Fitness

Part II: Updates from a year on

About a year ago, I made an attempt to deconstruct what fitness means to me. This is an update about where I’m at. While I have good reasons to have adopted the habits and routines mentioned here, I don’t present these as recommendations. I think of these as experiments to share with friends, open to criticism, debate, and modifications over time.

In the later half of this article, I also share some resources that helped me explore this interest over the last year or so.

Foundations

Sleep

My day job isn’t stressful for the most part and that makes it easier to maintain regular sleep patterns. Cutting out caffeine after 3:00 pm, dimming lights in the evening, and reducing exposure bright screens, actively looking for and using features like night-shift, smart-invert, and reducing-white on devices have been low-hanging fruit to incorporate on a regular basis to this end (see Hatori et al. (2017) for a short overview on blue light induced circadian rhythm disruption).

Food

I’m now thinking of food as meeting a daily energy budget. Along the way I want to meet a protein and fiber budget. While proteins, carbohydrates, fats are the main fuels the body derives energy from, protein is the main component of structure in the body. It is very easy to make up and even overshoot the energy budget with carbohydrates and fats alone, especially with processed foods that have narrow nutrient profiles.

I went through the exercise of logging all my routine meals and obtaining a rough estimate for the amount of protein intake in my primarily vegetarian diet. In light of that information, I modified my diet to include a protein-dominant component with each meal. I also started supplementing with whey. Increasing protein intake led to noticeably faster recovery from bouts of physical exercise for me.

Making it easier for the body to manage blood sugar levels seems to be quite crucial to long term health. I’ve learnt more about how the body maintains homeostasis in this regard, and also about links between excess calories and metabolic syndrome. The knowledge has made it much easier to cut out bingeing on sweets, almost entirely eliminate fried food from routine diet, and practice moderation and harm reduction on the rare occasions when an ideal meal choice is beyond reach.

Movement

Outside of any structured training regimen, I’ve incorporated frequent movement spread through the day. I’ll walk to colleagues’ desks instead of messaging them online, walk or bike to work and back when possible, and generally activate muscles every now and then.

A key thing that helped here was learning different options for movement and muscle activation. It can be subtle things like wiggling toes and activating the foot arch within shoes, or as pronounced as hingeing around the hip and rotating around the spine - depending on what the environment permits.

In particular, I find gentle movements (e.g. animal flow) helpful to reclaim neutral posture (e.g. after being stuck on a chair for a while) and regain body awareness. Such flow movements are composed of building blocks at various difficulty levels, making it playful and quite customizable with respect to time and space constraints.

I’ve gradually built up a resistance training practice. I’ve been cautious about this and have continued making progress safely. Along the way, I keep learning and updating my general understanding of anatomy as it relates to those movements.

In mid-2022 I was undergoing rehabilitation for pain in the arch of my foot. I attended a day-long course on running biomechanics hoping to understand my injury and rehabilitation better. The course dissected different running techniques, pointed out common errors and weaknesses, discussed related compensations and injuries, etc. For me, it was a glimpse into the connections between the ankle, knee, hip, back etc. that go into supporting complex movements like running that I had not appreciated previously.

I thereafter completed an online course through which I learnt an expanded vocabulary to think about and deconstruct movement patterns more broadly. This course also helped me build some foundational concepts about stable positions, ways to train movement patterns, common compensations etc. I’ll do a longer post summarizing my takeaways from the course, but a flavor of what I learnt can be found in this 1 hour lecture by the same teacher:

Data and tracking

For me, a simple and flexible way to record things is a notebook with nice paper, and a pen that I enjoy writing with. It’s helpful to have faithful records to know how to adjust training parameters when returning to training after > 1 week long breaks from training. I’ll occasionally jot down free form notes about how I feel, any particular issues I should pay attention to in the next workout.

The lack of control/flexibility in the hands of the user, and user data being inevitably locked up behind paywalls make specialized software apps a no for me.

Such apps can also box users into peculiar, narrow ways of thinking about health and fitness even without intending to. For example, apps might provide an interface to capture the loads lifted in sets and repetitions. They might show graphs of such numbers over time and suggest to the user that larger loads are the metric for progress. Such interfaces can make improvements along other axes (cardiovascular capacity, metabolic capacity, range of motion etc.) invisible or even worse, devalue and deprioritize them for the user.

Mindset

I personally find it easier adopt a habit in a strict manner at the beginning. Immersing myself in the why, weeding out blindspots in my reasoning through writing and discussions with friends helps build conviction and provides momentum for the habit. Making habits sustainable usually requires adjustments and flexibility. Being able to think rationally through tradeoffs is helpful to then come up with context dependent adjustments that preserve a major chunk of benefits while providing some slack.

I think it also helps to avoid reducing efforts to all or nothing. I’ll continue nudging things in the direction of what I believe unequivocally contribute to better physical and mental health. Thinking through a harm reduction lens when the occasional indulgence isn’t altogether avoidable helps minimize impact on health, and helps me a retain degree of agency on those occasions.

