The lazy technologist’s guide to fitness

In the past 8 months, I’ve lost 60 pounds and went from completely sedentary to well on my way towards becoming fit, while putting in a minimum of effort. On the fitness side, I’ve taken my cardiorespiratory fitness from below average to above average, and I’m visibly stronger (I can do multiple pull-ups!). Again, I’ve aimed to do so with minimal effort to maximize my efficiency.

Here’s what I wrote in my prior post on weight loss:

I have no desire to be a bodybuilder, but I want to be in great shape now and be as healthy and mobile as possible well into my old age. And a year ago, my blood pressure was already at pre-hypertension levels, despite being at a relatively young age.

Research shows that 5 factors are key to a long life — extending your life by 12–14 years:

• Never smoking
• BMI of 15.5–24.9
• 30+ min a day of moderate/vigorous exercise
• Moderate alcohol intake (vs none, occasional, or heavy)
  • Unsurprisingly, there is vigorous scientific and philosophical/religious/moral debate about this one, however all studies agree that heavy drinking is bad.
• Diet quality in the upper 40% (Alternate Healthy Eating Index)

In addition, people who are in good health have a much shorter end-of-life period. This means they extend the healthy portion of their lifespan (the “healthspan”) and compress the worst parts into a shorter period at the very end. Having seen many grandparents go through years of struggle as they grew older, I wanted my own story to have a different ending.

Although I’m not a smoker, I was missing three of the other factors. My weight was massively unhealthy, I didn’t exercise at all and spent most of my day in front of a desk, and my diet was awful. I do drink moderately, however (almost entirely beer).

This post accompanies my earlier writeup, “The lazy technologist’s guide to weight loss.” Check that out for an in-depth, science-driven review of my experience losing weight. 

Why is this the lazy technologist’s guide, again? I wanted to lose weight in the “laziest” way possible — in the same sense that lazy programmers find the most efficient solutions to problems, according to an apocryphal quote by Bill Gates and a real one by Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Gates supposedly said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Wall wrote in Programming Perl, “Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.”

What’s the lowest-effort, most research-driven way to become fit as quickly as possible, during and after losing weight? Discovering and executing upon that was my journey. Read on if you’re considering taking a similar path.

Cardio Fitness

My initial goal for fitness was simply to meet the “30+ min/day” factor in the research study I cited at the beginning of this post, while considering a few factors:

• First, this is intended to be the lazy way, so there should be no long and intense workouts unless unavoidable. 
• Second, I did not want to buy a bunch of equipment or need to pay for a gym membership. Any required equipment should be inexpensive and small.
• Third, I wanted to avoid creating any joint issues that would affect me negatively later in life. I was particularly concerned about high-impact, repetitive stress from running on hard surfaces, which I’d heard could be problematic.

Joint issues become very common for older people, especially knees and hips. My program needed to avoid any high-impact, repetitive stress on those joints to preserve maximum function. I’ve always heard that running is bad on your knees, but after I looked into it, the research does not bear that out. And yet, it remains a popular misconception among both the general population as well as doctors who do not frequently perform hip replacements.

However, I just don’t like running — I enjoy different activities if I’m going to be working hard physically, such as games like racquetball/squash/pickleball or self-defense (Krav Maga!). I’m also not a big fan of getting all sweaty in general, but especially in the middle of a workday. So I wanted an activity with a moderate rather than high level of exertion.

Low-impact options include walking, cycling, swimming, and rowing, among others. But swimming requires an indoor pool or year-round good weather, and rowing requires a specialized machine or boat, while I’m aiming to stay minimal. I also do not own a bicycle, nor is the snowy weather in Minnesota great for cycling in the winter (fat-tire bikes being an exception).

We’re left with walking as the primary activity. 

LISS — Low-Intensity Steady State

Initially, I started with only walking. This is called low-intensity steady state (LISS) cardio (cardiovascular, a.k.a. aerobic) exercise. Later, I also incorporated high-intensity interval training (HIIT) as the laziest possible way to further improve my cardiovascular health.

