, activity can keep the pounds off. It was this really complex study. You basically got a bunch of people, including yourself, and then you overfed them 1000 calories a day. And then you just watched what happened. Who gained weight and who lost weight. So walk us through that study. And what did you learn from this study?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, Brett, it was extraordinary. It was called the Great Overfeeding Experiment. And that is exactly what we did. But I have to tell you, this wasn’t done using a computer watch or guessing. This was done meticulously in metabolic laboratories at Mayo Clinic. It was a big, big deal. Every single food item was weighed and measured chemically. Every single movement was captured. Every calorie burned was analyzed. And even how people change their body fat was measured using precise technology down to a few 100 grams.

It was extraordinary work. A huge team of people helped do it. And what we found were two things that I think are really important. You can take a group of people, none of whom have obesity, and you can expose all of them to 1000 calories a day of overfeeding for months on end. And the extraordinary thing, first of all, is this, one person can take nearly all of those extra thousand calories and deposit it in body fat. That person is super prone, almost like a sponge absorbing water, to developing excess body fat.

On the other hand, another person can receive the same amount of excess food and somehow magically through their brain get up and start spontaneously moving. Their NEAT can increase for extra 1000 calories they’ve received. Their NEAT can increase 700 extra calories a day through movement, not going to the gym, through movement. 700 calories extra a day. On one hand, you’ve got somebody who seems to absorb every extra gram of food and deposit it in their body fat.

On the other hand, you’ve got somebody who you can overfeed a 1000 calories a day and gains almost no body fat because they switch on their NEAT. They get up and they move. So what you realize is, first of all, some people are really predisposed to gaining obesity. Yeah, we all know that and I’m sure some of your people listening are nodding their heads right now. But other people have this capacity from inside of the brain to get up and move so much more that they don’t gain any weight with overfeeding. And they never went to a gym. So that’s the first thing. Now what’s the second thing? The second thing is probably even more important than that.

The second thing is, if you are one of those people nodding your head right now, if you’re one of those individuals who has a tremendous susceptibility to gaining excess body weight, as soon as you sniff extra food, what you realize is that the body is designed in such a way that you can not gain more body weight. You cannot gain excess body weight and develop obesity if you are up and you are moving and your body has the capacity to do this. And you can even burn up to, if you like, 700 calories a day extra based on those data. So it’s a beautiful idea. You can win. You don’t need to go to the gym.

You can get up and move 100s of extra calories a day, whether that’s converting a standard meeting at work to a walk and talk meeting, whether that’s converting shopping online to actually shopping by foot, whether that’s getting your groceries delivered to your door from the supermarket, or actually going to the supermarket and physically choosing it. You can integrate movement into your day, so much so to stave off excess body weight, and you can even burn up to an extra 700 calories a day doing it.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Did you all figure out what causes some people to have that natural tendency to, when they consume more calories, they just start moving more naturally and others don’t do that? Is there a gene?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, we spent a lot of time on that. And again, what’s fascinating is this. Think about it for a second. So what we did in that experiment is we got completely healthy, normal volunteers and we overfed them. We checked that they took every single extra calorie that they were given. We measured that. We even measured their urine in their stool, I should tell you. We had freezers full of poop. And what we then measured was that people responded to that by increasing their NEAT, their movement throughout their day. If you think about it for a second, how did people know to do that? It had never been discovered before.

I mean, how did that happen? People, if you like, knew to do it subconsciously because there’s a mechanism in the brain that counter-regulates how our food relates to our activity. And we thought, well, we’ve got to go and try and find that area in the brain because then we can actually help people really achieve their goals. And so we had a whole neuroscience team led by Dr. Novak, a brilliant young neuroscientist, and she identified tiny parts of the brain right in the hypothalamus, which is an old part of the brain that switches on your NEAT and switches on NEAT more in some people than others. So in fact, right at the center of your brain right now as you’re listening to this podcast, your brain is analyzing your calories in, your calories out, and is propelling you to move more or move less. So yes, there’s a deep biology underpinning this.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in some people, there’s a part of the brain that’s more discerning or more activated so that whenever you take in excess calories, it sends a signal to move more. And then in some people, that part doesn’t switch on as strongly. But a big point you make in all of your books you’ve written is that even if you don’t have that natural tendency to want to move more whenever you consume excess calories, you’re not destined to be an inert lump. You can still take action. It doesn’t have to be big change. Just take small, tiny changes throughout the day to counteract that.

