The 80-20 View of Health & Fitness

Most are familiar with the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto Principle.

For those unfamiliar, the 80-20 rule states that for many events roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

It’s with this principle in mind that I have developed what I call the 80-20 rules of fitness. The goal is to convey the idea that there are handful of behaviors that we can invoke that will get us 80% of the way there.

Mostly, I developed this idea because the Health & Fitness industry is thick with all sorts of information, some bad, some good, but all in a jumble. Everyone these days is trying to monetize the health & fitness industry. Everyone is trying to make a buck at something that should be relatively simple. Because of this, it’s easy to embrace ideas that may not be that effective.

The 80-20 rules of health and fitness are a handful of ideas that should get you at least 80% of the way to where people need to be. The overall goal is to focus on the few things that will achieve 80% of the results. It’s a way to cut through the garbage and zero in on the activities that really matter.

Where do people need to be? What are the results that can be expected?

1. Lean (not overweight or obese)
2. Strong
3. Conditioned

Why would you want these things? Because they are healthy and lead to better health outcomes. This is not the article to go over all of the health benefits of being lean, strong and well-conditioned, but I think most are aware of the problems with being the opposite of these.

There are a few general areas you can focus your efforts that will get you 80% of the way to where you need to be (lean, strong, conditioned):

1. Diet: Pay attention to Calories-In / Calories-Out
2. Diet: Maximize your protein intake
3. Strength: Lift weights and utilize heavy, compound lifts
4. Conditioning: HIIT workouts for cardiovascular conditioning

Diet: Calories-In / Calories-Out and Protein Intake

While I am not going to discount that certain foods may impact your weight, the fact of the matter is that you can get 80% (or more) of the way to being lean by strictly monitoring the number of calories you consume and making sure that you stay within a reasonable range. It’s the most sensible and reasonable way to attain and maintain a healthy weight.

I’ve often found that monitoring calories-in / calories-out has a moderating effect on one’s diet. Once you start paying close attention to how much you are consuming, you also end up paying attention to and moderating what you are consuming. You end up cutting out all of the garbage foods because you start to understand how dramatically they impact your calorie count.

The diet aspect of the 80-20 rule also includes maximizing your protein intake. Put a premium on consuming protein, especially if you are:

• Lifting a lot of weights or engaging in a lot of strenuous physical activity
• Older

A note for aging athletes: Your body loses the ability to synthesize (use) protein as you age. What a 20-something gets out of 20 grams of protein might require 40 grams for a 50- or 60-something.

How much protein? I can’t answer this specifically, but between 1g – 1.5g per pound of lean body weight is a pretty typical recommendation.

If anything, trying to achieve 40g of protein intake at each meal is reasonable, although if you are only eating a few times per day, then you might consider a higher intake per meal.

Protein is essential for building muscle and to adapting to intense forms of exercise like lifting heavy weights.

Workouts: Strength

One primary goal of working out should be to attain strength and gain muscle mass. This article will not go into the details of the health benefits of being strong and carrying muscle mass. Needless to say, health outcomes are increased across the spectrum for those that demonstrate strength and carry a good amount of lean muscle mass.

It’s not surprising that measurements like grip strength and leg strength show a correlation to mortality – those that score lower on these tests have a higher chance of mortality. This is especially true as we get older.

While general resistance training with machines and dumbells is great, and I’m not going to knock anyone for using them, there are better ways to get strong and gain muscle mass and to do it quickly.

Done correctly, barbell training following a simple linear progression method will get you stronger and pack on the muscle with more efficacy than engaging in other types of resistance training.

A couple of days a week utilizing the following exercises for a few sets will get you at least 80% of the way to being strong and gaining some good lean body mass:

• Squats
• Deadlifts
• Press (Bench Press and Overhead Press)

Learn how to do the lifts properly and learn the basics of progressive overload, hit the gym consistently, and you’re likely to see good progress.

Once you’ve gained a good amount of strength with these exercises and established a consistent workout pattern, then start looking at adding other types of exercises into your program (machines and dumbells).

Conditioning: HIIT

High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) involves engaging in rigorous exercise for brief amounts of time. Weight lifting is itself a form of HIIT, but in this context I’m referring to running, cycling, rowing, calisthenics and other types of exercise performed in short (20 – 30 second bursts) with 1 – 3 minutes between bursts.