Streaks are powerful, and extended travel or even injuries can be major disrupters. I’ve educated myself on alternatives that work for me when routine diets and activities are not accessible, that are still aligned with my broader objectives.

Picking habits back up when they are inevitably disrupted is of course always challenging. A strategy that works for me is to build up from easy-to-reach short term goals when returning back to routines. For example, I’m more likely to engage with a goal that consists of walking to the gym and spending 5 minutes there, than a goal that requires me to push the limits of my capacity on different exercises at that point.

While I do want performance to trend in the right direction as an indicator of effort leading to desirable adaptations in my body, I don’t bother setting performance targets yet. Not chasing numbers makes it easier to both, avoid the temptation to lift more than capacity while I’m still ironing out technique issues, and also reduces a mental barrier to dial back loads after lengthy breaks in training.

All this is just to say that I prioritize my health far more now than I used to, and most of the changes I’ve made so far are based on understanding well-established, mainstream ideas aligned with my broad goals rather than a fear of missing out on someone else’s version of health.

Resources

Learning more about physiology, anatomy, and movement adds to the toolbox at my disposal to think about and deal with pain, to reason about habits, and to approach rehabilitation without feeling discouraged by setbacks. In this section I’ll point to some resources that made it easier to delve into topics I didn’t know much about when I started about 1.5 years ago.

Software learning tools for anatomy

The Essential Anatomy app by Elsevier has been a helpful tool to look up unfamiliar anatomical terms. It has a 3d model one can interact with, which makes it easy to see the layered organization of muscle groups, their relative positioning and attachments, along with positioning of internal organs.

The anatomy tool website (a Dutch initiative for open access educational resources) and a youtube channel associated with the project are great, expert-curated resources to browse and understand anatomy in the context of movements. Similar in spirit is the Muscle and Motion Anatomy app. The app interface is a bit clunky, and it’s primarily a collection of videos (many of these are hosted on their Youtube channel).

I use these tools to build a more detailed mental model while learning new movements, and refer to them to uncover anatomical terms for areas that feel sore or painful every now and then. Precise anatomical terms are helpful to carry out more targeted online searches, and I think such queries tend to yield higher quality results as well.

Textbooks

Essentials of strength training and conditioning is a manual for the CSCS certification offered by NSCA, and can be viewed as a standard text book that provides an accessible overview of adaptations relevant for athletic performance and related training protocols.

Guyton and Hall textbook of Medical Physiology is a standard textbook for physiology. The focus on pedagogy in textbooks makes it easier to sequentially go through concepts at well-thought out levels of abstraction, which tends to not be the case with research papers.

Research papers

Review papers, such as Furrer et al. (2023) on exercise adaptations at a molecular level, or Medzhitov (2009) on inflammation, cover a breadth of principles and topics of current research on topics I want to learn more about. Following such papers offers a summary of the state of the field, and references in such papers are a way to identify an active community of researchers in the domain.

I generally avoid looking for research papers that support a particular hypothesis in domains I’m unfamiliar with. It’s easy to be misled and fall into the confirmation bias trap. Instead I’ll mostly stick to review papers, or papers that share insights on biological mechanisms.

It also takes a really long time to go through such papers because of the dots I need to connect to understand even individual paragraphs. While I’m not going to become an expert in any of those domains anytime soon, it’s fun to learn about how researchers think about various biological systems and makes me appreciate the complexity of the human body.

Podcasts

Podcasts sound insightful as they rehash content from standard textbooks and material taught in introductory level college courses. However, I think they tend to subvert trust built through such content by mixing in recommendations based in low-quality evidence, or simply personal opinions, without clear disclaimers even when it comes from interviews with domain experts. I think it’s hard for the average listener to distinguish between established vs. speculative content in the moment, and even harder to remember which was which at a later point in time.

However, they are a convenient source to pick up threads I was previously unaware of. I prefer to listen to podcasts with my complete attention and jot down notes to follow up later. I ultimately care for established concepts that are known to have a large effect when it comes to picking up new habits. So I keep ideas gleaned from podcasts supported in text-books or review papers, and ignore the rest.

Influencers

I finally wanted to share some certified physical therapists active on social media whose content I’ve found to be supplementary sources for my education in movement: E3Rehab, Dr. James Chung, Dr. Laeda Malek, Dr. Stacie Barber. The short explanations of different conditions and rehabilitation progressions serve as mini lessons on movement mechanics. The rehabilitation context also facilitates discussions of movement progressions (e.g. difficulty level) in low resource settings (e.g. requiring no or minimal equipment), which is helpful for times when I’m away from my routine.

Low-effort skimming of such content is by no means a substitute to building up a solid knowledge base, but it is a way to immerse myself in that perspective a bit, and it helps me appreciate nuances of movements or even think through holes in my own practice.

What next

I plan to focus on particular axes of performance for sustained periods (3-6 months at a time) over the next couple of years. I’m hoping that a narrower scope will help me understand how to nudge adaptations faster in specific directions of ability. I also plan to prepare for and obtain a formal certification (CSCS) over the next year or so. In the meanwhile I’d like to work with friends in semi-formal settings to try and apply what I know in ways that benefits them.