Lifestyle
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The key to any good fitness lifestyle is creating one you can adhere to consistently for the long haul. Progress should be viewed as an investment; every choice you make adds up over time and builds toward the end goal. When you view things in this manner, it removes the emphasis on any single action & forces you to keep everything in context.
It's very easy to fall into the opposite mindset: "I trained hard, so I can afford to cheat on my diet" is a typical example. However, these two things aren't distinct from each other, and undercutting one activity because "you earned it" sabotages the other good behavior that you've already done. You can't out-train a poor diet; you can't out-diet a terrible training routine; you can't expect progress without proper sleep. Everything is inter-related. |
Habit-building is the cornerstone of this program for this exact reason. 14 days is short enough to commit to 100% & at the same time long enough to create the lasting habits that basically put your results on auto-pilot.
This all ties back to your Circadian Rhythm. Below is an excerpt from an article I wrote about how your can cultivate a sustainable one:
What is your Circadian Rhythm, anyway? Your Circadian Rhythm (CR) is a daily cycle of biological activity that roughly follows a 24-hour cycle. Sleeping and waking is probably the most noticeable cycle of activity that follows this pattern. However, nearly every bodily process has an “ideal” time of day to be performed.
For instance, it would appear that weight training would best be performed in the evening for maximal strength and progression. Heart rate, body temperature and certain hormone ratios all peak in the evening, allowing you to push harder and recover faster. Menno Henselmans wrote an excellent article digging into the details of the optimal training time, so click through to that link you just skipped over to learn more.
Does this mean we all have to train at 6 PM? Maybe, but A) this little thing called “life” tends to get in the way and B) that would make for some pretty crowded gyms.
Instead, we need to focus on picking specific times to do certain activities and stick to them as often as possible in order to create a sustainable rhythm for you.
As mentioned in Menno’s article above, if you train at a “non-optimal” time (say, in the morning) consistently, your body will eventually accommodate and make up the majority of the performance decrement.
This is where the rubber really meets the road: your body will adapt to whatever you consistently do at specific times and improve your ability to deal with that stimulus. For anyone familiar with the Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands (SAID) Principle, this should be very familiar.
If you have a physique goal, this has major implications. If you simply train, sleep and eat whenever you feel like it, you’re putting your body behind the proverbial 8-Ball.
Research shows that even just two consecutive nights of sleep restriction can increase ratings of appetite and hunger in healthy young males by nearly 25%. Restricting sleep to six hours, which many people claim they’re “lucky to get,” can increase calorie intake by 20% in just four nights.
As for meal times, and inconsistent pattern can cause your body to produce more insulin in response to a meal and burn fewer calories metabolizing it.
What’s worse, other things that we do throughout the day can compromise our body’s ability to adapt to the set rhythm it craves. Having caffeine too late in the evening (I’m looking at you, pre-workout junkies) and exposing yourself to artificial light close to bedtime can disrupt hormonal rhythms and destroy sleep quality.
In short: your body craves consistency. Give it what it wants.
By doing things at specific times, we can essentially turn our progress to autopilot. It all starts by constructing a sustainable CR.
The Takeaway: Try to keep the time that you fall asleep and the time that you wake up as consistent as possible, and aim to get at least eight hours of consecutive sleep each night (more is generally better). Try to start your training session within the same hour each day. When it comes to meals, you have a little more leeway: try to eat within a two-hour window across all days. You don’t have to stress about nailing everything to the minute, but the closer, the better.
Limit your caffeine consumption to at least six hours before bedtime (if not further). And finally, it may be a bit tricky to do depending on your job or lifestyle, but manipulate light exposure in your favor. With artificial light and digital screens everywhere we look, we can easily strong arm Mother Nature and create “artificial daytime.” Limit screen and light exposure to daylight hours as much as possible, and leave your phone/tablet/laptop/TV out of your bedroom. Your sleep quality will thank me.
Example Day (A.K.A. My Routine):
8:00 AM: Wake Up, Take Body Comp Measurements
8:30 AM: Meal 1
12:30 PM: Meal 2
4:30 PM: Meal 3
6:30 PM: Train
8:30 PM: Meal 4
11:00 PM: Sleep
Bust out the calendar, look ahead, and pick times that you can stick to for the long haul.
