EPTA short note to anyone who’s looking to start getting fit. Here’s what I did, how it all went down, what went wrong, and what went right.
My true fitness and health journey began approximately a one year ago when I began lifting for the first time. My progress over the last year has been average at best, but I have learned many valuable lessons that I hope I can pass on to somebody else so that they can learn from my mistakes. But first let’s begin by outlining where I was and what I’ve been doing.
One year ago I had just turned 18 and was weighing in at 190 pounds (86 kilos) at a height of around 5’7” (170 cm). Last weekend I turned 19, and as I write this I weigh around 165 pounds (75 kilos) and stand ever-so-slightly taller at 171 cm now (a negligible difference in terms of feet and inches). About a year ago I first started reading Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe, as suggested by Teamliquid Health & Fitness. In this book I learned the basics to barbell strength training, and as it happened my family had a squat rack and a barbell in the old barn on our property (We live on a farm, when we purchased the place there was an old barn there, which we use as a storage area). This barn became my new gym, and with nothing other than what I had read online and Rippetoe’s words, I began lifting.
My training went fairly well for the first several months. I began calorie counting and trying to cut in about January, and took progress pictures to gauge how I was doing around February. However, I didn’t exactly lose weight as a result of my diet, I more precisely lost weight in spite of my diet. I ate very “clean” (generally meaning low calorie) throughout the week. However, when the weekend came I would always go totally crazy and gorge myself, thus I very slowly lost weight throughout March, April and May. Because of depriving myself of enough energy on my workout days (Worked out Monday, Wednesday and Friday, overate Saturday and Sunday usually) my lifts began to stall in a pretty bad way. In addition I sustained a pretty bad ankle injury at the end of March that kept me from squats, deadlifts and power cleans throughout April and May.
At this point (early June) I was plateauing both weight-wise and lift-wise from my stupid diet and such. However this was graduation season (graduated June 11) and because of all the grad parties and such I decided to not give a shit about my diet and just ate like a pig, going from a weight of around 150 up again to 165 or so (however the 150 was a very glycogen-depleted weight, whereas the 165 was not, so the difference isn’t as dramatic as it may appear).
In the beginning of July, with school over I decided to try to clean up my diet again. The problem I had throughout all of this (and that I still have now, but not as much) is that I was letting food control me. Throughout the summer I began experimenting with intermittent fasting, going from just skipping breakfast to eventually just eating a single meal a day so I could get away with a 1300 calorie diet (yes, stupid, I was using deflab.me to tell me what to do, and was eating at a huge deficit, but still kept my weekend overeating problem) and my lifts all began to deteriorate and I had no energy for martial arts. When August got about halfway over, due to the goodbye parties everyone was having as all my friends left for school, I once again said “fuck it” to health and ate like shit again. However, right about when this began I sustained a bad shoulder injury in my martial arts class that kept me from doing any lifting at all.
I went to college with a poor diet, an injured shoulder, and an orientation that entailed lots of free food. In addition it I was surrounded by food at the all-you-can-eat dinners. My weight ballooned to a pretty disgusting 175. However, during the course of my PE class I got recentered on eating healthy, and began to follow a Leangains-style diet more strictly. The fasting over the summer, as big of a problem as it was, was helpful in that I learned to eat to live, rather than to live to eat. I began lifting again, and I just recently have been attaining some of the lift numbers I had back before the ankle injury and subsequent retarded dieting threw me off course (just today squatted 240 again, deadlifted 295 to make a new PR last Thursday). I still occasionally have binge-type eating issues, which generally stem from depression (or perhaps an eating disorder, I have a good family and friend support system so I haven’t been seen for this potential issue, as I’ve been able to keep it under wraps more-or-less) but by and large I’m eating fairly healthily and I'm back on track to improving my body composition
At this point my diet is: A Leangains type IF diet with high carb and 200 over maintenance on workout days, and lower carb and 400-600 under maintenance on rest days. I consume ~1g/kg of protein, rather than the popular 1g/lb, and I've been doing that for over a month now and haven't seen my gains hindered at all. For a training routine I do a slightly modified SS, I squat RPT once a week, but I alternate Bench/OHP similar to SS (I haven't gotten those quite back to what they were before my shoulder injury in August) and then alternate Power Clean and Deadlift the same way. On deadlift day I do chin ups as my extra work, and on power clean days I work on the front lever progression.
Here are the main lessons I learned throughout this first year of my fitness and health journey:
1. Lift heavy and eat well on a lift day.
It doesn’t have to be a huge surplus, but just a little surplus, even if you’re cutting, is going to be good for continuing to see strength gains.
2. Don’t do stupid shit.
I would say you should eat at a 600 Calorie deficit MAXIMUM, I personally have been eating ~600 fewer on rest days, and 200 over my TDEE on workout days, following a Leangains type approach.
3. Give fasting a shot.
Learning to do some sort of Intermittent Fasting can break the control that food has over most of us Americans (or Westerners in general) and you can get to a standpoint of eating to live rather than living to eat, which will make your life, health and fitness all much better.
4. Bodyweight is cool
Give Eshlow’s Overcoming Gravity a read, even if you’re not going to incorporate all bodyweight exercises into your routine, there are some very fun ones to work on, I personally work the manna and front lever progressions into my slightly modified SS routine.
5. Running is fun
I used to fucking hate running, but several months of lifting improves the cardiovascular system in an astonishing way. You can use this improvement to jump into running at a level that is more tolerable than starting from scratch with no fitness background. In addition, stronger legs will make running easier for you, and you get to see different things instead of the same old squat rack. It’s also a great recreational fitness thing, going on a nice run to some good music, or an easy jog with a friend can be a fun way to spend a nice afternoon while still being active.
6. Try something new
Even if you’re big into lifting, give something new a shot, I worked bodyweight exercises into my routine, as well as running, sprinting, yoga and martial arts. It’s all a lot of fun, don’t get too caught up in 1 routine. However, don’t skip from routine to routine, because you can’t make steady progress if you jump ship too fast.
There are probably a few more things I could mention, and I may add to this list later, but these stand out to me as the best and worst things that I’ve done throughout my fitness journey and I hope my mistakes and successes can help you improve too!
In the next year I hope to continue strength training, and perhaps work more bodyweight stuff into my routine. I also want to get back into running (had a stress fracture in my foot recently that kept me off of running) but the weather’s shit right now so I don’t know. I might also want to try to get into Intramural sports of some sort, we’ll see what happens, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!
