Collecting Data to Improve Body Composition

A Wrong First Impression

I can remember being in college with little tent-pole legs sticking out of my shorts absolutely despising that guy at the gym who jotted things down into his little miniature notebook.

In fact, I can still almost picture one particular jacked guy with great posture walking around like whatever was written on that tiny notepad held the key to eternal life (or gains) while I was over in my own corner just thinking about what I was going to eat on my Chipotle burrito later that day.

Naturally, I didn't have a great initial experience with all of those guys that would fill out their workouts on little notepads. It all seemed like something professional athletes were supposed to do, and I was pretty sure none of these guys were professional athletes.

I remember thinking “it wasn’t for me” or that I wasn’t knowledgeable or capable enough to create a workout program.

But now that I think back, I was at the gym just for the sake of being at the gym.

I thought, “Well, as long as I'm here, something has to happen, right? If I go push a couple of heavy-ish things around and get a nice sweat in, surely I'll be looking like Arnold in no time.”

As it turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong, and that guy I had originally judged for being a “meathead with a logbook” was years ahead of me in terms of utilizing the benefits of data collection for the sake of achieving a physique goal.

The Case for Data Collection

The best businesses in the world that seek to grow and surpass any of their wildest dreams all rely heavily on data to influence their decisions. Since I also currently teach math, I was recently reading a few articles on data collection and this quote from Carly Fiorina (former Hewlett-Packard CEO and a 2016 Republican presidential nomination) came up that I thought was relevant not only for business, but for our purposes also:

"The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight."

- Carly Fiorina

Hyper-successful people like Carly clearly use information and data to drive nearly all of their decisions. Now collecting data and information is not a direct indicator of success, but more successful people than not use data-driven ideas to drive their work.

What if we applied these ideas to our body composition goals as well?

Why Should I Collect Data to Improve Body Composition?

We use data and information to drive our decisions all of the time - even in ways we usually don't think about - because our brains do it almost automatically.

For example, say you tell a joke to a couple of friends and they find it extremely funny. We note their responses as important information such as, “my joke is funny, I should tell that again.”

Then we later tell that joke to some other friends and they also laugh. One of the best ways to see if we have a funny joke is to tell people and measure their responses, but we never really think about the process of telling a joke as a data driven solution - in some aspect, it just is!

Why then, do so many people refuse to let data drive their goals of body composition? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Can you still reach your goals without taking down any hard data or tracking anything? Sure. But, that's also like trying to walk from Columbia, Missouri to Mesa, Arizona without using the hundreds of map apps you could easily be accessing on your phone, which begs the question: If you could avoid all the wrong turns and setbacks, wouldn’t you prefer that? If I told you, “You can get to Arizona one of two ways. You either start walking with no resources or you start walking with a handful of helpful resources,” which would you pick?

What Do I Track?

As you may have noticed if you follow us on Instagram, Andrew and I are always posting little tidbits surrounding our habits of tracking calories, macros, workouts, steps, sleep quality and a host of other things, and this is why: Data is a friend of anyone pursuing a physique-related goal.

From here on, I’m going to talk mainly about my own process and things I'm personally doing.

I was very slow to join the tracking movement as you could tell by my initial response to people tracking in the gym, but clearly I was missing something. So I began to learn and practice all of these ideas about how to eat healthier, make better gains, and optimize rest and performance. My thought was: If I have all of these tools, why not try to use them to my advantage? Especially if the work to track some data points seems to be minimal.

Here are some of the (nearly) daily things I track:

• Steps

• Total Calories

• Macros

• Sleep Quality

• Sodium Intake

• Scale Weight

• My Workouts

Some of these things are easier than others to track, like entering my scale weight into a spreadsheet versus guessing my sleep quality based on how I feel when I wake up. One is straight forward, and the other is pretty subjective since I can’t measure the quality directly.

Here is what it looks like for me on my spreadsheet:

Examples of Why Tracking Has Been Useful for My Personal Fat Loss Goals

Weight Spikes

Occasionally my weight will spike up randomly, and you can even see that happen a few times on my sheet. Specifically near the end of the first week in the image, we can see a fluctuation of bodyweight. Without tracking anything, I probably have no idea what happened, or I could maybe at least incorrectly blame something.

With tracking however, I knew that I had eaten deep dish pizza for a special occasion on April 23 and a couple of other food items high in sodium. That was the only large meal I had eaten that day aside from a couple of other small snacks, so I know I kept my calories low (just didn’t report them for some reason). So why the weight gain? Sodium levels. Any time you eat out or make a dish that is high in sodium, even if you keep a lock on calories and macro numbers, you still might end up with a higher number on the scale the next morning because sodium causes us to hold a little bit of water, skewing your numbers a little bit.

Tracking As a Road Map for When You Get Lost

At some point in the cutting or gaining process, what you were doing before stops working. This is completely reasonable and logical because a lot of things about your body are changing as you gain and lose weight, so naturally it makes sense that the things that we need to do will slightly change.