A final note: life will get in the way. Some days you’ll be stuck in traffic when you’re supposed to be eating, you have a meeting scheduled during your training time, or you fall asleep later than usual. THAT’S OKAY. Just make sure that the vast majority of your days resemble your consistent routine and you’ve won the battle.
For the purposes of our program, this boils down to optimizing your sleep, meals & training and scheduling them in a manner that you can stick to across days. This is much simpler in practice than people tend to make it out to be, and by adjusting these major variables, you will see some impressive results.
Timing Your Sleep
This is as close to a "magic fix" for progress as you're likely to get. High-quality sleep allows you to recovery, mentally & physically, from all of the activities that you've been through during the preceding day. There is a large burst of anabolic hormones at night, which makes the time you spend in bed the most beneficial time of the day in terms of improving your body composition. The amount of time you spend sleeping even dictates how much of the weight you lose comes from body fat as opposed to muscle.
One of the biggest flaws in most fad/crash diets is that they focus too much on "total weight loss" instead of fat loss. Hours of cardio & huge calorie deficits can cause you to lose quite a bit of weight on the scale, but as you'll learn in the next unit, scale weight isn't the determining factor of how successful your diet was. If you don't do anything to maintain your lean mass (i.e. strength training, proper diet & sleep), you end up lowering your metabolism, which makes it easier for you to regain that weight (and more) as soon as you stop the diet & cardio. This "Yo-Yo Dieting" is all too common and easily avoidable.
For these next 14 days (& beyond), sleep is one of your top priorities. Getting eight to nine hours of sleep per night is a non-negotiable, and it the first block of time you should be scheduling for the week ahead. Doing this is as simple as figuring out what time you consistently need to be awake across the entire week & working backwards.
For instance, if you work a typical 9 AM - 5 PM shift, and you need to leave for work at 8 AM, you should give yourself an hour or so to get ready & have your first meal of the day. This means 6:30 AM would probably be a good wake time. And yes, you're sticking to this wake time across all days, even on days you don't work. Again, sleep is your priority: staying up later because "you don't have anything to do the next day" is the wrong way of looking at it.
Keeping your wake time at 6:30 AM on all days will train your body to produce certain hormones, namely cortisol, at similar time. While you may know it as "the stress hormone," and while it may be detrimental to have too much cortisol at all times (like with chronic stress), this hormone is vital for daily function in small amounts. Remember: exercise is a stress, too. The stress itself isn't poisonous, the dose of the stress is poisonous. If you exercise for hours on end, you're going to produce too much cortisol, which throws everything out of whack. If you wake at random times, your body won't know when to produce that cortisol. This has an impact on your energy level for the rest of the day.
While it may sound like a drag, keeping a consistent wake time will do wonders for your energy level throughout the day & therefore your productivity.
You may be saying "my schedule isn't that simple." You can plan for this:
Say you work a job with inconsistent shifts. I have quite a bit of experience with this, & this is no excuse to sacrifice your sleep time. Simply find the latest time that you can wake up across days and make that your wake time. Ta-da.
Example:
Shift 1: 8 AM - 4 PM (3 Days)
Shift 2: 1 PM - 9 PM (2 Days)
In this scenario, you probably need to wake up at around 6 or 6:30 AM to get to your early shift. 8 hours back from 6 AM is 10 PM. That means you're going to want to get to sleep by 10 PM on all days and wake up at 6 AM on all days. On days you work late, that may literally mean getting home & going to bed. Netflix isn't going anywhere; that episode of Game of Thrones can wait (you can even watch it the next morning when you have "nothing to do").
You're also going to want to be aware of your exposure to light at specific times of the day. Since the invention of artificial light, we’ve been able to strong arm Mother Nature and get away from our natural instinct to rise and fall with the sunlight. Most lights and electronic devices actually function as “artificial sun,” meaning when we look at lights or phone screens, our body still thinks we are experiencing daylight. This is due to the blue spectrum of light being emitted by these lights and devices.
