Strength Training in a Calorie Deficit, Hotworx Incentivized Fitness Model, Why We Need Supplements
Welcome to Trynotsuck Tuesday: A snapshot of habits, lessons, and tools I’m using to not suck at life
A question I'm constantly asking myself is, "How can I optimize my habits for longevity?"
In the context of exercise, this has led me down the rabbit hole of hybrid athlete training.
Hybrid athlete training is best described as equal parts endurance training and bodybuilding.
The more I learn about hybrid athlete training, the more I believe it’s the best way to exercise for longevity.
Get as strong as you can. Get as fit as you can.
All the data on both sides point to a longer, healthier life.
Dan Go recently wrote about how he is making a shift towards hybrid athlete training next year.
I highly recommend his newsletter. It's one of the few I look forward to opening each week.
Here's today's Trynotsuck Tuesday.
Why You Should Strength Train While in a Calorie Deficit
The primary benefit of strength training while in a calorie deficit is it helps you maintain muscle mass while losing fat.
This is ideal because the goal of most people who are in a calorie deficit is to lose fat without losing muscle.
If you can do this, you’ll look much better than you would if you lost a lot of fat AND muscle.
People new to strength training may even be able to build muscle mass while in a calorie deficit.
Another benefit of strength training in a calorie deficit is it can help you lose fat faster.
You will burn extra calories during and after your strength training workout (as a result of a higher post-exercise metabolic rate), which will help you achieve your fat loss goal faster as long as you don’t overeat.
From personal experience, I’ve found shorter, high-intensity exercise such as weightlifting or HIIT doesn’t increase my appetite as much as longer, moderate-intensity exercise such as jogging.
How much strength training should you do?
Many fitness experts recommend strength training at least 2–3 times per week targeting all major muscle groups throughout the week, which is what I aim for.
In addition to strength training, you should keep your protein intake relatively high (around 1 gram per pound of body weight).
This will go even further in preventing muscle loss and increasing satiety, which is helpful for regulating your calorie intake.
This Yoga Studio Has Nailed Incentivized Fitness
I recently signed up for a fitness studio called Hotworx that offers sessions like yoga, pilates, and spin inside an infrared sauna.
The reason I did this was to incorporate mobility and sauna into my wellness routine.
I want to do both of these regularly but hadn’t been doing either. I don't have a sauna at home, and I tend to neglect mobility work like yoga, so I figured this would allow me to combine the two.
The membership isn't that cheap - about $60 a month, plus a couple of hundred dollars up front for equipment. But I thought, maybe the cost will encourage me to go at least a couple of times a week.
Then, the manager started walking me through the membership benefits and my ears perked up.
Hotworx has a unique reward system tied to how much you use the facility.
Specifically, it tracks how many calories you burn during and immediately after your workout on the app. If you get to a certain number of calories burned, say 5,000, you qualify for a gift card that can be applied to your membership fee.
But it gets better…
The more you use the facility, the bigger the rewards. When you reach a higher rewards tier, like 21,000 calories, you can get a $50 gift card, which basically offsets a month of your membership.
The tracking resets each quarter. So if you are going consistently, like three or four times a week, you could earn a high enough rewards tier to get one out of every three months of membership for free.
This is the opposite of the typical gym membership model where they get you to sign up and then hope you never show up.
It got me thinking… why aren’t insurance companies doing stuff like this?
These days, it's easy to track how active or inactive you are, how well you're sleeping, etc. through wearables.
They could provide some sort of financial incentive, like a discounted premium, if you practice good health, which can be proven through data tracking.
Maybe the Hotworx rewards program will set a precedent for incentivizing healthy behaviors and other businesses will follow suit.
Why Do We Need Supplements?
“Why do we need supplements if humans evolved for 200,000 years without them?”
My favorite response to this comes from @drmarkhyman in his book Young Forever.
Paraphrasing Dr. Hyman:
If you hunt and gather your food, including mushrooms and 800 different species of wild plants, get enough nutrients, vitamins and minerals from unadulterated soil, eat Omega-3 rich wild fish, live in a toxin-free environment, spend several hours a day outdoors moving and lifting heavy things, avoid chronic stress, and sleep 8-9 hours a night waking and sleeping with the sun, then no you would not need supplements.
Thanks for reading.
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