1,000 Health and Fitness Tips #0018: Don't Overcomplicate Getting In Shape
My Simple Frameworks For Building Muscle and Losing Fat
I think people tend to overcomplicate the concept of getting in shape. From an aesthetics perspective, I think this can generally be simplified to focusing on muscle mass and body fat (i.e. body composition).
My framework for building/maintaining muscle largely comes down to two factors:
Resistance training
Eating enough protein
And, my framework for losing fat comes down to the concept of energy balance, or burning more calories than you consume.
Based on my experience and what I’ve heard from sports science experts, like Dr. Mike Israetel and Dr. Eric Trexler, the biggest practical factor here is likely controlling how many calories you eat; though, maintaining movement through exercise and taking enough daily steps also plays a role–in theory, you could lean heavily on the movement piece of the equation to lose weight, but, based on my understanding, this would likely cost more daily hours of walking or training in the gym than is practical or desirable for many people.
SIDE NOTE: Dr. Mike Israetel and Dr. Eric Trexler had an awesome conversation in this podcast that I recently watched. Amongst other things, they discussed research and theory related to fat-loss and health and fitness supplements.
Sure, there are many more variables and details involved in getting in shape and the other concepts mentioned above that we could zoom in on; however, I think it is sometimes valuable to zoom out and simplify things.
In this regard, from my view, one simplified version is the following:
getting in shape = muscle gain or maintenance + fat loss