This is not rocket science. You need only to take a glace around the office to notice that our industry is not exactly the healthiest. We are sitting all day, eat pizza, and guzzling energy drinks (mind eye: google "cartman gamer"), obviously this is an exaggeration, but in some cases, it isn't! Adding exercise can go a long way, you do not have to think of this as wasted time, you can listen to audio books, podcasts, etc while you are doing your thing.
My main gripe is that as engineers and measurement freaks, I want to research exercise before actually doing anything, and then want to measure my results. There is no clear action path down this road. Diet and exercise are two side of the same coin. Maybe I'll produce some content on this topic since I have spent the last couple years getting my house in order.
For example, say, starting tomorrow, you wanted to "eat healthy" and "workout". What would you do? There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine. You need to do all this research first!
I would urge you to very much think of it as 'wasted time'. There's an obsession here from some people with filling every moment with information (such as audio books, podcasts, etc.).
While exercising it's a perfect time to have no other stimuli and let your mind wander. Just let it wander. It's really useful to do that because rather than listening to other people's thoughts you'll have thoughts of your own. Unexpected thoughts at that.
Or better still instead of doing pointless exercise: do something useful. Help someone build a house, go shopping for old ladies in the neighbourhood, chop wood for your stove (or your neighbours stove), chase pickpockets, and if you have them play with your kids (or someone else's kids!).
Anything as long as it is useful and you get your exercise.
That is you rationalizing your procrastination. I'm guilty of it more than anyone.
You read and read because you want to do it right. But if I were to put a table of various foods in front of you and asked you to point out the healthiest, you'd succeed. You know what's healthy to eat. You know what simple exercises there are to get started with.
You researching so that you can optimize every second is likely a bigger waste of time and energy than eating healthy meals that may not have perfectly optimal macronutrient ratios, or doing exercises that aren't fully isolating a specific muscle group.
There are many, many books, videos and sites that will tell you exactly what to do. The issue is not that "there is nothing that will give you a grocery list and workout plan"; the issue is that you don't think that the ones you find are 100% optimized for your specific situation, so you research and research and research and never make a single change.
Come up with a minimum viable plan, then iterate, obviously!
But seriously, you can start doing simple exercises and improving your diet while you're researching the next step of the plan. Take the stairs instead of the elevator; get off one stop earlier on the bus/train, and walk a little further. Park in the far corner of the parking lot. Do push-ups at home. Eat at least one salad a day. Cut your soda consumption in half, then to nothing.
Is there a term for the paralysis you work yourself into because you don't want to start something until you've perfectly researched it?
If you want measurable results, try CrossFit. It is built around measurable results. Every workout is done in comparison to the last time you did that particular workout. By tracking your results over time, you can quickly measure the progress you have made.
If you want measurable results, just start measuring your results. You just need a pad and pencil, and it won't cost you $150 to $200 per month in membership dues.
Sure but someone coming to fitness as a beginner has no idea what to do much less what to measure. Also, for $1000, you can have a pretty well stocked garage gym (I do) if you are comfortable with most of the exercises.
Of course, many of the CrossFit exercises are technically challenging and most people aren't going to feel comfortable teaching themselves. That $150-200 a month isn't just for the equipment. At a good gym, it's for quality coaching.
The problem with most exercise plans, professional and amateur alike is that there is no concept of measurement. CrossFit has that built in.
It's not only coaching - though it's important too. But also both challenge and support. It's one thing trying to do some workout alone and completely other thing doing it with people around you - you could both challenge yourself (this guy can lift this 25 times - why wouldn't I be able at least 10 times? Maybe I should try harder!) and be supported (it's east to tell yourself "ok, I can't do it" when you are alone, but when people around telling you "yes, you can do it!" you have better motivation - and frequently it turns out you indeed can). I discovered that I can't push myself nearly as efficiently in solitary setting as I can in group setting, and that gives results too. I think it is well worth it.
It's interesting to see this, because one of my main criticisms of Crossfit is that the results aren't measurable because of the strong emphasis on utilizing an extremely wide variety of exercises, and lack of emphasis on progressive overloading of the same exercise.
My understanding of Crossfit is that its purpose is to isolate fitness adaptations from exercise-specific skill adaptations, to produce a well-rounded athlete who can perform almost any exercise at a competent level with minimal skills training.
In other words, if you run a 5k for every workout, and your 5k time goes down, how do you know whether it went down because your fitness improved, or because your running technique improved? How do you know if that improvement will transfer over to, say, swimming, or basketball?