Dr. James Levine: Absolutely. And the trick, if you like, I actually, as somebody who looks after patients, I really don’t like tricks. But nonetheless, for you, Brett, the trick. The trick to all of this is to make a decision. Is to make a decision with your day? Today. Is today going to be the day I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and step forwards? Or is today gonna be the day I stay on my seat? If you decide to stay on your seat, my only prayer is that tomorrow you think the same question of yourself.

On the other hand, if today is the day right now that you are going to get up, take control, and take a step forward, the moment you do that, you will do it tomorrow and you’ll do it the next day. And the data suggests that if you can find those moments throughout your day to consistently be up and moving, and you do it for 21 days approximately, it will become a habit. Just like sitting down in the evening every evening and binge watching is a habit, you can actually have really cool and healthy motivational movement habits as well.

So, if you can find those moments to get up and move throughout your day and keep doing it, it will become a habit. It’ll become part of your life. And here’s what the data from… We’ve worked in over seventy US corporations, here’s what the data from corporations show, it’s really great stuff, is once you’ve taken on one good habit and done it for 21 days, we call it the NEAT ripple effect, is a good movement habit will beget, will make another movement habit. And so, one becomes two, and all of a sudden two becomes four. And what happens is people who are sitters become people who are movers.

And people who become movers also influence their families, their kids, husbands, and wives, and friends to become movers as well. And so, there’s a NEAT ripple. But the trick, the trick, the trick is to think right now, today is today. I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and take that first step forwards or not. And if the answer is yes, do it now. In other words, Brett, what I’m saying is, if you can get it into your mindset, into your thinking that I’m gonna fight the chair, I’m gonna win this battle, you can actually do it.

Brett McKay: And what’s great, you offer suggestions on how you can do that. I think the trick is understanding, Okay, our social environment is pushing us to be sedentary. Everything is like, you do everything sitting down. And I think one trick is just, can I do this typically sedentary activity? Can I do it while moving somehow? So, you offer suggestions like, if you like to watch TV, get yourself a really cheap treadmill. You can find them on Amazon for 300 bucks now. They’re so cheap. And then just stick that in your television room. And while you’re watching your favorite show, just walk at one point one miles per hour on that treadmill. Or if you like playing video games, do the same thing. You can play a video game while you’re walking. Or like you said, if you take phone calls during work, don’t do that sitting down. Do that while you’re walking.

Dr. James Levine: You are a 100% correct. And I’m telling you, what’s really cool about this is the other thing I mentioned is once you’ve… And I will tell you now, 300 bucks for a treadmill in your house, that’s expensive these days. I mean, they’re coming in at a $100 now, or you can get a secondhand one, or you can get… People are throwing away their exercise bicycles. I mean, take it, refurbish it, put it in your TV room. And you’d be surprised that you can binge watch, I’m actually starting to re-watch Seinfeld again, I hate to tell you this, but I can binge watch Seinfeld gently cycling on my stationary bicycle.

It makes almost no noise and I’m getting just as much TV. And there is so much we can do if we put our mind to it. And the other thing, Brett, you mentioned is we sort of, society has put us in our chair. But the other thing to think about for a second is how we can change the society. Now, I don’t mean changing the world, let’s be serious, but how can I change the society I live in? So, next time if I’m dating, next time I choose a date on, I can’t remember the name of the website, whatever, where you’re swiping left and swiping right, I’m actually going to choose a date for somebody who also likes to go walking.

I’m going to sort of say, next time we all sit to come for my birthday, and for those of you listening, my birthday is November the 20th. Next, for all of you who are going to come to my birthday party, yeah, we’re going to have cake, you bet we are. But also, once we’ve done our cake, we’re also all going to go out for a walk together, we’re going to do a family walk. So, we actually have the opportunity to influence the micro society we live in, but we need to choose to do that. And it’s all part of the same thing, make that decision, take your first step, and the rest is going to flow from there.

Brett McKay: And one thing you point out in your book is that you work with a lot of patients who have had extra weight, and just by simply increasing the amount of NEAT in their lives, they’ve been able to lose weight, a lot of weight. They don’t even become serious gym goers, they’re just moving more during the day.

