Author: Jason Kemp

I’ve written before about the importance of setting goals. In that post, I also wrote that you have to record your progress, so you’ll know whether you’re on track to achieving your goals. Recording what you’ve done is also a great way to plan for the near future. If your goal is months away, planning for the next month may be difficult if you’re not sure whether what you’ve been doing for the past month is effective.

One of the things you’ll hear about often is keeping a workout journal. It’s one of the most effective tools, especially when you’re starting out. I’ve been keeping one for as long as I can remember.

• You can set your goals for each workout – Before every workout, I write down the exercises I’ll perform and the weights I’ll lift. The only thing I don’t write at the beginning is the number of reps — I’ll write that after I’ve finished the set.
• You have an immediate record of what you did last week – This is related to the point above. I don’t write the number of reps until I do them, but I can refer to last week’s workout to find out what I did for that exercise, then set my target for that set. Suppose I’ll only increase the weight for the bench press after I’ve done 3 sets for 13 reps. If I look at last week and see I’ve done that, then I increase the weight. No need to remember some little detail about my workout last week.

The more you learn about diet and exercise, the more variables you find that you must keep track of. But if you don’t know the big, basic ones, tweaking your rep speed or your beta-carotene intake won’t help. In this tip, I’ll define three big things that you must know about for planning your routines: frequency, volume & intensity.

Frequency

This is the least controversial of the three. All frequency means is how often you train in a given period of time, typically a week. For example, I go to the gym four days out of seven. That’s my frequency.

Volume

Volume is the amount of training you perform per workout. This would equate to how many sets you do in a workout. For example, today, I trained arms and shoulders for a total of 27 sets (9 per muscle group). More is not necessarily better when training. A marathoner is probably the ultimate high-volume trainer. Sprinters, by contrast, train with a low volume.

Intensity

Intensity is how hard your workout is. I don’t mean how hard you were breathing or how hard you felt it was: intensity is more objective than that. Intensity is a measure related to your maximum effort. You only have 100% intensity. For lifting weights, this is typically measured by your 1 Rep Maximum (1 RM) of an exercise: the maximum weight you can lift for one rep; any more, and you can’t perform the exercise. Ideally, you wouldn’t begin your training without first testing your 1 RM in the lifts you want to do. Sprinters are the ultimate high-intensity athlete. Marathoners train with a low intensity.

So: you can train hard; you can train long; but you can’t train long and hard. I’ll talk more about this in future posts.

I find myself paralyzed: there are so many aspects of getting back in shape that I want to write about, I can’t decide where to start. Everytime I think of a good place to start, I think of at least two other things to tell you. That would require WAY more organization here at jasonkemp.ca than I can muster.

So I’ve decided on this little mini-category of Diet & Fitness Tips. This will be a grab bag of definitions, tips I’ve read & tried & liked throughout the years and anything else I feel I should pass on, but don’t want to write at length about. (I actually always intend for my posts to be short, but I can’t bring myself to not be thorough. … But this time I mean it.)

So here’s the first tip, I mean, definition: diet.

Diet

When I think — and you do too, dear reader — of the word diet, I immediately think of the phrase on a diet; as in “I have to go on a diet because I’m causing planes to arrive 10 minutes late.” This implies that after you go on a diet for a while, that you get to go off a diet. Not so, dear reader. That’s not the meaning you should think of when you hear the word diet.

The meaning of diet that you should think of is “the sum of the food consumed by [the] body.” (source) So if you had a penchant for hot dogs and a can of Coke for lunch, your diet would consist of snouts and assholes…and Coke. It’s what you eat day in and day out. If your diet isn’t healthy or balanced, then you have an unhealthy diet. The only way to maintain a healthy weight is to work out and eat a healthy diet that you can maintain for long periods of time.

So what’s a healthy diet? It’s one that has the right balance of macronutrients (carbohydrate, water, protein and fat) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) for your daily needs. If you work out with weights a lot, your protein demands are higher than if you were a couch potato. If you are a lumberjack the sheer quantity of food compared to a receptionist is huge.

Stay away from diets with names. They do all the thinking for you, so you can’t judge whether a certain food is “in” the diet or not.