Tip
I have been a chubby person from childhood, and my athletic level was at the bottom. I started to get into fitness during my first year of graduate school, systematically studied and exercised for 1 year, going to the gym every other day. I successfully reduced my body fat to a normal level, and my muscle level was able to bench press my own body weight. I could easily run 10km in 1 hour. The biggest regret is that I was lazy and confident at the time. I kept all my fitness knowledge in my head and didn’t take any notes, leaving nothing behind. Now I am almost 30, and my fitness habits have been abandoned for 5 years. Fortunately, the good habits of exercise, diet, and posture that I developed back then have prevented me from getting too fat. And the common problems of cervical spine, spine, and hair loss for office workers have not yet appeared in me. Now I plan to pick up the 25-year-old me again. A man is only 30, still capable 💪🏻. This time I plan to record my knowledge in detail in Obsidian, record data in Notion, and constantly upgrade and iterate to give my 35-year-old self some capital to brag about.
Conclusion First
- If you don’t have money to hire a reliable coach, then learn on your own.
- The level of more than 90% of coaches is average, and their original intention is to make some money in the fitness industry, so they will intentionally or unintentionally exaggerate the necessity of our body shape. Sometimes we feel that a certain coach is very sincere and even advises me not to buy classes (secretly tell you, this kind of sincerity is also one of his tricks to sell classes, just to make you feel sincere).
- Gaining muscle and losing fat is also a field that requires a brain. The coach’s brain may not be good. Maybe he spent a lot of time doing a simple thing, so he looks better than us ordinary people. We still have to go to work and don’t have so much time.
- If you have a good friend who has already made mistakes and can recommend a reliable coach to you, that would be great.
- Solution: Don’t hire a coach. It’s definitely a better choice to have friends or colleagues to motivate each other and communicate with each other.
- Muscle gain and fat loss should be carried out at the same time.
- People with a large base can consider focusing on aerobic exercise and fat loss. But most people should take muscle gain, that is, strength training, as the main means, because muscle gain is a long-term investment in health, body shape, and quality of life. Ordinary aerobic exercise lacks this long-term effect.
- For novices, it is entirely possible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. For veterans, it is also possible to maintain muscle as much as possible while losing fat. The worst choice is to lose too much muscle in order to lose weight, which leads to a decrease in basal metabolism. In the future, if you can’t maintain the current diet and exercise volume, you will rebound quickly and damage your body.
- Diet is very important. A sustainable diet is the king, which is the so-called Sustainable Fat Loss.
- Poor energy and binge eating may be the consequences of blood sugar fluctuations. You can check out Sugar Control Revolution - Book Summary.
Why Exercise?
Body shape, self-confidence, high social value.
Quantitative goals, using lower time costs to make your physical fitness exceed 90% of your peers.
Turn the method of maintaining health through exercise and diet into a long-term and lifelong habit.
How to Eat
It is said that for muscle gain and fat loss, exercise accounts for 30% and diet accounts for 70%. This is true, but not entirely. Do we attract the other half by 30% of our body and 70% of our wealth? In fact, the matching problem in the marriage market is the same as the problem of fitness and fat loss. Both involve so many variables that the same sentence may even get a completely opposite interpretation. I have followed no less than 20 fitness bloggers on Zhihu and Bilibili, and I can often find completely opposite conclusions. Each conclusion seems to be supported by a lot of literature, and no one can convince anyone.
In fact, under the premise of limited time and energy, exercise and eating are equally important and indispensable. There should be a relatively optimal solution between the two. What we need to do is to get as close as possible to this optimal solution without sacrificing the happiness of life and consuming too much time and energy.
My principle is: look at the opinions of many people, and if it is a consensus, I will treat it as a golden rule. If there is a conflict of opinion, I will judge according to the feeling of my body and choose the relatively conservative plan that has a way out and will not cause irreversible damage to the body.
I want to gain muscle, and I also want to lose fat. Can’t I have both? That’s impossible.
Muscle Gain Expectations for Ordinary People
In fact, the biggest problem is the time problem. Those fitness enthusiasts are often either practitioners in the fitness industry, or upper-class people, or people with lower-level occupations. The common feature is that they have a lot of free time and less work pressure, so they have more time to build muscle.
Now some experts, in order to get traffic, will also become “tech players” by taking drugs, but they say they are natural fitness. This type of person often has a more exaggerated body proportion, which makes us more willing to believe that he is awesome, and thus believe in his fitness plan, actions, concepts, and diet.
But we should find such a group of people to learn from and imitate: natural fitness players who aim for health and invest a small amount of time each week. The body shape goal should also be more like Peng Yuyan, Jay Chou, and Jiang Jinfu, rather than the big muscle bullies of bodybuilders.
Fat Loss for Ordinary People
Low body fat, such as below 10% for men, is not only difficult to maintain, but also has a certain impact on health. We should pursue a standard physique, such as about 15% for men and 25% for women, which not only has a good posture, but is also optimal for health, and it is relatively easy to maintain this ratio.