Dr. James Levine: A 100%. And so, yes, and if you like, there is the world of what I call testimonies, and this is fine, and I’m a 100% respectful. But as somebody with a science background, I’m actually more interested in the hardcore data from the scientific studies. And the scientific studies conducted in normal US office workers show that even in people who don’t want to lose weight, they will tend to lose weight and become more active. But in people who want to lose weight, people will start, if they activate their lives, they take on NEAT, are going to be losing 10 to 20 pounds slowly and gently, if you like, without breaking a sweat. And they’re gonna do that over six months, and then over the six months, the same.

And so, what’s really powerful about this is, Yes, 60% of the population may be dieting in any given year, but what’s really cool about NEAT is NEAT is going to help you keep off that excess body weight, and it’s going to nudge you forwards and forwards and forwards. And what’s important about this is you’re not gonna get a sports injury from NEAT, you’re not gonna have to pay a gym membership for NEAT, everyone can get up and move throughout their day without paying a penny for doing it. And what it’s gonna help with, for those people who want to lose weight, you don’t have to lose weight, even if you have excess body weight, you’re not obliged to. If you want to, this will help.

Brett McKay: So we’ve been talking about the benefits of NEAT and weight loss, but you mentioned earlier, there’s other benefits to moving more throughout the day. How can NEAT improve metabolic health? We’re talking like how we regulate glucose.

Dr. James Levine: Oh, this is really, I hope we have enough time for this, Brett, but let me explain briefly. This is super cool. Experiments were done where healthy volunteers came onto a research centre, very, very carefully monitored, and their glucose from their blood was being monitored every 30 seconds. These individuals were given breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the metabolic unit in the research centre, and then were instructed to get on with their normal day. And that was, computer work for the morning, then lunch, computer work, and a bit of Facebook, and then dinner, and then evening time, Facebook, binge watching, and TV, okay?

And we measured their blood glucose every 30 seconds continuously throughout the day. And what actually happens is, when you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, your blood glucose climbs to a mountain and then slowly descends over a total period of about an hour and a half. After each of the three meals, that’s what happens. Then we said to people, we want you to do exactly the same day again. We’ll measure your glucose again. We’ll give you the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner again, but we want you to do one single thing different. After every meal, we want you to take a 15-minute walk or stroll at one and a half miles an hour. That’s literally strolling.

15 minutes after every meal. Now, as I mentioned, without the stroll, normal day, you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, your blood sugar, your blood glucose climbs to a mountain, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you add a 15-minute stroll, that’s it. The mountain becomes a hill. It literally halves the size of that blood glucose mountain. 15-minute stroll after each of your meals. The biggest predictor of Type 2 diabetes is the size of those mountains. So all of a sudden, for taking a 15-minute stroll after each of your meals, everyone listening can do this. You halve your blood glucose response to meals and potentially risk of Type 2 diabetes. What a win, win, win!

Brett McKay: Now, that is really powerful. Another thing you talk about is the benefit of NEAT to our mental health. I know a lot of people out there are struggling with their mental health. What effect can NEAT have on that?

Dr. James Levine: There has not been one clinical trial in depression prevention that includes a walking program. That hasn’t helped people. Many of us are susceptible to feeling blue. I am. Feeling low, feeling bad. Most people listening will know that when you’re feeling bad and you go for a walk, for a reason you quite can’t understand, you actually feel a little bit better. What’s really powerful are the data that show that if you actually sort of take on NEAT walking as part of your routine, that will actually help you feel brighter, smarter, and sort of more alive. All of us already sort of know this. We all know this. When you’re down, somebody says, let’s go for a walk, and you feel better.

This is actually a truth. And so for those of us who can take on a NEAT approach to life, not only is your sort of body going to be better, whether that’s with respect to obesity prevention or diabetes, blood pressure, whatever it may be, but actually you’re gonna feel brighter too. And what’s really cool is once you feel brighter and happier doing a little bit of walking, even after each of your meals, guess what? You’re gonna keep doing it and you’re gonna take on more stuff so you can feel even brighter and happier. And again, that’s what the data suggests.

