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.