5 Fitness Tips After 15 Years in The Gym

It can be hard to prioritise health and fitness. Here are 5 tips from somebody who does.

Many people have good intentions to regularly go to the gym, have a perfect diet, and have the body and life they desire.

However, ambition is often not the reality…

It’s hard to find the time in a busy life to prioritise exercising and your diet.

We have families, jobs, friends, and hobbies which all make it difficult to prioritise health and fitness.

I love the gym. I love competing against myself to get stronger and I love competing against others in sports.

Therefore, I have prioritised the gym and my diet for the vast majority of my adult life. More than 15 years.

I consume a lot of fitness content online along with spending around 8–10 hours in the gym a week.

Here are five key learnings.

If you only want to build muscle, your diet doesn’t really matter

The most important thing to building muscle (hypertrophy) is the training stimuli.

Yes, protein matters when it comes to building muscle. Ideally, we should consume around 1.5–2 grams of protein per kg of body weight every day.

If you’re a meat eater, chances are you’re getting close to enough without even trying.

Many gym rats over-emphasise protein intake. I certainly did in my beginner to intermediate phase. Many take the attitude that “more is more”, which just isn’t the reality. It’s just expensive pee and extra calories.

Having 6 scoops of protein shake a day adds up.

You should be in a caloric surplus, which means gaining weight.

It doesn’t have to be chicken breast and broccoli — it could be pizza or burgers. It could be chocolate.

What foods you eat won’t impact your ability to build muscle — as long as you’re getting enough protein.

So, if you’re not so concerned about gaining a little bit (or a lot) of body fat, you can essentially eat what you like and your ability to build muscle won’t be compromised.

However, you must progressively overload in the gym to build muscle.

Progressive overloading is increasing the amount of weight we lift over a period of time, through adding weight, adding reps, or adding volume.

Progressive overload continuously damages our muscle fibres, forcing our muscles to adapt and grow back bigger and stronger.

If you want abs, your diet is most important

We just discussed that to build muscle, your diet isn't so important.

In stark contrast, to lose weight, your diet is of the utmost importance. So, don’t waste your time doing sit up after sit up…

Why?

One, without removing the fat, you won’t see your abs.

Two, there are more effective ways to train abs.

Three, there are better uses of your time in the gym (like doing squats).

To see our abs, we need to be at very low body fat. Far lower than the average person.

To lose body fat, we need to be in a calorie deficit.

A calorie deficit means consuming fewer calories than you expend (burn). A calorie surplus is the opposite — it’s consuming more calories than we burn and therefore, we gain weight.

Thermodynamics dictates that the energy content of food is transferred from the food to the person eating it. If we consume more energy than our body requires, it stores it as body fat for later use.

Research suggests the make-up of our calories makes little difference in managing our weight. Whether we eat a diet high in carbs or high in fat is far less significant than controlling our total calorie intake.

If abs are your aim, it’s impossible to out-train a bad diet. Exercise burns far fewer calories than most people assume. Therefore, an overemphasis on cardio and underemphasis on diet is why most people struggle with weight loss.

Many of us overestimate how many calories we’re burning during cardio. It doesn’t help when exercise machines can overestimate the number of calories we’re burning by up to 50%.

On average, you’ll burn around 200–600 calories an hour exercising. In comparison, a Big Mac burger from McDonald’s has around 550 calories.

For more, check out the below article.

Getting stronger doesn’t mean you’ll build lots of muscle

Building muscle isn’t the same as getting stronger

Although you’ll get stronger by building muscle and vice versa, there are some key differences in optimising each process.

Confused?

Key differences are rep ranges, volume and intensity.

Although you’ll build muscle in any rep range as long as the intensity is sufficient, strength training is optimised at low rep ranges.

To get stronger, do reps fewer than 6. To build muscle, do 5–20 reps.

If strength is the key goal, over-training is a real issue.

If you can’t recover, you’re fighting a losing battle. Volume should be monitored. On the other hand, building muscle doesn’t have the same recovery demands.