To counteract this, you’d be best served exposing yourself to real sunlight during the actual daytime. Novel, I know. Blue light isn’t all bad, and is actually necessary to sync up your body clock and affirm that you are actually experiencing day time. But it’s when we take our phones into bed with us or work on our computers into odd hours of the morning that we run into trouble.
Blue light reduces the production of melatonin, which is a vital hormone for your body to secrete if you want optimal sleep quality. This is why blue light is important in the daytime, and the last thing you want to expose yourself to when it’s dark outside. If you can’t get outside in the daytime regularly, use an artificial light box (very inexpensive on Amazon) every morning upon waking. At night, you can invest in blue-light blocking glasses (think Blu-Blockers) and orange-tinted lights.
Or, you can take the easy route and just turn lights and devices down/off in the hours leading up to bedtime.
A great program to help you out on your computer on nights that you just can’t get away is f.lux. It will automatically remove the blue spectrum of light from your computer screen as the sun sets in your area. iPhones & iPads have a similar function built-in called "Night Shift." You can also dim the lights and rediscover simpler hobbies, like actually reading real books. You can even bust out the candles, just don’t burn your house down.
Caffeine should be treated similarly: it doesn’t block melatonin production, but it binds to adenosine receptors in the brain. Typically, when adenosine binds to these receptors, you feel tired. With caffeine blocking the way, you’re basically artificially circumventing sleep.
Caffeine has a half-life of roughly six hours, meaning half of the amount of caffeine you ingest is metabolized in six hours. That means if you had 300 mg of caffeine (a typical Starbucks coffee) at 4 PM, you’d still have roughly 150 mg caffeine present in your system at 10 PM.
I generally only advise people to consume caffeine shortly after waking up to help sync their body clock (much like light exposure), or if they train early in the morning. Excessive caffeine, as popularized in the fitness industry today, can not only detract from sleep quality, but also slow your adaptations to strength training due to reducing your Testosterone:Cortisol ratio. Caffeine also doesn’t provide much (if any) performance benefit, so I don’t recommend pre workout caffeine other than for morning trainees. Give yourself a "caffeine curfew" of at least eight hours before your planned bed time.
Blacking out your room and getting it to a relatively cool temperature are also positive improvements to “sleep hygiene.” Blacking out the room should be obvious from the rationale above, but cooling the room down may seem counterintuitive. However, if you keep your body temperature too high, your core temperature won’t be able to drop low enough to allow you to enter the more restorative stages of sleep.
Concretely, you can buy blackout curtains, cover or remove anything that emits light in your bedroom, turn of all screens in your room an hour or two before sleeping, rocking an old school eye mask with ear plugs, and turning the thermostat down to 68 degrees (YMMV).
Finally, if you make all of these changes and still feel that you didn’t fully recuperate after a full night’s sleep, you can experiment with supplemental melatonin. Yes, it’s the hormone that your body secretes at night, but it won’t negatively impact your body’s own production of it. It can make it easier to fall asleep and can improve sleep quality. Supplement with 1-3 mg within 30-60 minutes of sleep to find your sweet spot.
One of the biggest flaws in most fad/crash diets is that they focus too much on "total weight loss" instead of fat loss. Hours of cardio & huge calorie deficits can cause you to lose quite a bit of weight on the scale, but as you'll learn in the next unit, scale weight isn't the determining factor of how successful your diet was. If you don't do anything to maintain your lean mass (i.e. strength training, proper diet & sleep), you end up lowering your metabolism, which makes it easier for you to regain that weight (and more) as soon as you stop the diet & cardio. This "Yo-Yo Dieting" is all too common and easily avoidable.
For these next 14 days (& beyond), sleep is one of your top priorities. Getting eight to nine hours of sleep per night is a non-negotiable, and it the first block of time you should be scheduling for the week ahead. Doing this is as simple as figuring out what time you consistently need to be awake across the entire week & working backwards.