Crossfit tries to answer this question by having the athlete perform various unrelated exercises, in circuits, for time, and varying the exercise selection each day. But the problem is, if you never (or infrequently) do the same circuit twice, how do you know you've progressed at all?
Contrast that with a powerlifting program that would have you increasing the weight on the bar by a certain percentage each workout. Yes, your improvements will be partly due to improved form and technique, but there's also no question that you're getting physically stronger as well. No attempt is made to separate the two phenomena, as they are inherently intertwined.
Perhaps different Crossfit gyms take different approaches to programming, though. I suppose the quality of the programming could really depend on the training philosophy and experience of a particular Crossfit coach. But I don't get the impression that the concepts of measurable results and progressive programming are really part of the core philosophy of Crossfit.
My experience shows it is measurable, but indeed since it is very varied for some workouts it may be months since you repeat exactly the same one. But eventually you do, and individual exercises are repeated much more frequently, so you can see your progress in basic exercises easier than in full combined workouts.
This sounds awesome. I thoroughly enjoy Crossfit, but don't think my gym has ever had the same WOD more than once or twice in a year, so it's hard to track that. Tracking what you can do (how fast / how many / how much) is still very useful, but you might need to put work into breaking down your WoD into components.
e.g., how do I compare a 5 min AMRAP ("as many _ as possible") of something which I can't lift at RX to a later attempt where I might lift more (but slower), or less (but without stopping)?
Similarly, how do I meaningfully compare the performance of the same lift (e.g. deadlift) in an AMRAP situation with doing a set amount in as long as it takes? (I'm slow.)
I don't mean to imply that Crossfit is less than awesome. It makes me feel amazing, and I love it. I just have had a really hard time _quantifying_ my performance.
I find I encounter key movements often enough that I can definitely gauge progress. We do strength and metcon, so every few months each lift will get its spotlight - it's easy to compare my 5x5 power cleans now from my numbers in April. (Though doing something like Starting Strength is even more quantifiable due to consistency.)
In terms of metcon, I mostly compare myself against Rx, since I scale most things. So, this week I'm doing pullups with an assistance band one level harder than the one I'd been using for months beforehand. It feels wonderful. If I scale thrusters to 65lb from 95, when in the past I've had to scale to 55 from 95, that's also clear progress for me.
I try to follow the main page programming. I have a policy that I can't move up in weight until I improve the previous version of the WOD. I use CrossFit Brand X scalings and if I set a PR, I move up to something closer to RX.
BrandX typically will tell you the goal of a particular MetCon. For example, they'll say that you should be able to do Fran in 5-7 minutes. If you're below that time, increase the weight up to RX. If you're above that time, decrease the weight. Your goal should always be to complete the WOD in approximately the same amount of time as top athletes, you're just doing it with less weight.
Lots of good information in the BrandX forums around scaling and measurement.
First, start working out regularly; the goal is to get to the point where not working out makes you uncomfortable the way, for example, not brushing teeth does. Once you reach that point, you're all set on the excercise front, because the will power required will be little, just like you don't need much will power to make yourself brush your teeth (I assume).
Now you can approach changing your diet. Start by making sure you don't have any "bad" food in your pantry. If you WFH, that's fairly easy. If not, take brown bag lunches with you (and don't work in fancy startups that offer free meals and snacks :p). Some people allow themselves one day per week when they can eat whatever they want to make it easier on themselves.
After a while of this you start noticing that you don't crave sugar, carbs, starch, etc. at all. You still enjoy it, you just don't get so much kick out of it. For example, you start noticing that the desserts you used to eat before have become too sweet for your taste.
Really? Might work that way for you, but for me, I use willpower for controlling my diet but receive extra physical and psychological energy from exercising.
The best advice I can give for exercising is to turn off your brain (or part of it) for a while. Concentrate on visceral things like breathing and posture, not performance metrics or meal strategies. Let your subconscious chew on technical stuff and focus your attention on being a physical machine that pulls in oxygen and burns fuel to produce energy. Also, try not to get hit by cars! (I ride a bike)
This isn't something that needs to be researched, it just needs to get done. Put something together and push it out, gain domain knowledge, refactor, repeat. Experience will be your guide and most of what you read during 'research' won't relate anyway, but you won't realize this until you have the experience. That's assuming the research phase doesn't paralyze you with options and statistics and metrics. You don't need a comprehensive prospectus, just change one thing. Then change another when you feel like it or it makes sense to do so.
