What Actually Matters For Fat Loss Part 4
How To Increase Your Physical Activity and Exercise
In parts 1 and 2, I covered the nuts and bolts of energy balance and why the best fat loss strategy uses a two-pronged approach addressing energy in and energy out. In part 3, I laid out practical dietary strategies for fat loss. Now finally, I will cover practical strategies and considerations for increasing energy expenditure.
I mentioned before that we are not built for burning calories. We are thrifty with energy utilization and primed to store what we don’t immediately use. Although this allowed us to survive in environments with low food availability, it has led to soaring rates of obesity today.
The moral of the story is that you’ll have greater fat loss success if you can prevent the calories from passing your lips versus trying to burn them off through activity.
But…that doesn’t mean exercise in the context of fat loss is useless. On top of the myriad health benefits physical activity bestows on us, it’s often a key differentiator for fat loss and especially for fat loss maintenance.
Improving Consistency
Consistency is the single biggest hurdle you will ever face when trying to maintain a consistent physical activity or exercise schedule. That’s because most folks underestimate the power of small daily habits and they don’t think enough about how to remove barriers to action.
Since exercising is a habit, we can approach this through James Clear’s Four Laws of Behavior Change. They are:
Make it obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make it satisfying
Make It Obvious
It’s almost impossible to change a habit if you never think about it.
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.
If you don’t clearly lay out when and where you’re going to exercise, it often won’t get done. This is exactly what implementation intentions are designed to address. They can look something like this:
“When situation x arises, I will perform response y” or “At this time, at this location, I will perform x.”
Implementation intentions are designed to remove ambiguity about when you will perform an action. To summarize why this is so important, I will once again call on the words of James Clear:
Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course. We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.
Remove The Ambiguity From Your Workouts
Think about why people hire trainers; there is an actual living breathing human being waiting for you at a specific place at a specific time that you have paid a great deal of money for that will be disappointed if you don’t show up. That is one solid implementation intention; it’s no wonder so many people pay folks like us.
You can set things like this up yourself by setting:
Location - the gym or location where you will perform your workout
Time - the time you will perform your workout
Workout Duration - This can be timed cardio duration or a clearly laid out “amount” of exercise you will do—which is typically dictated by number of exercises, sets, reps, rest periods, etc.
What You Will Do - Have a plan!! Know what you’re going to do when you get into the gym. You don’t want to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. I don’t like cookie cutter workout plans long-term, but they are great for giving beginners somewhere to start.
Make It Attractive
There are a handful of ways we can make exercise more attractive. One of the best ways, and one I’ve personally employed, is to use temptation bundling. Temptation bundling is when you combine something you want to do with something you need to do (exercise in this case).
For instance, I used to do cardio while reading my kindle. The time went by much faster, and I hardly noticed how much I was sweating by the end. But the thing that you love about your exercise routine can be anything. Could be the setting, combining another activity, doing it with people you like. Here is a list of ways to make exercise more enjoyable or attractive:
Watch your favorite show on your phone or tablet while doing cardio
Listen to audiobooks or music when going out for walks (I personally feel like I absorb more when I occupy my lower brain with a repetitive task like walking)
Enjoying a low calorie but tasty coffee drink while lifting weights (another one of my favorites)
Do activities with a friend or group
Exercise outdoors when the weather is nice
Do activities you actually enjoy (shocker I know)
Start training with a professional that's hilarious like me (it's true, everyone says so)
Make It Easy
Exercise need not be some grueling affair leaving you dripping on the gym floor after every workout. It relies on the compound interest of consistency and slow incremental progress. Don’t place too much importance on any given day.
There are a ton of ways to make exercising easier, and I will go over each one in greater detail. These concepts and examples mostly come from James Clear's book Atomic Habits.
Prime Your Environment
You want to eliminate points of friction as much as possible to make the next action as easy as possible
Set your clothes out or pack your gym bag the night before
Prepare food ahead of time so you can sleep later or grab and go on the way to the gym
Get a coffee maker that has an autostart function so it's finished brewing in time for you to leave
The 2-Minute Rule
If you struggle with consistency, you can try turning your exercise habits into 2-minute versions. You'll have less mental inertia if you only have to commit to 2 minutes. Keep consistently doing that 2-minute version of your habit and through a process of habit shaping, you can incrementally increase the difficulty, complexity, or time of the habit.