Essentially, there’s no upper limit for how many total sets you can do with your ability to build muscle being impaired.

The same goes with training intensity, measured by the rate of perceived exertion (RPE) — which is how close we train to failure.

In strength training, leaving a couple of sets in the tank is more optimal than pushing to failure on heavy compound exercises. Because compound lifts such as squats use multiple joints, these are far more fatiguing than isolation exercises for building muscle such as a bicep curl.

To build muscle, we can train to failure. However, we should still use training to failure sparingly.

You should save training until failure until the last set of an exercise or the last set targeting a specific body part. So, we can reduce fatigue and train at an optimum intensity consistently.

Don’t worry about what others are doing

When you first start going to the gym, you have no idea what you’re doing.

You can’t help but look around you for inspiration.

You see this big muscular guy, and you can’t help but be drawn to watch what they do and try to replicate it.

They’re huge, which means they must know what they’re doing, right?

Not necessarily…

When I started at the gym, I had no idea how mainstream steroid use was.

Steroids help people build muscle regardless of how optimal their training is. Either way, chances are that what they’re doing is not going to be optimal for you.

Focus on yourself. The gym is all about you — your journey and goals.

So, create goals. What do you aspire to achieve in the gym?

Dedicate time and energy to learning about training. If you don’t have the time or capability to educate yourself through free avenues such as the internet, invest money into a coach or personal trainer.

If you don’t know where to start with educating yourself, here are five great YouTube channels about fitness and specifically building muscle.

Just as importantly, don’t let others distract you in the gym.

Don’t get stuck in the habit of using the gym to socialise. It’s a trap! Your workouts will end up taking much longer, and you’ll put less time into doing “hard” sets that get results.

Get into the zone when you train and minimise distractions. You’ll create a much better mind-muscle connection.

You have to be a little self-absorbed

Along the lines of the last tip, when it comes to fitness and ambitions to transform your body, you need to be number one.

Prioritising your health and fitness can and will seem selfish to others. Other people who want your time. Sometimes that means you don’t get as much time with family or friends.

Athletes speak about this all the time.

It can even be other people at the gym!

I actively avoid conversation as much as possible in the gym. As I discussed in the previous point, it’s a distraction. The gym is “me” time. And it should be!

It’s your health. It’s your hobby. It’s your passion.

For people who don’t prioritise their health and fitness, it’s hard for them to understand. Just like I don’t understand people who are obese and their health becomes a liability to themselves, their families and society.

For us gym rats/bunnies, the gym is as much a source of self-esteem as it is well-being.

But it does take time. It will take dedication. You might be in the gym for 5–10 hours a week.

And you don’t make a habit of skipping workouts. Ever.

You will spend a lot of time shopping and preparing healthy meals that help you to reach your goals.

You don’t go out with your workmates for drinks and snacks. They probably think that you’re a self-absorbed dick because of it…

Many people say that they need to prioritise their health and fitness more — part of their judgement of others who do is probably rooted in a bit of jealousy.

Book your weekly workouts into your calendar if you have to. Prioritise time for the gym.

Avoid bar food. Avoid the cake in the lunch room. Avoid snacks.

People may be offended at first, but most will learn to accept it.

Remember — your health is a priority. Your body is a priority.

Parting Thoughts

The internet is saturated with all sorts of weird and wonderful fitness advice.

Some of it is better than others.

This article has explored 5 tips from me to you, after 15 years of being almost obsessive with my own gym routine, diet, and eternal lust for learning about how to improve my results in the gym.

If you want to look amazing in your swimwear or impress some guy walking past you in your tank shirt, this is the article for you.

The five tips are: if you want abs, your diet is most important; if you only want to build muscle, your diet doesn’t really matter; getting stronger doesn’t mean you’ll build lots of muscle; don’t worry about what others are doing, and you have to be a little self-absorbed.

Thank you for reading.

If you enjoyed the content, you might be interested in this article about the best isolation exercises to build each muscle group.

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