I could expand on this if anyone is interested. I actually wrote a lot more here but decided it was probably irritating and chopped a bunch off.
My advice would be to wear a polar heart monitor to the gym and just shoot for X calories per visit. I AM NOT advocating "calories in calories out" but just that it's a constant metric regardless of how you exercise.
I'd also say google "starting strength" and do that. It's the first lifting program that's actually been really transformative to my body comp.
If you wanna log strength progress try fitocracy or something.
Seconding the "Starting Strength" recommendation. It's pooh-poohed by some in the greater strength training community, but for somebody without any prior lifting experience, it got me off to a great start.
As others of said, start by just doing something. In a way, it is similar to coding in that you don't have to know every detail of a language before starting to program.
But with respect to your questions:
You can figure out how many calories you can eat based on your gender, age, and weight by calculating your TDEE (various calculators can be found online. Advice I've heard is to tell it that your activity level is sedentary since those calories can often be overestimated.)
I have spent a lot of time researching improving my health over the past year (and have done so) and found the reddit fitness FAQ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq) to be very educational and reasonably short. Highly recommended that people read it.
You may also want to check out the myfitnesspal (or similar) mobile app which helps you track your calories. I personally just google foods and use a text file but many people like the app.
There are a lot of tools, from fitocracy to more specialized sites, which allow you to measure all the aspects of the exercise you'd like. Prerequisite for it would be, of course, actually exercising :)
>>> There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine.
Why not? There are a lot of gyms and online resources offering workout programs. Same with meal plans - there are tons of diets, from Atkins to Paleo to hundreds in between - each with meticulous meal plans. If anything, for me they're too planned (what if I have to work late? What if I can't eat specific meal at specific time because I need to do something else?) but if it's your cup of tea, there's tons of stuff out there.
And there are a lot of exercise plans or organized exercise gyms. You can just come there, do whatever the trainer says and turn you brain off completely, if you'd like.
Shameless plug: I'm actually almost done writing an ebook that tackles this very problem. It is going to be a practical, no-bullshit guide that will give a beginner all the essentials without overwhelming them with useless detail.
As an example, one of the things I talk about in the ebook is the value of simplifying your diet as much as possible. I eat the same small group of foods over and over[1], which not only completely eliminates the risk of overeating, but also makes it possible for me to cook an entire week's worth of meals on a Sunday night so that I don't need to worry about it during the week. The latter is particularly useful because I never come back from work and get into the self-destructive "gosh, I'm too tired to cook, I guess I'll just order take-out" mindset.
[1]I've learned different ways of cooking them so it never gets boring, at least for me.
Please don't. The problem isn't that there aren't a good exercise plan out there, the problem is that there are too many. Your ebook, rather than try to help that problem, you are only making it worse.
My big issue with exercise (other than that it sucks) is that it is so 'ungeeky' - it is mostly brainless and you do the same thing over and over again, while you learn very little new and you solve no interesting problems.
1. If you go out and exercise, by being away from your project, you may acquire a perspective on it, maybe a different way to look at any problems or bugs that may have come up. This has happened to me more tines than I can count.
2. If you want to eventually be a revered sage and teach young people how to code, you have to live long enough to become a sage in the first place. Exercise is a first-rate way to extend your life.
3. You'll experience the so-called "runner's high" that accompanies vigorous exercise. It's better than drugs. I know -- I've tried both -- exercise is better.
Curious, pizza seems really healthy to me: Cheese, tomatoes, veggies, maybe a tiny bit of meat, the dough isn't really worse than normal bread (get whole wheat dough!)
It's unhealthy and will make you fat - the dough is normally white bread which is awful for you, wheat bread has a slightly lower glycemic index but more calories and it is still bad for you. Cheese which is incredibly calorie dense and really fattening, tomato paste is basically water. Stay away!
Healthy is perhaps the ~wrong word. You're right in what you say. For example, if you are starving in the sense of being calorically depreived, (american) pizza is quick, efficient, and cost effective nutrition. The problem with pizza is that most people that eat it, are not like the above example. In that case, they need to me more concerned about the effect of the pizza on their sense of satiation and metabolism. That is in addition to stopping eating pizza. While the latter are grey areas, the slope is slippery toward indulgence. Which is simply eating to get the rush/endorphins of eating such a calorically rich and diverse foodstuff. Which sucks if you are a sedentary person, but is NBD if you are michael phelps. =D
In my view, exercise is mandatory if you don't want serious health problems at a young age.
