MEN’S HEALTH

The Gung-Ho Man’s Guide to Working Out LESS (and Feeling Great)

Calm your jets, fellas. Less is more.

Guys CAN multi-task after all, because we can be awesome and dumb at the same time.

• Awesome by tackling things head-on, no messing about, let’s fix this.
• Dumb because we confuse the quantity of energy and effort put into a task with the quality of actual work.

I could take you on a tour of my house and show you various home improvement projects I started myself, all guns blazing, ALL the tools…

and then had to call a guy to come do it right.

But working out is possibly the only area of my life where I HAVE learned to curtail my manly gung-ho urges. I keep things calm and steady and do just enough (2 hours a week tops) to stay in shape and still make progress at 47.

I don’t work out much, but when I do it’s a high-quality workout. I get a lotta bang for my buck.

And this is what I want to teach my fellow guys here. Because having coached hundreds of men over the years, I know how it starts:

6 days a week, all the goals, all the equipment, new sneakers, high expectations…

and how it ends:

tired, injured, disappointed, demotivated, and still out of shape.

Why Are You Working Out?

If you’re working out for hours every week to burn calories and lose weight, that’s a surefire way to end up hating workouts and eventually giving up.

Why? Because focusing on exercise is a terribly inefficient way to lose body fat.

Working out is an excellent way to:

• get fitter and stronger and build muscle;
• build a bulletproof heart and lungs;
• de-stress;
• improve your body shape and confidence.

and lots of other great outcomes… just not burning body fat to get rid of your belly and chest fat.

You need to be aware of this when you embark on any workout program, so you’re not setting unrealistic expectations.

I have coached several guys who came to me after achieving precisely zero fat loss despite their 6-days-a-week, 6 a.m. hardcore bootcamp workouts.

So many burpees and nausea: So little fat loss.

But when you’re working out for health and longevity, to become tough-as-old-boots as you age, then 3 times a week of quality training will feel like ‘enough’.

And you’re much more likely to be able to fit that amount of exercise into your busy life longer term and reap the benefits.

6 Week Goals, Lifetime Commitment

Look around any gym and you’ll see a lot of Moochers.

Doing a bit of this, a bit of that, using a machine because it’s available and simple to use, looking at their watches to see if they’ve been there long enough to go home yet.

Don’t be a Moocher.

You need a program. Not one that you’ll stick to for life, but one that you’ll follow for 4–6 weeks. In my experience, 4–6 weeks is the sweet spot to make progress (instead of just getting used to the exercises) and avoid boredom.

So up-front you’re committing to working out forever… but you have short-term goals or a focus for 4-6 weeks at a time, like:

• strength training
• muscle building
• focusing on learning the Big Lifts
• focusing on bodyweight training
• improving stamina
• getting great arms/legs

You get the drift — decide on a goal, get a program (and here’s my free one for over-40s muscle building), and stick to it.

Each workout needs to build on the work you did in the previous one (a little heavier/faster/more volume etc.), so you know that skipping any workout f*cks up the whole program.

Know exactly what you’re going to do before you set foot in the gym. And don’t mooch!

Sleep & Stress > Another Workout

I was a machine in my 20s.

Out til 2 a.m. drinking, up for a 9 a.m. class, workout in the afternoon, and eating some junk food for dinner. And I was somehow in great shape!

I just wish Doc Brown from Back to the Future could have blasted in and told me:

“Appreciate this while you can, son — try doing this sh*t in your 40s and see how it works for you!”.

As I got older I came to understand Cortisol better. Our stress hormone increases when we are:

• mentally stressed
• physically stressed (from work or exercise)
• sleep-deprived

When Cortisol is high this puts the brakes on fat loss AND decreases Testosterone in men.

In practice, this means that exercising too much puts your body under so much stress that your Cortisol levels increase, and the things you want from all this huffing and puffing and calorie restriction — Fat Loss and Body Shape improvements — don’t happen.

This brings us back to the importance of working out just enough to move the needle for health, fitness, and body shape reasons.

Working out 3 times per week, hard, quality work, and then getting a ton of sleep while eating healthily will result in so much more progress than 6 workouts a week, cr*ppy sleep, and a so-so diet.

So Please Just Stop

If you are struggling to stick to some hardcore, high-volume program that has sold you on its Incredible Fat Burning Effects, please God just stop.

• stop training so much, thinking you’re burning a bajillion calories (you’re not);
• stop doing lots of going-through-the-motions workouts, and instead set some goals and get a program aligned with those; and
• stop leaving your body so beaten up that you look and feel like sh*t.

It’s time to stop multi-tasking, being awesome and dumb with your approach to workouts.

Instead, just focus on being what we both know you are: awesome ;-)

I’m an online coach for tired, busy, out-of-shape men over 40. If that sounds like you, grab my free muscle-building program, DadBod Overhaul, right here to start getting in shape without living in the gym!