Brett McKay: Another thing you’ve seen in your research and working with patients is that a lot of these patients that come to see you, they talk about, I’m just so tired all the time. And it seems weird because like, you’re just sitting around all day. Why would you be tired? But I think everyone has experienced how doing absolutely nothing can just be exhausting. And by incorporating some more light physical activity during your day, it’ll actually give you the physical energy you need to do the things you want to do in life.

Dr. James Levine: I think we all, again, know this to be a common truth, but Brett, that allows me to touch on one other thing, which is so important and this will not shock anybody. Sleep. Sleep is a critical component of this equation. It is absolutely critical. And the data on NEAT and sleep are fascinating. We brought people again onto our amazing research centers at Mayo Clinic. These are extraordinary places where people volunteer to do studies to help us understand what’s going on. And we brought them onto the research center. And we said, Have a good night’s sleep in your normal way.

Get used to our facilities. And people did. What we then did is we sleep restricted people. We said to people, you’re gonna sleep 30% less. We’re gonna wake you up. We’re gonna twiddle your toes. We’re gonna keep you awake. And my goodness, yes, you’re gonna get tired. And that’s exactly what happened. But here is what the data show. The data shows when you sleep restrict people, they eat more. We all know this. When you’re tired, this is me, by the way. Okay. This is me. When I’m tired, I eat more.

This is always the case. For some reason, you reach for the choc, you reach for the chips, whatever it may be, but you eat more. This is what happens when you sleep deprived. You’re feeling tired, you’re feeling pooped out, you’re noshing, you’re eating a few snacks here and there. But the one thing when you’re tired you don’t want to do, is to get up and go for a walk. When you’re fully rested and you’ve got good sleep, you get up and you feel, what’s the word we all use? Energized. That’s what we feel. And that energized means get up and go for a walk. Get up and do some cool stuff. Let’s do something fun today. And guess what? You think less about that food you’re going to lean on to deal with your tiredness.

So I fully understand that people may have two or sometimes three jobs. I totally get it. I totally do understand that there is tremendous stress at the moment and tremendous mental anguish. But if you can find a good method to get good sleep, whether that involves, for example, stopping your coffee at noon or starting to relax early in the evening so you’re ready for sleep, not stressing yourself out with text messages or arguments before you go to bed, whatever it may be, if you can find a method of getting good sleep, that is a critically important part of the NEAT equation.

Brett McKay: Well, I also think moving more can help you sleep better. I’ve noticed my own life. There’s this idea I’ve heard about sleep pressure. You have to build up some sleep pressure so your body wants to go to sleep. And one way you can do that is just moving more. I’ve had the best nights of sleep when I’ve had a really active day. I think the best night of sleep, I’ve been chasing this night of sleep for 20 years now is when my wife and I, we went to Rome. And you just walked. There’s, like, all day. You’re just walking hours on hours. And I remember we came back to our hotel and we just laid down and we just both fell asleep. We didn’t wake up until, like, 14 hours later, and we both felt that was the best night’s sleep.

And I think it’s because we just walk so much. And I noticed in the times where I don’t move a lot during the day, I have a hard time falling asleep.

Dr. James Levine: This is 100% correct, your body… If you remember earlier, Brett, we were talking about the parts of your brain that are sort of monitoring all of this, one question you’ve got to ask yourself is, Okay, I’ve now got my movement going, just as you say. You walked around Rome all day, you sort of met your NEAT goal set by your brain. What happens if you don’t? And I think a lot of people actually understand this, but haven’t necessarily thought about it the way you put it. So if I am sort of forced to sit in meetings all day long, and I assure you that’s often many of my days, you get home sort of feeling this sort of anxiety. This sort of tightness inside of you. And I don’t know about you, but I get this thing sort of like my thoughts, and I get frustrated and irritated much more than if I’d actually had an active day where I dissipated all of my energy. And I think the other thing that, again, many people relate to, when you’ve come back from work and it’s been a day that you’ve been in your chair, you haven’t been up, moving and so on and so forth, what’s one thing you do? You reach for a beer. Really, what that’s saying is I need an anesthetic. There’s too much pressure in my head. I need to anesthetize myself.

And so therefore, the complexity of getting a good night’s sleep absolutely relates to the need to burn off the energy that our body needs us to burn off. We’re designed to get up and move. If you suppress the human, the human doesn’t do well. We get really internally upset by that, and we need to move. So part of our argument is that by forcing people to be seated all day, it’s fundamentally unnatural to people, and they need to move just to function normally. And your day in Rome is illustrative of that.

