Have you ever gotten a piece of advice, and thought it seemed plausible, but not something you wanted to try right now?

Sometimes you follow through and try it later. Or you don’t. And if you don’t, sometimes you hope the advice actually doesn’t work out for people. That way, you rationalize that it was the right decision by you not to do it. We know it’s not the right way to think but we do it anyway.

But this post is about trying it, having your fears confirmed, and thinking “I hate to say it, they were right”.

In fall 2021, just before I turned 26 I decided I wanted to improve my health. Specifically, I wanted to fill out my frame and feel better. I was 6’4”, around 175-180 lbs for most of my adult life. I did a lot of cardio but neglected strength training.

Three years later, I’ve learned a lot about how to progress towards those goals. And it didn’t take anything extraordinary, just following through on some pieces of common sense advice I had delayed trying.

Food

Throughout my life I considered myself a hardgainer, someone who just wasn’t going to put on muscle. I’m not going to argue that hardgainers exist or don’t. It doesn’t matter, because I quickly realized that I wasn’t one.

It turned out I was just bad at eating consistently.

Whether it was a busy schedule, not having food at home, not feeling well, or any other reason (just being lazy!), I had a pattern of skipping a few meals a week. And when I did eat, I wasn’t eating big enough portions of foods with sufficient nutritional value.

To counter this, I put myself on a diet.

It was a pretty easy diet to follow.

Three meals a day. Anything I wanted. And it had to either be cooked by me or from a restaurant — no more reheated chicken nuggets or frozen foods.

I gained 40 lbs in six months just from forcing myself to eat three meals a day. They were right. And I felt better.

Sleep

That same fall I thought I wasn’t sleeping well. I bought an Oura ring to measure that. (Eventually I stopped wearing the Oura ring — too many people confused it for a wedding ring.)

I recall three takeaways from the first few weeks.

1. My peak-pandemic-era 1:30-2 am bedtimes weren’t cutting it when one of my roommates would occasionally wake me up at 7:30 making breakfast (noise carried easily from the kitchen).
2. I woke up in the middle of the night, a lot.
3. You could pretty easily spot the nights where I drank. Abysmal sleep each time. What surprised me was that even on nights I just drank a single beer, I still saw pretty degraded sleep.

The bedtimes were an easy adjustment. The wakeups I couldn’t do much about directly. The alcohol angle was something to latch onto.

I had thought that having one drink was a mature and moderate thing to do. But I was willing to cut down on those instances for better sleep. My policy since then has largely been none or a few — might as well get max enjoyment if it’s going to mess up sleep anyway.

My sleep had improved, to the point I was fairly autopilot (not changing anything) on sleep between then and spring 2024. But when I moved into my own apartment in Santa Monica, I had the opportunity to try something that some of the most annoying people on the internet espouse.

I tried sleeping with no screens in the bedroom.

There are a few narratives (conspiracy theories, too) that people push about why to do this. I’m not going to get into any of that because it didn’t influence my decision.

Leaving my phone in the living room when I go to bed means I don’t scroll in bed (delaying bedtime), and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I don’t check my phone.

I haven’t been paying attention to any evidence about the former, but there is a noticeable decrease in nights where I wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake for an hour or longer. Those instances always started with me waking up, looking at my phone (for a few seconds or several minutes), then failing to fall back asleep as my mind is now racing.

Earlier bedtime. Cut down on alcohol. Don’t sleep with your phone by your bed. They were right.

Strength training

Learning to lift weights had been on my to do list for a while, just low on the list.

There were a few instances in college where I’d ask a friend to show me some basic lifts, but those turned out to be one-off coaching sessions. It was impeding their workouts and I imagine I wasn’t really going to pick up good form that way, anyway.

In late February 2022, I am planning my upcoming one-month sabbatical and am looking for things to do. I lived a few blocks from Warhorse Barbell Club, a gym offering small group coaching. I set up an assessment with the gym’s owner, Chris.

I wasn’t an easy case to take on. No strength training experience. No experience doing other types of exercises that would translate over easily. And I was so inflexible that we had to work around that.

I liked Chris’s approach of being very intentional about how you set your goals. He recommended focusing on the process (ex. lift three days a week) vs. outcomes (ex. bench x for y reps).

I told Chris my goal for March was to figure out whether weightlifting was something I liked. If it was, I’d keep at it. If not, I could say I tried something new, and cross it off my to do list.

Warhorse had you sign up for one-hour sessions, max of 10 people per hour. There were usually two coaches roving around advising on programming, critiquing form, and spotting. Everyone is on their own program, and there was no separation of skill levels.

That last part meant most of the people around me my first few times were crushers. And like a lot of beginners at the gym, I felt self-conscious about how much worse I was. That feeling took a few months to shake.

Even as I felt nervous inside the gym, I pretty quickly knew it was something I wanted to keep doing. My body felt great after a session. It was good for the brain chemicals.

I continued working with the Warhorse team (shoutout to Caolan and Jon as well) until I moved out of Philly in June 2023. If you’re in the Philly area, definitely check them out.

I realized a few things in the moment, but they’ve felt especially true now that I’ve moved on.

1. Booking a one-hour time slot was great for accountability. There were several days where I didn’t want to get out of bed, but the feeling that I was taking a spot from someone else, and that I didn’t want to let my coaches down led to much better consistency.
2. Warhorse was expensive at $225 a month (which for a small gym + coaching was a great value). When you make that big of an investment, you really want to make it work. That helped with pushing myself to go to the gym but also spilled over into staying disciplined with diet, sleep, and more. $225 a month for that much positive influence on my lifestyle was well worth it.
3. Good coaching is just so valuable, and I think it’s something a lot of people would benefit from if they tried it if they can afford it. This was a big factor in my deciding to join Future later that year.

So that’s how I began lifting weights. I started to gain muscle and I felt better. They were right.

Conclusion

I can’t say there was an 100% hit rate during this period. But the things I didn’t like or didn’t work, I just stopped. And I was left with some better habits than what I had before.