Nerd Fitness

Quick Summary There is no “perfect” workout plan. Nobody can know what perfect looks like in advance. If you’re too afraid to start and make a mistake, it will keep you stuck at the starting line. Build an action plan instead: 1 or 2 small actions this week, and everything else blocked out for now. Action is what teaches you. Three weeks of imperfect reps will tell you more about what fits your life than three months of research ever could. Do you ever feel like you’re

Expecting yourself to stick to the same fitness routine, no matter what, is why it fails. Because the only predictable thing about life is that it’s unpredictable. A kid gets sick. Sleep falls apart. The to-do list explodes. You can’t know which one is coming or when, but you can know something is, and you can build your routine to expect it. That’s the whole trick: take two minutes and decide, in advance, exactly what you’ll do the next time life goes sideways. Here&#821

You lose strength much more slowly than you probably think. A few days off changes basically nothing, measurable losses take roughly two to four weeks depending on the quality (muscle endurance fades first, maximal strength last). Muscle memory makes rebuilding faster than building the first time, and maintaining takes a fraction of the training that building did. Here’s the timeline, and how it can inform your training. Has this question ever crossed your mind: How fast do I LOSE stren

Soreness is not an indicator of a good workout, and not being sore doesn’t mean your workout didn’t count. That day-after ache (DOMS) mostly tells you that you did something new, not something effective. Progress is more reliably measured in your training log: more weight, more reps, more control over time, sore or not. Rachael (a reader and all-around amazing person) sent me a question about this so well-organized it came with multiple choice answers. Is severe soreness in the fo

If you can’t get yourself to start a workout after a long day, the problem might not be the workout itself. It’s the gear shift from “couch” to “go.” A bridge task is a small, neutral action (not fun, not hard, just…meh) that you put in between the two so the jump is smaller. Below is the 5-step version one of our coaching clients uses with her own students, plus a free worksheet to map your own. A few weeks ago I was talking with Tabitha, a Nerd Fitnes

No, it isn’t too late. People in their 70s, 80s, and 90s get meaningfully stronger when they start strength training, and beginners tend to see the biggest response to training. You also need far less than you’d guess: 30 to 60 minutes of lifting spread across a week is a great starting point. Here’s the science, three ways to begin, and a client who started at 57 and is still going at 77. A reader wrote me this week. Her whole email was one sentence: “Is it too late i

No, you don’t need a gym to get strong. Bodyweight training and weight training are both strength training, and both run on the same principle: progressive overload. In a gym you add weight to the bar; at home, you change your leverage. Each has real advantages. Bodyweight goes anywhere, needs little or no equipment, and is still highly scaleable. Weights make heavy loading and progression math simpler, and cover pulling exercises more easily. Your progress is based on the principles of tr

If you can do knee push-ups but the floor still feels impossible…that’s totally normal! You’re at the hardest jump in the progression ladder. Here’s how to break through: work in the 5 to 10 rep range, add a rep a week, and only move up once 10 reps feel strong. Not there yet? Add another set, add reps, or add a pause at the bottom of each rep, and try again in a few weeks. (For the full wall-to-floor plan, see The Push-Up Progression Plan.) Below: the ladder, the level-

If you’re a busy parent and fitness feels like the one thing you can’t figure out, you’re not alone, and you don’t need an ideal routine to start. You need a plan for the chaotic days. Take five minutes and write down one emergency backup meal and two or three “movement snacks” you can fit anywhere in your day. That’s the starting point. Here’s why that’s enough, and a story about the night I realized how many of us are quietly carrying the s

This past year, I became a complete beginner again. …it didn’t go how I expected. I’ve been a coach for over 15 years. It’s my passion, and why I was hired at Nerd Fitness back in 2018. But my role at Nerd Fitness has grown. These days, I’m not just responsible for our coaching. I’m also responsible for making sure the right people out in the world – the folks we were built to help – can actually find us. As it turns out, that’s its own huge, complicated, overwhelming problem. I had