Brett McKay: So we talked about some ways people can incorporate more NEAT into their lives. There’s an activity that you do sitting down. See if you can do that standing up or even walking. For people who want to incorporate more NEAT in their life, is there a goal they should shoot for? Like, what’s the minimum dose of NEAT that we need to get before we start seeing that benefit? Is it an hour of extra NEAT two hours? Is there steps? What have you found in your research?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, I mean, this is a terrific question. There has been a huge vogue, as many people know, to buy various gadgets, to look at various watches and sort of monitor stuff. Now, if you’re somebody who loves monitoring stuff, go for it, enjoy it. That’s great. But what is actually the truth and again, when you study this in sort of normal folk, what you find is if you give people a monitoring device, they’ll use it for a short period of time, and it can be literally, I kid you not, days. And their use of that monitoring device will fall off almost exponentially, almost sort of like over a cliff face, and they’ll sort of put it into a drawer. And how many people listening today have exercise monitoring devices, wearable little things that are in their drawer that’s powered down, that’s unused? So my advice to people is to actually look at it completely differently.

If you love monitoring stuff, get the equipment. It’s great. If you’re going to take on for yourself a goal, I suggest you take on one goal, not 100 goals. One thing. What’s the one thing you’re going to do for the next few weeks, and let’s say for the sake of argument, is every Thursday, and this is as simple as it gets, every Thursday I have to do a conference call with central corporate where they talk about health and wellness, whatever it is. It’s a 40 minutes call every single week. I only have to listen to fulfill my obligations. So I’m going to do that walk and talk. That’s one thing I’m going to do every Thursday. Super simple. Actually, what I’m going to do is I’m going to have a little chart on my fridge, and every time I do it, I’m going to put a check mark against it until I’ve done it 21 times. Monitoring, as simple as it gets.

On the other hand, I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to say, you know what? My daughter loves the art stuff, and I live in Washington DC, where all the galleries are free at Smithsonian. So once a week, I’m going to go with my daughter and we’re going to stroll through the art gallery, and we’re going to do that together for two months. Now, honestly, do you need to put that on your fridge to remind yourself to go for a walk with your daughter in the art gallery?

No. What you want to do is to do it for three weeks and it becomes a habit between you and your daughter. And so what I suggest again, is be smart, what works for you. But pick something, find a way of monitoring it, and do it. And the last concept I’d like to share with you in this regard is the idea of rewards. Now, rewards are great, okay? They’re really, really cool. But again, you have to be smart. So giving yourself a reward to go to the mailbox and collecting your mail on foot every day, to me, honestly, sounds a bit silly. I’m not going to reward myself for collecting the mail. However, if my goal is to walk a half marathon, and I had this amazing patient who did this, she came into clinic in her wheelchair, and she sent me a photograph of her and the grandchildren when they walked a half marathon.

I kid you not, it was like, it blew my mind. Her reward was if she could walk a half marathon, she’d saved up enough money to go to South Dakota for a week. That was her reward and that was her goal. And she actually said to me, Actually, the reward was to do it. So I think if you can think of the idea of finding things that you want to do, finding a method to record it, and then finding a method to recognize yourself, pat yourself on the back, or have some sort of achievement recognition that you’re off to the races.

Brett McKay: I love it. So just find ways to move more. That’s it. Again, it’s not hard. It doesn’t have to be that hard. It could be as simple as standing up at work occasionally. It could be doing the walk and talk, something that I’ve done after reading your book, or we’ve done this for a long time as a family. When we park somewhere, we park the furthest away so we can walk there, take the stairs. Kind of becomes a game. Finding ways you can move more in an environment that is fighting for you to sit more. It’s kind of fun to be a rebel. I’m going to move more instead.

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, be a rebel for yourself. Do it. Get up and move.