For instance, if you work a typical 9 AM - 5 PM shift, and you need to leave for work at 8 AM, you should give yourself an hour or so to get ready & have your first meal of the day. This means 6:30 AM would probably be a good wake time. And yes, you're sticking to this wake time across all days, even on days you don't work. Again, sleep is your priority: staying up later because "you don't have anything to do the next day" is the wrong way of looking at it.
Keeping your wake time at 6:30 AM on all days will train your body to produce certain hormones, namely cortisol, at similar time. While you may know it as "the stress hormone," and while it may be detrimental to have too much cortisol at all times (like with chronic stress), this hormone is vital for daily function in small amounts. Remember: exercise is a stress, too. The stress itself isn't poisonous, the dose of the stress is poisonous. If you exercise for hours on end, you're going to produce too much cortisol, which throws everything out of whack. If you wake at random times, your body won't know when to produce that cortisol. This has an impact on your energy level for the rest of the day.
While it may sound like a drag, keeping a consistent wake time will do wonders for your energy level throughout the day & therefore your productivity.
You may be saying "my schedule isn't that simple." You can plan for this:
Say you work a job with inconsistent shifts. I have quite a bit of experience with this, & this is no excuse to sacrifice your sleep time. Simply find the latest time that you can wake up across days and make that your wake time. Ta-da.
Example:
Shift 1: 8 AM - 4 PM (3 Days)
Shift 2: 1 PM - 9 PM (2 Days)
In this scenario, you probably need to wake up at around 6 or 6:30 AM to get to your early shift. 8 hours back from 6 AM is 10 PM. That means you're going to want to get to sleep by 10 PM on all days and wake up at 6 AM on all days. On days you work late, that may literally mean getting home & going to bed. Netflix isn't going anywhere; that episode of Game of Thrones can wait (you can even watch it the next morning when you have "nothing to do").
You're also going to want to be aware of your exposure to light at specific times of the day. Since the invention of artificial light, we’ve been able to strong arm Mother Nature and get away from our natural instinct to rise and fall with the sunlight. Most lights and electronic devices actually function as “artificial sun,” meaning when we look at lights or phone screens, our body still thinks we are experiencing daylight. This is due to the blue spectrum of light being emitted by these lights and devices.
To counteract this, you’d be best served exposing yourself to real sunlight during the actual daytime. Novel, I know. Blue light isn’t all bad, and is actually necessary to sync up your body clock and affirm that you are actually experiencing day time. But it’s when we take our phones into bed with us or work on our computers into odd hours of the morning that we run into trouble.
Blue light reduces the production of melatonin, which is a vital hormone for your body to secrete if you want optimal sleep quality. This is why blue light is important in the daytime, and the last thing you want to expose yourself to when it’s dark outside. If you can’t get outside in the daytime regularly, use an artificial light box (very inexpensive on Amazon) every morning upon waking. At night, you can invest in blue-light blocking glasses (think Blu-Blockers) and orange-tinted lights.
Or, you can take the easy route and just turn lights and devices down/off in the hours leading up to bedtime.
A great program to help you out on your computer on nights that you just can’t get away is f.lux. It will automatically remove the blue spectrum of light from your computer screen as the sun sets in your area. iPhones & iPads have a similar function built-in called "Night Shift." You can also dim the lights and rediscover simpler hobbies, like actually reading real books. You can even bust out the candles, just don’t burn your house down.
Caffeine should be treated similarly: it doesn’t block melatonin production, but it binds to adenosine receptors in the brain. Typically, when adenosine binds to these receptors, you feel tired. With caffeine blocking the way, you’re basically artificially circumventing sleep.
Caffeine has a half-life of roughly six hours, meaning half of the amount of caffeine you ingest is metabolized in six hours. That means if you had 300 mg of caffeine (a typical Starbucks coffee) at 4 PM, you’d still have roughly 150 mg caffeine present in your system at 10 PM.
I generally only advise people to consume caffeine shortly after waking up to help sync their body clock (much like light exposure), or if they train early in the morning. Excessive caffeine, as popularized in the fitness industry today, can not only detract from sleep quality, but also slow your adaptations to strength training due to reducing your Testosterone:Cortisol ratio. Caffeine also doesn’t provide much (if any) performance benefit, so I don’t recommend pre workout caffeine other than for morning trainees. Give yourself a "caffeine curfew" of at least eight hours before your planned bed time.