This year it happened way earlier in the cutting process, and I have written a lot about it in several past social media posts, but essentially what happened was that I was struggling to lose weight early based on what worked for me last year and how I was implementing the diet this year. If I am a type of person that doesn’t track any of the categories listed above, I would probably be clueless about how to progress

However, with this data, I was able to manipulate a few things very easily and started to see results. I personally decided to increase my step count while also trying to better limit the fat consumption in my diet, and it worked!

Trying to Diagnose the Reason for a Poor Workout

This example has a little more nuance than the others, but it is something that has still been helpful for me when tracking. Several weeks ago I went to the [garage] gym and had a memorably horrible day; I felt sluggish, and asleep at the wheel with no motivation or strength to get anything done. I got in a few movements to justify being there and then left, albeit a bit puzzled.

The date I referenced was April 21, and if you peep the logbook picture above, you will see that my sleep quality from the previous night was listed as bad. I remember that night. I got maybe 3 hours of sleep? Again, this may make sense to most people… obviously my workouts suffered because my sleep was poor. Sometimes I have horrible sleep and then go into the best workouts of my life, so sleep may not always tell the entire story.

Another factor could’ve been that I had around 2,300 calories the day before as well (this was at a time when I was eating close to 2,700 cals), so the two could have compounded to provide the perfect storm for a poor workout.

How Much Work Does Tracking Data Take?

Tracking is one of the easiest and potentially most life changing investments you can make on your fitness journey.

I do almost all of my tracking (outside of entering my food into MyFitnessPal) in the mornings. My morning routine is almost always this:

• Wake up

• Use the restroom

• Weigh myself

• Enter bodyweight for that day, then sleep quality, total steps, sodium intake, calories, and macros from the day before into my spreadsheet.

Entering these things takes me maybe a maximum of five minutes if you move slow in the mornings like me, but realistically it only takes a couple minutes of transferring some numbers over into a spreadsheet and you’re done!

What you will probably find when you start is that it isn’t necessarily hard to input the data, but it can be hard to be consistent about tracking if you don’t have a routine for doing so. I mentioned my routine above, but that doesn’t have to be yours. I’d suggest to find a time to update your spreadsheet as often as possible (ideally daily), and start making that a habit!

Conclusion

Hopefully from the information laid out here, you can see why we value tracking data with our own programs, but also why we generally ask clients to track these sorts of things.

The more information we have at our disposal, the more informed decisions we can make. If building a healthy lifestyle and a better body composition is something that you are wanting to work hard for, or you are already working hard for it, then consider tracking some of the things listed in the article to give you a better chance at achieving the composition that you want.

To clarify, data isn’t the only tool we use at IVRY to help our clients, and like I’ve said already: if it’s easy to track this data and it’s easily accessible, it would be silly not to let those numbers help inform decisions along with other important factors.

I encourage you as you continue on with your body composition journey to start using data as a friend and a guide, and to let us know how it goes!

If you found this post helpful or are interested in learning more or having some personal coaching, we are currently adding new clients to our roster! Just click here to learn more!

Why Doing At-Home "Workouts from Hell" Might Not Be the Best Move for Your Physique

As far as entertainment goes, I’m a big YouTube fitness guy, and one of the things I’ve noticed lately on both YouTube and Instagram is that a lot of fitness influencers are pushing these “at-home workouts from hell.” And here’s the thing: they look really good in the thumbnails and the clickbait headlines are yummy. But, I’m not so sure this is the best way of going about things if what you care most about is your physique, and I’m here to tell you why.

First, I want to be clear about what I mean when I (and these influencers) say workouts “from hell.” The general theme of all these workouts can be summed up a in a few bullet points:

• Usually lots of reps (50 or more in most cases)

• Lighter loads

• Minimal focus on technique

• Minimal focus on the mind-muscle connection (MMC)

• Maximal focus on intensity and effort

• Minimal rest times or long circuits of exercises strung together

Let’s get into it then.

Q: Why are these workouts probably not the best idea for people looking to improve their body composition?

1. Being needlessly hardcore isn’t the mechanism that drives improved body composition.

This immediately requires us to zoom out a bit. What does it even mean to improve your body composition? Well, let’s cut to the chase. As far as I’m concerned, most people want to lose body fat (not just weight) and build muscle to the extent that they look good naked and feel confident at the pool. I have yet to hear a client say, “I actually really just like fitness for fitness. I really don’t care that much about losing body fat or gaining a bit of muscle.” If that were true of you, you’d probably already be fairly committed to your fitness hobby of choice: jogging, boxing, swimming, CrossFit, etc. So from now on, let’s assume that your goal is primarily motivated by looking better and feeling more confident.

Unfortunately, well-intentioned people get this wrong all the time, and I can say this confidently because I did it for years. So, hear me when I say this: Neither losing body fat nor gaining muscle are achieved through being aimlessly hardcore. It’s not the “hardcore-ness” of your workout that communicates to your body, “Okay, start looking better.”

If you want to achieve that leaner, more muscular look, you really need to figure out how you can train to maximize muscle gain (or retention) while being in a caloric deficit. Simply put, these "workouts from hell” probably aren’t optimal for physique outcomes because they don’t load your muscles optimally for growth - and growth is what creates that look most of us are after.