While I would certainly not leave out slower, steady-state type of cardio exercises, if you want to accelerate the development of cardiovascular capacity, settle on HIIT.

Some general ground rules for HIIT:

• If you are just getting started, make sure to ease into your HIIT workouts:
• Engage in HIIT once or twice per week.
• Don’t do HIIT on the days you lift weights.
• Perform maybe one to three sets (bursts) during your first few HIIT sessions.
• Your sets (bursts) should last no more than 20 seconds, and 10 or 15 seconds might be more appropriate for your first few HIIT sessions
• Pick an exercise you are comfortable with. If you are not really a runner, then don’t run, choose cycling or rowing instead.
• Perform a set (burst) for 20 – 30 seconds at near maximum intensity
• Rest 1 – 4 minutes between sets
• Five sets is probably adequate, but add more sets and reduce rest time between sets as your capacity for this type of exercise increases
• After each set or burst, your heart should be pounding and you shouldn’t be able to talk due to breathing so hard
• Ideas for HIIT exercises:
• Sprints
• Cycling
• Assault Bike
• Rowing
• Sled
• Burpees
• Broad jumps / vertical jumps
• Engage in very low-intensity cardio activity between sets. Don’t just sit there, walk around or continue cycling albeit at the lowest setting possible.
• Don’t neglect longer, steady-state cardio activity. HIIT is not a complete replacement for longer duration cardio activity, which should still play an important part in your workouts.

Book Review: Chronicles of the Black Company

by Glenn Cook 4 of 5 Stars

This is a review of The Black Company omnibus, which contains the first three novels of the Black Company: The Black Company, Shadows Linger and the White Rose.

The first book of the Black Company sat on my bookshelf for nearly 15 years before I got to it. I had attempted to read the first book, with its compelling cover of a Darth Vader-like figure holding a knife and stabbing a table with a glowing pentagram on it, a couple of times. Glenn Cook’s writing style is not heavy on description or exposition and backstory. He just throws you into the story and you have to swim for a while before things start to make sense. Originally, this was very off putting and led me to reading a dozen pages before I put the book down. However, recently, I picked the book up with the intention of finishing it no matter what, and once I got past the initial disorientation and managed to get my footing in the story, I was extremely impressed.

So, be warned, Glenn Cook has a jarring storytelling style that requires a fair amount of patience. He has a spartan writing style. The sentences and paragraphs are not difficult; they’re lean. But his lack of description and exposition complicate comprehension of the story. Stick with it. Struggle through the first few chapters, and you’ll be rewarded with a compelling story that’s worth the time. The Black Company is a mercenary outfit with a history that dates back hundreds of years. They are unwittingly duped into serving The Lady, a cunning and diabolical sorceress, to put down a rebellion against her in a massive military campaign on a new continent. There is a lot of military fiction told from the gritty perspective of the soldiers on the ground.

In the first book, The Black Company, the story is told first-person from the perspective of Croaker, the Black Company’s annalist and physician. In later books, the narrative is split between third-person and Croaker’s first-person narrative.

That’s another thing to understand about the novels – none of the main characters have a real name. (This is in keeping with a general premise among the sorcerers and wizards of the book that to know someone’s true name is to have power of them.) So, you have characters like The Captain, the Lieutenant, Goblin, One-Eye, Darling, Raven, Soulcatcher, Bonegnasher, the Lady, the Dominator, Tracker, and (my personal favorite) Toadkiller Dog.

There’s a lot of great storytelling in the Black Company, although I would argue that my favorite of the series would be the second book, Shadows Linger. It’s an older fantasy novel (written in the 80s), and so it is absent a lot of the social narratives that have tainted fantasy and science fiction of late, and it definitely has the feel of fiction written in that era. The books are shorter than your typical fantasy novel, owing to Cook’s spartan writing style.

While it is not as graphic as Game of Thrones, there is no doubt that it has a dark and gritty feel. There are no explicit scenes of rape or torture, not much over the top vulgarity, but there is a definite feel of moral grayness, a bleakness to the storyline where the lines between good and evil, between the good guys in a war and the bad guys, cannot be adequately described.

There’s also an undercurrent of political machination that adds a complexity to the “villains” in the story. It’s an interesting play on politics that does not reach Game of Thrones levels, but may give you pause to consider whether similar intrigue might have played out among Sauron and his Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings.