I could go on all day about which specific types of exercise are best, but it really depends on the person. The key is to find an exercise that YOU enjoy doing, and make the time to do it regularly.
Personally, I enjoy powerlifting and grappling. There are literally zero days where I drag my feet and have force myself to go to the weight room, or to jiu-jitsu class. I look forward to these activities all day while I'm at work. To me, they are fun and rewarding.
Find a sport or form of exercise that is fun to you, and just do it, a lot. Enter amateur competitions if you can. Doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it makes you sweat. It will help keep you fit, relieve stress, and even help you meet people and make friends, making you a happier person all around.
I completely agree that doing something enjoyable is absolutely the best approach, and if you want to optimise for various things, that's great - but don't knock the millions of folk who are getting off their arses and actually moving about. (It also makes me happier to think of people out there enjoying exercise, than "putting in their time" on the treadmill like hamsters.)
Sadly, finding a form of exercise that fits is easier said than done, as with so many things.
If you are unfit, there are many barriers - both physical and mental - to just trying out new sports until you find the right one. Even less unfit people can be paralysed with fear of the unknown, over-abundance of choice, etc.
College and workplace activity offerings are great, as are good gyms, because you can just try out a bunch of classes once and see what works for you. But it took me many years to get to the point where I was brave enough to walk in the door of a Crossfit gym, which I now thoroughly enjoy.
Maybe the point here is that if you have friends or acquaintances that "don't like exercise", bring them along to something you love or have always wanted to try (ideally the latter - doing someone's favourite sport with them is way intimidating if you're new to exercise, failing together is much more enjoyable).
Yes, the older and more out-of-shape you are, the harder it can be to find a sport/exercise you like, and to form new, healthy habits and break old, unhealthy ones in general.
But a very common question that people ask of recreational sport coaches is some variation of "I don't think I'm fit enough to even do this yet, what should I do to get ready for it?" And unless you already have a serious medical condition, the answer is almost always "Just show up and give it a try."
Most people don't realize this, but even if you're overweight, slow and weak, you don't need to put yourself through a "training montage" in order to prepare for a sport. The best way to get in shape for a a particular sport, is just to start playing that sport. Just ease into it volume/intensity-wise as appropriate for your level of fitness.
Exercise is a source of confidence, motivation, and resilience -- a free and unlimited source. So not only will it benefit you, but keeping yourself physically and mentally healthy will likely increase the chances of your startup succeeding. I say that because people often feel, including me, that exercise comes at the cost of productivity, when in fact it multiplies it.
I realized the limiting factor in my performance is not time, it's mental energy. Since I started running almost every day, the time it takes to run more than makes up for itself in added mental energy.
And if you bring someone you need to talk with with you to run (or at least walk) outdoors in the sunshine, it sometimes turns into a more focused discussion than you might have had indoors at your usual places surrounded by your laptops and phones.
The fable here is that neglecting facets of your lifestyle has consequences. Exercise tends to correlate heavily with consciously managing diet and mental health.
I am thankful that someone as PG is a proponent of this sort of thing because the state of workplace culture (in many places) is already unhealthy enough (e.g. bagel Monday, pizza Friday, donut Wednesday, coupled with excessive sitting and high caffeine consumption). We all could benefit from employers who felt it a responsibility to keep their employees healthy (though the onus is ultimately on individuals, of course).
I use the "7-minute workout" android app. There's a bug in it where you can't switch apps in the middle, but I consider this bug to be a feature! For whatever reason, the chromium plugin which was my backup, no longer works (I also liked it because it plays a nice arpeggio at the end, so that's a positively reinforcing primary stimulus).
If you're asking about the workout, I've begun modifying it - I now do the 7 minute workout with 5 lb dumbbells and 5lb ankle weights. I also often do some pull-ups before and after. I also do triangle push ups (or sometimes clap-push ups) instead of the push ups, I do side-to-side push ups (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQcQrXoYrw) instead of push-up and rotate, and instead of side planks, I do static leg lift, at about 5 degrees elevation.
when I first started out I was doing 7 days a week, but cheating (which is fine, you do whatever to bootstrap) - now I'm doing 5 or 6 days a week, which I think is sufficient.
A long time ago my very athletic college girlfriend dumped me for a very athletic version of me. In the final weeks of that doomed relationship, I desperately hit the gym to try to stop the inevitable end of that first love. I failed.