Training intelligently is what drives body composition results - not being “hardcore” just for the sake of it.

2. Muscles have been shown to grow best when loaded near failure in the 5-30 rep ranges - not 100 or more like some of these trending at-home workouts prescribe.

Yesterday on Instagram I saw someone challenge their social media audience to do 200 air squats per day for an entire week. Again, there’s nothing wrong with doing air squats if you like them for general exercise or find them therapeutic. My intent is also not to say this person is “stupid" or “wrong" because they aren’t! Getting people off their butts and moving during a time like this is amazing and absolutely beneficial in it’s own way, I just don’t want our audience thinking that doing 200 air squats a day is a good way to develop stronger, muscular, and more aesthetically pleasing legs (for both men and women). It’s not. Getting “up and moving around” versus training to grow some respectable muscle are two very different things.

If you want to grow, the science consistently shows that growth happens when loading your muscles to the extent that you can perform between 5-30 reps as you approach muscle failure. For example, if you’re doing a dumbbell squat at home and you’re able to do 40 reps with 25 pounds, you’d probably be better off increasing the weight until those achievable reps fall below 30.

To zoom in even more, most of that work should probably be done in the 8-15 rep range. This means instead of doing 1400 air squats across the span of a week, you could just pick one or two days and perform 3-5 sets of a weighted squat in that 8-15 rep range. 

It’s up to you, but the latter is much more likely to actually get you growing muscle and looking better naked while that first option is more of a fitness or endurance goal.

Choose what’s best for you, but be educated in that decision.

3. Despite the higher calorie burn, these workouts don’t account for sustainability or future progression, which frequently leads to burnout.

With their high rep counts and short, circuit-based rest times, these "workouts from hell” are really just training your endurance systems and maybe bumping your calorie burn for the day. And although burning extra calories through high intensity activity can absolutely be a piece of the fat loss puzzle, it can also be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Yes, I am actually making the point that burning a few extra calories might not be worth it in the grander scheme of things.

Think of it this way, if you burn an extra 500 calories doing a series of burpees, air squats, pushups, crunches, mountain climbers, and whatever else, do you really want to get in the habit of having your body rely on that sort of induced calorie burn to maintain your current rate of progress? You might - and I certainly don’t want to discount the fact that those people exist, I just personally don’t know too many people who genuinely enjoy that sort of training. Most people workout a certain way as a means to an end because they’ve been convinced it’s the best way to go about things. But, is it? In this case - probably not.

These workouts also probably aren’t sustainable. If you’re not already in phenomenal shape, doing something like 100 burpees followed by 100 pushups followed by 100 pullups followed by 100 crunches is going to absolutely dominate you. You will be sore for days - maybe even more than a week! So if you do that on Monday, what are you going to do on Tuesday? Well, I know exactly what you’ll be doing. You’ll be curled up in the fetal position with enough delayed onset muscle soreness to cripple an army.

And to that same point, these workouts don’t account for the future. Even if you could do that workout and live to see the light of next Monday, what happens then? Do you do it again? For the same amount of sets and reps? And again the following Monday? How do you progress? It’s a dead-end road.

For optimal muscle development, I’ve learned that you really need to be periodizing your approach, which means learning when to take it easy, when to ramp it up, and when to go hard in the paint.

Take this example of a leg day you could do instead of those 200 air squats per day.

• DB Goblet Squats for 3 sets of 8-15

• Bodyweight Bulgarian Split Squats for 2 sets of 10-20

• DB Romanian Deadlifts for 2 sets of 8-15

• Weighted Crunches for 2 sets to semi-failure

Most people could do that on Monday, feel a bit of soreness on Tuesday, and be fully recovered to train their legs again by Thursday. By next Monday, you could repeat that entire workout while adding a small bit of weight, adding a rep here or there, improving your technique, or even adding a set. That’s called progression. Progression provides overload, and overload produces results when your diet matches the goal.

So, here is the point in black and white…

“If your goal is to look better naked, consider training with heavier loads, eating plenty of protein within an overall caloric deficit, setting a step goal, and prioritizing your sleep and recovery.”

Hopefully that makes sense in simple enough terms.

Q: Are there any good reasons to be doing these workouts? Or are they just a bad idea in general?

It doesn’t have to be a non-negotiably bad idea.

Good reasons for doing these sort of workouts could be that you enjoy them or just prefer getting a bigger caloric burn in a short amount of time. Those are great reasons to do them, I just personally don’t relate to them because:

1. I don’t like high intensity training with lighter loads.

2. I prefer to achieve my calorie deficit primarily through diet and walking.

Another reason could be that you just really enjoy a good challenge for the sake of fitness. If that’s you, go for it!

But if that’s not you, take a step back, evaluate your long-term goal, and train/eat/sleep according to what the science says - not fitness mythology.

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Thanks for reading, everyone! I sincerely hope you enjoyed the content and learned something.

If you feel like this blog brought you any value at all, consider sending it to a friend or family member!

And, if you're interested in working with me one-on-one, visit The Vegan Gym and apply for coaching. I’ve had nothing but success in guiding people toward their fat loss goals.

Cheers, everyone!

-Andrew