This really was a delightful and compelling series to read and quite a surprise to me in the content and quality of the story being told. It probably should be held up as one of the modern classics of fantasy. Considering that it came out around the same time as Terry Books’ Shannara series and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, both of which are credited for breathing life back into Fantasy back in the 80s, I’d put Glenn Cook’s Black Company up there as well. He may not have been as popular as these other two, but I think there are seeds that were planted, a kind of pedigree, that show up in the works of George R.R. Martin (and the other gritty fantasy realists that have followed) and Stephen Erickson.

Book Review: Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals

by Thomas C. Corley 3 of 5 Stars

I’d taken a long hiatus from business and personal motivation books. This one caught my eye for some reason and, if only to refresh my memory or tune up some old hardware in the back of my mind, I decided to give this book a read.

It’s alright. It’s not bad advice. The price for the paperback is steep, considering that it weighs in at less than 90 pages. So, one star down for that.

And another star down for the fact that 50% of the content of the book is “storytelling.”

The author begins with a handful of stories of people down on their luck. Each of them somehow meets a stranger who, seeing a reflection of themselves, offers the person a free “Rich Habits” seminar with the mysterious J.C. Jobs. Later, we find out that J.C. Jobs was himself in dire straits at one point and had set out on a mission to discover why rich people are successful.

From there, the book launches into the ten daily habits that rich people practice.

The Ten Daily Habits are:

1. Form Good Daily Habits.
2. Set goals – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, long-term
3. Work on Self-Improvement every day
4. Exercise every day
5. Build and nurture relationships
6. Moderation in all things
7. Do it now, no procrastination
8. Think richly
9. Save and invest
10. Exercise control over your thoughts and emotions

Each habit is covered in a few pages.

The book is a quick read, and quite honestly it’s not bad advice. None of the advice is outlandish or difficult to follow. It’s all true, if simplistically so, and will tend to lead someone to success if followed routinely. I enjoyed the author’s concept of “Situational Good Luck,” meaning the type of good luck someone gets when they open themselves up to opportunity and set themselves up for success.

I’d rank Daily Habit # 5 as the most critical or most important. In my experiencing, networking is the backbone of success.

Daily Habit # 6 has me perplexed, because it seems that the Daily Habits themselves are a kind of obsession and that, when it comes to working, successful people seem obsessed and not able to withdraw from the arena. Your average executive works 60 hours per week and often has plenty of engagements outside of work. Where’s the balance and moderation in this? Perhaps this is just living for them. I can completely get on board with moderation, but I suspect that you have to exempt success from the equation, because I don’t think you can be a moderate when it comes to work and be highly successful.

I’d also take issue with his advice for Daily Habit # 4, which is to spend most of your time running to get in shape. I’d place strength training on equal ground with cardiovascular exercise.

Overall, a good primer with a solid backbone for anyone looking to get someone in shape for taking a good ol’ stab at the American Dream.

Rules of Weight Loss: Accountability

Weight loss begins with extreme accountability, and by this I do not mean that you need to “blame” yourself or “feel” guilty for the overweight or obese situation you are in. Yes, it is in fact largely your fault and you need to own it (if for no other reason than no one else is), but we don’t want to focus on our past failures. Instead, we want to focus on future success and put in a framework that both eliminates the problem and prevents it from happening again.

Accountability simply means taking measurements (biometrics), recording them and watching them like hawk.

These are the biometrics you should watch and the interval at which you should take and record them:

• Weight (Daily)
• Waist Circumference (1 / week)
• Blood Pressure (1 / week)

Why not body fat %? Mostly because the simplistic machines for ascertaining body fat % aren’t very accurate and also because the three measurements are easy to attain and are all that are really necessary. (In other words, track body fat % if you can and want to, but not to the exclusion of any of the three biometrics listed above.)

Create an Excel spreadsheet. Track your progress. And create some simple charts to show your progress. Nothing looks more stellar than seeing these numbers fall, day after day, week after week.