Brett McKay: Well, James, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Dr. James Levine: Well, I mean, it’s fantastic. If people wish to go to the library and get the book, Get Up. It really summarizes the work we did in the lab. It’s, of course, available on our favorite online website as well. And that’s great. But also places like mayoclinic.com have really high quality information on the Internet. And so please please make a decision to get up and move today and learn more from these various resources and make it happen for yourself.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, James Levine, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. James Levine: It’s my pleasure as well. Thank you so much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. James Levine. He’s the author of the book Get Up!: Why Your Chair is Killing You and What You Can do About It. Check out our show notes at aom.is/neat, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com and while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a weekly edition and a daily edition. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what we’re doing at The Art of Manliness.

And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you how to listen to ao podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Fighting Powerpenia: How to Keep Your Explosive Strength as You Age https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/powerpenia/ Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:53:27 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=189503 Many evenings during the week, you’ll find our family playing basketball in the driveway — parents vs. kids. Something I started to notice earlier this year, as I went head-to-head against my 14-year-old son Gus, was that while he was becoming more explosive with his athletic moves, I had gotten significantly less springy. While he […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> A man showcases his explosive strength with a box jump in the gym, where he's surrounded by weights, exercise balls, and other fitness equipment. Clad in athletic gear, he defies powerpenia with every leap.

Many evenings during the week, you’ll find our family playing basketball in the driveway — parents vs. kids.

Something I started to notice earlier this year, as I went head-to-head against my 14-year-old son Gus, was that while he was becoming more explosive with his athletic moves, I had gotten significantly less springy.

While he could turn on a dime to make a quick cut to the basket and effortlessly jump for a rebound, I found myself relying on my larger body to slowly muscle into position for a shot.

I was definitely still a lot stronger than Gus — I just couldn’t turn that strength into force as quickly as he could. It felt like I had lost the gear for it.

We talk a lot about strength and muscle gain here on AoM. If you’re looking to get bigger and stronger, you’ll find plenty of articles on those topics.

But an area of fitness that we’ve overlooked, but I’m now starting to appreciate more and more as I move into middle age, is muscle power.

What I was experiencing in my basketball match-ups against Gus was a diminishment in this capacity.

Researchers have given the age-related loss of muscle power a name: powerpenia. And growing research shows that it’s a key predictor of whether you’ll be able to pick up your grandkid, climb a flight of stairs, or hoist your keister off the toilet when you’re 70.

Here’s what you need to know about powerpenia — and how to resist it.

The Muscle Decline Trifecta: Sarcopenia, Dynapenia, and Powerpenia

You’ve likely heard of sarcopenia — the loss of muscle mass with age. It typically begins around age 40 and accelerates after age 60. Muscle mass typically declines by .5-1% per year after 40. Sarcopenia leads to frailty in old age, which makes it hard for old people to get out of chairs, let alone get up from the floor if they fall down.

Then there’s dynapenia — the loss of muscle strength. Sarcopenia contributes to dynapenia, but there are also other things going on that lead to age-related declines in muscle strength. Mostly it comes down to our neuro-muscular system becoming less efficient at activating our muscles. Muscle strength declines along a similar trajectory as muscle mass, with a loss of 0.5–1% per year after age 40.

Both sarcopenia and dynapenia can be mitigated and even reversed with regular strength training, which is why we’re big fans of weightlifting.

In 2024, researchers introduced a third area of concern: powerpenia — the loss of muscle power.

Muscle power is the ability to display strength quickly; it’s explosiveness. Examples of muscle power in action include jumping for a rebound, sprinting, and punching. But muscle power doesn’t just come in handy in sports. Muscle power is also what lets you:

  • Sprint to catch your kid running into the street
  • Jump out of the way of an object about to hit you
  • Lift something quickly
  • Bound up stairs two at a time
  • Catch yourself during a fall

Powerpenia may be the new age-related muscle concern on the block, but it seems to be the most influential factor in the maintenance of our physical vitality. In fact, a recent study found that power — not strength — is the best predictor of whether older people are able to successfully navigate the activities of daily living.

The interesting thing about muscle power is that it actually drops faster than muscle size and strength — as much as 2–4% per year after 40. That means by your 60s or 70s, you might still look pretty solid and even test decently on a strength test, but you’ve lost the explosiveness needed to stay agile and independent.

Why the rapid decline? Three big reasons:

First, there’s the loss of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Fast-twitch fibers are responsible for generating quick bursts of strength and speed, and they naturally atrophy faster than slow-twitch fibers as we age and don’t call upon them.