Blacking out your room and getting it to a relatively cool temperature are also positive improvements to “sleep hygiene.” Blacking out the room should be obvious from the rationale above, but cooling the room down may seem counterintuitive. However, if you keep your body temperature too high, your core temperature won’t be able to drop low enough to allow you to enter the more restorative stages of sleep.
Concretely, you can buy blackout curtains, cover or remove anything that emits light in your bedroom, turn of all screens in your room an hour or two before sleeping, rocking an old school eye mask with ear plugs, and turning the thermostat down to 68 degrees (YMMV).
Finally, if you make all of these changes and still feel that you didn’t fully recuperate after a full night’s sleep, you can experiment with supplemental melatonin. Yes, it’s the hormone that your body secretes at night, but it won’t negatively impact your body’s own production of it. It can make it easier to fall asleep and can improve sleep quality. Supplement with 1-3 mg within 30-60 minutes of sleep to find your sweet spot.
Timing Your Workout & Meals
These are the final pieces of the puzzle, and have already been touched on in detail. The simple guideline here is to schedule your training on three days where you can keep that consistent training time, and scheduling your meals based on your training.
An additional note: I recommend that you have one full day of rest between training sessions if possible (I.E.: Monday, Wednesday & Friday). For some of you, that may not be feasible. If you work inconsistent shifts, for example, you may have three days in the middle of the week where you're working at the time you'd normally be training.
This again calls for some simple planning. Find three days of the week where you can train at the same time (preferably in the evening). If these days fall next to each other, so be it. At this volume & intensity, overtraining is not a real consideration. Plus, your diet is now constructed to allow for optimal recovery between sessions, regardless of if you train every day of the week or once a week.
Here's how a training day schedule could look for morning trainees, afternoon trainees & evening trainees:
An additional note: I recommend that you have one full day of rest between training sessions if possible (I.E.: Monday, Wednesday & Friday). For some of you, that may not be feasible. If you work inconsistent shifts, for example, you may have three days in the middle of the week where you're working at the time you'd normally be training.
This again calls for some simple planning. Find three days of the week where you can train at the same time (preferably in the evening). If these days fall next to each other, so be it. At this volume & intensity, overtraining is not a real consideration. Plus, your diet is now constructed to allow for optimal recovery between sessions, regardless of if you train every day of the week or once a week.
Here's how a training day schedule could look for morning trainees, afternoon trainees & evening trainees:
Morning7 AM: Wake Up
7:30 AM: Protein Shake + Caffeine 8:30 AM: Train (1 hr) 9:30 AM: First Meal 3:30 PM: Second Meal 9:30 PM: Third Meal 11:00 PM: Sleep |
Afternoon8:00 AM: Wake Up
9:00 AM: First Meal 12:00 PM: Protein Shake 1:00 PM: Train (1 hr) 3:00 PM: Second Meal 9:00 PM: Third Meal 11:00 PM: Sleep |
Evening (Ideal)8 AM: Wake Up
8:30 AM: First Meal 2:00 PM: Second Meal 5:30 PM: Protein Shake 6:00 PM: Train (1 hr) 8:00 PM: Third Meal 11:00 PM: Sleep |
All three scenarios follow the guidelines and result in 8-9 hours of sleep every night. On days you don't train, you simply remove the workout & protein shake from your schedule while keeping the meal times & wake/sleep times. You may have to do a little bit of fine tuning to match your exact schedule, but that should be relatively easy to do.
When you know what variables to manipulate, they're easy to change. When you stick to these changes, progress is a matter of time.
To Recap:
- Pick your wake, meal, training & sleep times AND STICK TO THEM. EVERY DAY.
- Your first meal should come within an hour of waking.
- Your protein shake should come within an hour of training; your post workout meal should also come within an hour of training.
- Meals in general should be spaced 4-6 hours apart.
- You should be getting 7-9 hours of sleep per night with ease, every day.
- Be mindful of your light exposure & "sleep hygiene."