Some notes about these biometrics:

• Weigh yourself daily and continue doing so even after you reach your goal weight. This is the strongest reinforcement possible as it makes you face every single day the consequences of following a reasonable diet or deciding not to.
• Belly circumference is the measurement of your belly at the belly button. Optimal measurements for men are less than 40 inches. Optimal measurements for women are less than 37 inches. Having a belly girth above these numbers increases your chance of mortality.
• Belly circumference measurement is also a buffer of sorts. Sometimes, if you are eating at or near the level of calories your body needs to operate and build muscle, your weight may not fluctuate much. However, if your belly is getting smaller, you can see that you are making progress in the battle against being overweight or obese.
• A simple blood pressure wrist cuff is inexpensive. It may not necessarily be the MOST accurate measurement of your blood pressure, but it gives you a baseline. Your blood pressure should be around or below 120/80. If you are consistently between 120 – 140 / 80 – 90, you should be concerned. If you are consistently 140+/90+, you should be very concerned (and probably on blood pressure medication and you should go see your doctor ASAP). As you lose weight and body fat (especially the body fat around your midsection), your blood pressure should start to head south too.
• Take these measurements at the same time of day. I prefer to take them in the morning, right when I wake up.

Consider weight loss as a kind of biological debt-repayment program. Not only are you going to have to suffer a bit to get out of the situation, you’re also going to have to develop a strategy to manage your biological finances going forward to ensure that you do not end up in the same mess again.

Rules of Iron: Protein Intake

Of the four macronutrients – alcohol, carbohydrates, fats and protein – protein is the most critical. Every meal you prepare should be done so with an emphasis on maximizing protein intake.

You should, of course, worry about the quality and amount of carbohydrates and fats you consume. But you should make absolutely certain that your meals contain 30+ (and probably even 40+) grams of protein.

Protein is critical to building muscle. It’s also more satiating than the other macronutrients and has a tendency to help control the appetite.

Some considerations for protein:

• Make sure you are consuming essential proteins (i.e., essential amino acids). Essential amino acids are the proteins that your body cannot manufacture by itself. Unfortunately, plant-based proteins may not contain the essential proteins that your body needs, or at least they may not contain the quantity of essential amino acids that your body needs. If you are vegetarian or vegan, you need to find ways to get more essential amino acids.
• Wait 3 – 4 hours between meals that contain protein. 30 – 45 minutes after consuming protein, your body begins the protein synthesis process, which takes between 2 and 3 hours. During this time, your body WILL NOT absorb or utilize any other protein. Consuming protein during this time is an exercise in futility.

It goes without saying, but great sources of essential protein:

• Meat
• Dairy products – milk, cheeses, yogurt
• Meal Replacement drinks and bars

(My condolences to vegans and vegetarians.)

Rules of Iron: Progressive Overload

The concept of progressive overload is quite simple:

In your weight training – and especially with your top-tier exercises – you should always seek to add weight.

This is especially true as you begin your weight training experience, or if you’re returning after a long layoff.

Each week, add a few pounds or more to your lifts. Continue doing this week after week until you can’t do it anymore. When this happens, you’ve reached the end of your beginner training phase. You’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, and you will now need to start looking into more serious training methods and variations to maximize your strength gains.

You may also at this point have reached the strength goals you wished to achieve and can continue lifting at this same level, maintaining a fairly high level of strength as the years roll on.

This is why the top-tier exercises are called such. They are the only exercises that can really accommodate long-term progressive overload. None of the other exercises, perhaps with the exception of leg press and some other leg machine exercises, can be loaded and progressed at a steady rate like the top-tier exercises.

Keep a training journal. Log your progress. You can record either your maximum lift (1RM) or the weight that you are using for your standard 3 to 5 sets of between 5 and twelve reps.

An Excel spreadsheet with a simple chart in it that shows you going from a 150 lb. squat to a 300 lb. squat over the course of 6 or 9 months is impressive and confidence boosting.

Rules of Iron: Top-Tier Exercises

The foundation of your workout should be the top-tier barbell exercises:

• Squat
• Deadlift
• Bench Press
• Overhead Press

Your workouts should be based around these movements, and each workout should begin with one of these exercises. They are complex, multi-joint exercises that give you the biggest bang for your buck – more strength, more muscle mass.

Keep these rules in mind:

• Squat twice per week
• Press twice per week
• Deadlift once or twice per week
• The best warmup for these exercises is to perform the exercise at a lower weight for a few sets – the heavier the weight, the more warmup sets you’ll require
• 3 – 5 sets per exercise
• 5 – 12 reps per set

If you are not training for competition, then you really don’t need much more than this information. Training for powerlifting or bodybuilding is going to require a different approach. But for those who just want to gain and maintain strength, a simple weight lifting program built upon these exercises will suffice.