Second, there are the changes in our tendons due to inactivity. If you don’t regularly do activities that require you to display strength quickly, your tendons become stiff and less efficient at storing and releasing energy, making explosive movements harder to perform. The degradation of tendon health from disuse explains why a lot of middle-aged guys injure themselves when they decide to play pick-up basketball for the first time in a decade. It’s why I got a bad case of hamstring tendonitis a few years ago when I decided to do a sprint workout after years of not sprinting.

Finally, as we age and don’t call upon our fast-twitch muscles for explosive activity, our brain and nervous system become less efficient at telling our muscles to contract quickly.

How to Fight Back Against Powerpenia

After my lackluster performance in basketball games against Gus and after reading the research on powerpenia, I decided I needed to do something to counteract the decline of muscle power that comes with middle age.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to do.

Here are some things I’ve started to incorporate into my physical training to fend off powerpenia:

Plyometrics

Plyometric exercises develop explosive power by training your muscles and nervous system to react quickly.

You don’t have to devote an entire workout to plyos. You can add one or two plyometric exercises to your regular strength-training routines. Here’s what I’m doing:

Before my first lower-body workout of the week, I do the following plyometric exercises:

  • Power Skipping. Perform a regular skip, but jump and lift your knee as high as you can. I do this for 15 yards, three times.
  • Box Jumps. Stand in front of a box or other suitable platform. Try to find a box that’s at least 18″ off the ground. Jump onto the box. To avoid injury, step rather than jump down from the box. Do three sets of five jumps.

Before my second lower-body workout of the week, I do the following plyos:

  • Broad Jumps. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, swing your arms back, bend your knees, and then explosively jump forward as far as possible, using your arms to help propel you. Land softly with your knees slightly bent to absorb the impact and maintain balance. Do three sets of five jumps.
  • Pogo Hops. Stand with your feet together and begin jumping straight up as high as you can. When you land, begin the next jump as quickly as possible. Do three sets of ten hops.

Before my first upper-body workout of the week, I do the following plyometric exercise:

  • Plyometric Push-up. Assume a normal push-up position. Lower yourself to the floor. With explosive force, push off the floor with enough force that your hands leave the ground. Do three sets of five push-ups.

Before my second upper-body workout of the week, I do the following plyometric exercise:

  • Overhead Medicine Ball Slam. Raise the medicine ball overhead and slam it down as hard as you can. Do three sets of ten slams. (Here are ten medicine ball exercises you can incorporate.)

As I continue with these plyos, I’ll probably rotate some of them out and substitute some of the plyometric exercises we’ve written about here into my routine.  

Hill Sprints

Hill sprints are one of the most potent weapons against power loss. They engage fast-twitch fibers better than flat-surface sprints while also reducing impact on your muscles and tendons, thus reducing the likelihood of injuries. Besides training for power, hill sprints are a great HIIT exercise.

Find a 20–30-yard hill. After a warm-up, do 4–6 sprints up the hill at 80–90% effort. Walk down slowly to recover. Rest 1–2 minutes between sprints. You just need to do this once a week.

For more tips on doing safe and effective sprints in general, read our Grown-Up’s Guide to Sprinting.

If you’re looking for another powerpenia-fighting cardio/HIIT exercise, jump roping is a great one. We’ve got a whole guide to that, too.

If it’s been a long time since you did the kind of explosive exercises outlined above, you may be concerned that trying them will get you injured. Start slowly and gently, to be sure. Doing things like stepping down from the box after your box jumps and sprinting uphill will help lessen the risk of injuries. And you can do things like broad jumps and hill sprints on softer surfaces like grass.

But you do need to steadily ease into these movements to avoid a kind of catch-22: avoid plyometric exercises out of fear of injury, and you actually increase the risk of injury when life suddenly demands an explosive movement.

The only way to safely rebuild this capacity is to train it — gradually and consistently. And once you have it back, don’t stop. Keep training these movements into old age, until the day you’re truly no longer capable of doing them.

Here’s to Powerful Aging

I’ve been doing these power exercises for about a month now, and I’m already noticing a difference.

I’m still not as explosive as my teenage son, but I can better shift myself into that gear when we face off on the driveway court.

And knowing that training for power will keep me strong and capable as I age — not just in the game, but in life — is the real win.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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