To bump walking up into a “moderate” level of activity, I need to walk between 3–4 mph. This is what’s sometimes called a “brisk” walk — 3 mph feels fast, and 4 mph is about as fast as I can go without changing into some weird competitive walking style.

I also need to hit 30+ minutes per day of this brisk walking. At first, I started on a “walking pad” treadmill under my standing desk, which I bought for <$200 on Amazon. My goal was to integrate walking directly into my day with no dedicated time, and this seemed like a good path. However, this violates the minimalism requirement. I also learned that the pace is also too fast to do much of anything at the desk besides watch videos or browse social media. So I broke this up into two 1-mile outdoor walks, one after lunch and another after dinner. 

Each 1-mile walk takes 15–20 minutes. Fitting this into a workday requires me to block off 45–60 minutes for lunch, between lunch prep, time to eat, and the walk itself. I find this much easier than trying to create a huge block of time in the morning for exercise, because I do not naturally wake up early. In the evening, I’ll frequently extend the after-dinner walk to ~2 miles instead of 1 mile.

It turns out that walking after meals is a great strategy for both weight loss and suppressing your blood sugar levels, among other benefits. This can be as short as a 2-minute walk, according to recent studies. In fact, it’s seen as so key in Mediterranean culture that walking is considered a component of the Mediterranean diet.

Overall, I’ve increased my active calorie consumption by 250 calories/day by incorporating active walks into my day. That’s a combination of the 2 after-meal brisk walks, plus a more relaxed walk on my under-desk treadmill sometime during the day. The latter is typically a 2 mph walk for 40–60 min, and I do it while I’m in a meeting that I’m not leading, or maybe watching a webinar. Without buying the walking pad, you could do the same on a nice outdoor walk with a headset or earbuds, but Minnesota weather sometimes makes that miserable. Overall, all of this typically gets me somewhere between 10,000–15,000 steps per day. 

Not only is this good for fitness, it also helps to offset the effects of metabolic adaptation. If you’re losing weight, your body consumes fewer calories because it decreases your resting metabolic rate to conserve energy. Although some sites will suggest this could be hundreds of calories daily, which is quite discouraging, research shows that’s exaggerated for most people. During active weight loss, it’s typically ~100 calories per day, although it may be up to 175±150 calories for diet-resistant people. That range is a standard deviation, so people who are in the worst ~15% of the diet-resistant subset could have adaptations >325 calories/day. So if you believe you’re diet-resistant, you probably want to aim for a 1000-calorie deficit, to ensure you’re able to lose weight at a good rate. On the bright side, that adaptation gets cut in half once you’ve stabilized for a few weeks at your new weight, and it’s effectively back to zero a year later.

To further maintain my muscle following weight loss, I added a weighted vest to my after-lunch walks occasionally (examples: Rogue, 5.11, TRX). I started doing this once a week, and I aim to get to 3x+/week. I use a 40 lb weighted vest to counterbalance the 40+ lb of weight that I’ve lost. When I walk with the vest, I’m careful to maintain the same pace as without the vest, which increases the intensity and my heart rate. This pushes a normal moderate-intensity walk into the low end of high intensity (approaching 80% of my max heart rate). I also anticipate incorporating this weighted vest into my strength training later, once my own body weight is insufficient for continued progression. 

Considering a minimalist approach, however, I think you could do just fine without a weighted vest. There are other ways to increase intensity, such as speed or inclines, and the combination of a high-protein diet, HIIT, and strength training provides similar benefits.

HIIT — High-Intensity Interval Training

Why do HIIT? Regularly getting your heart rate close to its maximum is good for your cardiovascular health, and you can’t do it with LISS, which by definition is low intensity. Another option besides HIIT is much longer moderate-intensity continuous training (your classic aerobic workout), but HIIT can fit the same benefits or more into a fraction of the time.

Research is very supportive of HIIT compared to longer aerobic workouts, which enables time compression of the total workout length from the classic 60 minutes down to 30 minutes or less. 