But what I succeeded at was vowing to never again get dumped for someone that was pretty much me but in better shape. So the rest of the failed experiments on the way to meeting my wife found new and innovative ways to reject me.
These days, when I'm in a technical interview, and I get asked how I solve problems, I answer with something like "On a treadmill, running at 7-9 mph, until the answer becomes clear to me." About 2/3 of the time, the person asking the question is taken aback and I've just saved myself from working at a company full of couch potatoes half my age and heading twice as fast into effective old age. Really, we won't get along, let's just move along.
And about 1/3 of the time, the person seems to get that I'm using exercise to get away from the information deluge of the workplace to give my brain a chance to do its thing. These are the only jobs to which I give any consideration.
The day you stop moving is the day you start dying IMO.
I am not quite sure how that would work if you worked on a project alone and need to review a large stack of code or you work with somebody else, you can't exactly take 3 minutes on a threadmill.
If you work on a team, mark time on your calendar where you are busy and stick to it - there are very few emergencies that really are more important than maintaining your own personal productivity - in the rare event that you hit one, throw an exception.
And that may sound self-centered and harsh, but really, your most valuable time at work is your time in flow. If your employer doesn't value that, and feels free to interrupt you willy nilly as well as drop you into the middle of a 1960s boiler room of coders happily jabbering away instead of writing code, your project and likely your company is doomed.
If you're working alone and you're blocked, go exercise, it works like magic because it monkey wrenches your brain out of the infinite loop that's keeping you from seeing the solution. If you aren't blocked, go exercise anyway. Make it a regular habit.
Finally, review that stack of code after you come back from the gym. You'll be in a much more receptive state to do so.
With the 7 minute workout, you have no excuse not to exercise daily. All you need is a wall, a chair, a mat if the floor doesn't have carpet, and about 8 minutes. You get a full body endurance workout with all its long term and short term benefits - makes you feel more awake right away and helps you sleep better at the end of the day - and just 8 minutes later you can be back on your keyboard.
You can exercise more if you want to, but unless you have an impeding health problem, you have no excuse not to do this much.
I used this iOS app to learn the exercises (I started by learning 6 exercises and then evolved from there, in less than two weeks I was doing the full workout), and I use it every day to guide me: http://www.uovo.dk/apps/7minute.html (There's plenty of others similar apps out there which I haven't tried but this one works for me)
A few months ago I traded in bourbon and podcasts after work for yoga. I keep it simple and fairly easy. While I would probably be even better off doing intense cycling and/or lifting, basic yoga is doable for me after a hard day of work. Not only do I feel much more in shape, but I feel drastically more relaxed as well.
Working exercise into you're day is a good way to ensure you stick to it. I've always cycled to work and not only does this mean I do hundreds of hours of exercise that I wouldn't otherwise do it saves money and is probably quicker than commuting by car. I also feel more alert when I get to my desk.
Why are there so many articles posted on HN about this? Want to live long and be productive exercise and eat mostly healthy must be common sense at this point right?
I'm not knocking on the OP for posting this but am interested in hearing comments on why this keeps getting repeated. I sure know that everyone around me on a day to day basis knows this independent of whether they follow it or not.
I think the health results of daily excersize are a fringe benefit to the perseverance and dedication required to do so. Once you have perseverance and determination, you can DO anything.
I'd met Seth rock climbing at Dogpatch Boulders in SF. There are a lot of startup founders and people working at startups that go rock climbing -- make sure to check it out.
With all due respect to Paul Graham and on behalf of my fat ass and all my fellow (especially telecommuting) fat asses out there, /screw that guy/!. :D
Anything that you'll actually do every week and gets your heart rate up. Bonus points if it gets you outside. Walking. Running. Bicycling.
Personally, I like biking to work. Integrates the exercise right into my routine and doesn't really take that much more time than my other commute options. I also do longer weekend rides (40-70 miles).
Which is why it infuriates me that researchers are wasting time showing the benefits of exercise on this or that subgroup instead of solving the entire thing with the damn exercise in a pill.
My main gripe is that as engineers and measurement freaks, I want to research exercise before actually doing anything, and then want to measure my results. There is no clear action path down this road. Diet and exercise are two side of the same coin. Maybe I'll produce some content on this topic since I have spent the last couple years getting my house in order.
For example, say, starting tomorrow, you wanted to "eat healthy" and "workout". What would you do? There is nothing that will give you a grocery list + meal plan, along with a workout routine. You need to do all this research first!