Eight months ago, Faye joined our coaching program. What she told us on day one is something we hear a lot: “I hate exercise. I want to have a better attitude about it so that I’ll actually do it instead of dreading doing it. I want to learn some general principles about exercise so I can teach my kids how to be healthy with exercise. It’d be great if I could look awesome, but honestly, I just want to be healthy.” A lot of the people we work with are in a s

Squats. Rows. Deadlifts. Presses. There’s a reason why these are the foundation of any good strength program.[1] But if you’re goal is to be capable outside of the gym, there’s another category of movement that’s often overlooked. These are the movements that help you build qualities other than absolute strength: power, mobility, and work capacity. So you can break into a game of tag with your kiddos or help your friend move that awkward piece of furniture without worryin

I just got an awesome video question from a reader named Dale – and it got me so fired up, I had to share it with you. Dale’s been working out at planet fitness for the last couple of years, but in the last 6-weeks, she’s made it her mission to start learning how to strength train. (HECK YES!!!) She’s watching Youtube videos and trying to figure the whole thing out. Here was her question: I want to know how to transition to the other things that I’m intimidated by

After 4+ years of work, Steve’s new book, How to Try Again, is on bookshelves everywhere! In case you’re new to this email list, Steve is the nerd who started Nerd Fitness in 2009, and stepped back from NF to spend the last few years writing it!) I was lucky enough to be a small part of Steve’s writing process. I got to jam with him about behavior change, provide feedback on his opening chapters, and heck, one of my stories even made it into Chapter 3! So obviously, my opinion is COM

Have you ever caught yourself thinking, “I need it to work this time“? Maybe you’re trying to start a workout routine again. Maybe you want to take better care of yourself and finally eat in a way that feels good. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Whatever it is – if you’ve tried before and it didn’t go how you hoped, a quiet desperation can creep in. “I’m so tired of trying and getting nowhere.” “Will this ever work for me?&#

When someone joins our coaching program, we ask them to rank three things in order of importance so their coach knows where to start: Fitness Nutrition Mindset Almost everyone ranks them in exactly that order. Fitness first. Nutrition second. Mindset a distant third. (And that makes sense! They came here to move better and eat better. That’s the tangible change.) But here’s what’s interesting: When I look back through eight years of success stories, the physical wins are ther

Tell me if this pattern sounds familiar. One of my clients (let’s call him Elliot) would go hard every three months. Aggressive diet. New workout plan. The full deal. And it would work…for a few weeks. Then life would do what life does – motivation would fade, work would get stressful, there’d be a sick kid to take care of, a vacation – and the whole thing would unravel. Three months later, the cycle would start all over again. Only this time, everything felt a litt

When someone comes to me with an injury (or one of those nagging aches that’s been hanging around for weeks and they can’t figure out why) I run the same diagnostic almost every time. It’s simple. You can run it on yourself. And it’ll teach you what to look for to dodge future issues. The 3-part diagnostic I’m looking for a recent spike in any of these three: Volume – how much of the thing you’re doing Intensity – how hard the thing is Novelty &#8

I got this question from a reader last week, and it echoes a lot of questions I’ve received over the years: “I hate weight lifting and no matter what strategy I tried, I just can’t make it stick. Standing or sitting, lifting dumbbells for more than a few minutes just bores me to death. Walking truly has been easier to do because I can do it while I do other stuff I need to do that day; work meetings, reading work emails, doing my game dailies. It is the act of just standing th

It happened again. I came home from coaching my son’s rec soccer game, ran up the stairs, and felt it instantly. My back seized and locked up. And then that sinking feeling hit right away: “Not again. I was doing so well.” And I was doing well. This was about 2 years without a major flare-up, roughly 4x longer than my average through most of my 30s. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I’ve dealt with low back pain for over 20 years thanks to congenital spina