This Reddit comment from Terry Cruz gives some great insight into building a habit of going to the gym. It’s about showing up first. Then you can expand on it.
Commitment Device
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.
Personal training is equal parts implementation intention and commitment device, which is probably why it’s so effective. You have a set place and time where you have to be somewhere (the implementation intention) and you will lose money and have a human that is disappointed in you if you don't show up (commitment device).
Here are a few commitment devices you can use to increase the likelihood of adherence:
Tell you friends and family about what you're doing. The shame and embarrassment of not following through can spur action.
Sign a contract with someone. To take it a step further, you can have some sort of penalty by not following through.
Have someone withhold something from you unless you do your workout.
These should be motivating but not punitive, as that can result in reaching for unhealthy habits to deal with your negative feelings.
Make It Satisfying
First three laws increase odds that a behavior will happen this time while this law increases the odds that a behavior will happen next time. It closes the habit loop.
You can make an exercise habit more satisfying by having an easy-to-see visual representation of your progress or consistency. You could have a calendar with a checkmark for every day you worked out, a chart of your lifting numbers or running times, etc.
It doesn't matter what it is; it just needs to be something that's motivating for you and it needs to be in a place where you're going to see it all the time.
We all find exercise satisfying for different reasons. I, for instance, love watching my lifting numbers slowly improve. But someone else may love the feeling of being sweaty. Whatever it is, find ways to amplify the part of the experience that is satisfying to you.
As Menno Henselmans has said, "If you hate exercising, its cost-benefit is terrible." It's true. It's uncomfortable, the process is slow, and you have to be insanely consistent to see those results. You've got to find a way to make it more appealing now or you likely won't do it.
Seeing great fitness results requires delayed gratification, but you can find ways to make it satisfying now to increase the likelihood you'll do it again in the future.
You can try giving yourself a reward every time you perform the habit in a way that doesn't conflict with your identity. I like to read, but I feel guilty buying books. If I wanted to increase my workout frequency, I could transfer a dollar to an account every time I worked out and use that money to buy books.
A well-placed reward that doesn’t act in opposition to your aims can make a huge difference in your adherence. I like to opt for physical rewards because they remind me of my accomplishment every time I see them.
Cardio and Resistance Training: Where They Each Fit In
Cardio has become an ambiguous term. It can mean any activity designed to stress and train the cardiovascular system, but when speaking about it to the average person it takes on a more specific definition.
For most folks, cardio activities:
Increase the heart rate
Are repetitive
Make you sweat
Are typically activities where you can zone out
Cardio has a host of benefits for cardiovascular, metabolic, and mental health, and can help you burn extra calories. The problem is when people use it as the sole means for fat loss.
Regular cardio does burn extra calories but not as many as most people think. People that have insanely high levels of cardio may be able to eat like shit and stay at a normal weight, but it’s not a strategy I recommend. We are not built to burn energy; we are built to conserve it.
Cardio doesn’t have the same compound effects that progressive resistance training does, which means the benefits expire rather quickly in the context of body composition. Building muscle is the ultimate test in delayed gratification and the cumulative effect of years of progressive strength and muscle growth is incredible for changing your body and metabolic health.
Because resistance training forces your body to prioritize muscle growth, it will ensure you keep more muscle and lose more fat in a calorie deficit and gain more muscle and less fat in a calorie surplus. So while doing cardio is unequivocally better than doing nothing, for long-term health, fat loss, and physical function, you need to engage in some form of resistance training.
Summary
Increasing the frequency of physical activity is a matter of finding out what you like, what you have time for, developing a simple plan, and relentlessly following through with that plan. Make it as simple as possible.
Consistency is your number one priority and anything that makes it hard to be active is an impediment. So remember the four laws of behavior change: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. If you’re always thinking about these laws as you try to improve your life, there really is nothing you can’t do.