However, 30 minutes still isn’t the least you can do and still get most of the benefits. The minimum required HIIT remains unclear — in overall length, weekly frequency, as well as patterns of high-intensity and rest / low-intensity. Here are some examples of research that test the limits of minimalist HIIT and find that it still works well:

• 1x 4 min, 3x/wk: review
• 5x 1 min, 2x/wk: study, study, study
• 4x 1 min, 3x/wk: study
• 8x 20 sec, 4x/wk (i.e. the Tabata protocol): study

Yes, you read that right — the last study used 20-second intervals. They were only separated by 10 seconds of rest, so the primary exercise period was just 4 minutes, excluding warm-up. Furthermore, this meta-analysis suggests that HIIT benefits more from increasing the intensity of the high-intensity intervals, rather than increasing the volume of repetitions.

After my investigation, it was clear that “low-volume” or “extremely low volume” HIIT could work well, so there was no need to do the full 30-minute HIIT workouts that are popular with many gym chains. 

I settled on 3 minutes of HIIT, 2x/week: 3 repetitions of 30 seconds hard / 30 seconds light, plus a 1-minute warm-up. This overlaps with the HIIT intervals, breaks, and repetitions from the research I’ve dug into, and it also has the convenient benefit of not quite making me sweat during the workout, so I don’t need to change clothes. 

I’m seeing the benefits of this already, which I’ll discuss in the Summary.

Strength Training

I also wanted to incorporate strength training for many reasons. In the short term, it was to minimize muscle loss as I lost weight (addressed in my prior post). In the medium and long term, I want to build muscle now so that I can live a healthier life once I’m older and also feel better about myself today.

What I’ve found is that aiming for the range of 10%–15% body fat is ideal for men who want to be very fit. This range makes it easy to tell visually when you’re at the top or bottom of the range, based on the appearance of a well-defined six-pack or its fading away to barely visible. It gets harder to tell where you are visually from 15% upwards, while anything below 10% has some health risks and starts to look pretty unusual too.

Within that 10%–15% range, I’m planning to do occasional short-term “lean bulks” / “clean bulks” and “cuts.” That’s the typical approach to building muscle — you eat a slight excess of calories while ensuring plenty of protein, aiming to gain about 2–4 lbs/month for someone my size. After a cycle of doing this, you then “cut” by dieting to lose the excess fat you’ve gained, because it’s impossible to only gain muscle. My personal preference is to make this cycle more agile with shorter iteration cycles, compared to some of the examples I’ve seen. I’m thinking about a 3:1 bulk:cut split over 4 months that results in a total gain/loss of ~10 lbs.

Calisthenics (bodyweight exercises): the minimalist’s approach

My goal of staying minimal pushed me toward calisthenics (bodyweight exercises), rather than needing to work out at a gym or buy free weights. This means the only required equipment is a doorway pull-up bar ($25), while everything else can be done with a wall, table or chair/bench. Although I may not build enormous muscles, it’s possible to get to the point of lifting your entire body weight with a single arm, which is more than good enough for me. That’s effectively lifting 2x your body weight, since you’re lifting 1x with just one arm.

My routine is inspired by Reddit’s r/bodyweightfitness (including the Recommended Routine and the Minimalist Routine) and this blog post by Steven Low, author of the book “Overcoming Gravity.” I’ve also incorporated scientific research wherever possible to guide repetitions and frequency. Overall, the goal is to get both horizontal and vertical pushing and pulling exercises for the arms/shoulders due to their larger range of motion, while getting push and pull for legs, and good core exercises that cover both the upper and lower back as well. 

I’ve chosen compound exercises that work many muscles simultaneously — for practicality (more applicable to real-world motions), length of workout, and minimal equipment needs. If you’re working isolated muscles, you generally need lots of specialized machines at a gym. Isometrics (exercises where you don’t move, like a wall-sit) are also less applicable to real use cases as you age, such as the strength and agility to catch yourself from a fall. For that reason, I prefer compound exercises with some rapid, explosive movements that help to build both strength and agility.

My initial routine

Here’s my current schedule (3 sets of repetitions for each movement, with a 3-minute break between sets):

• Monday: arm push — push-ups (as HIIT) and tricep dips. “As HIIT” means that I’ll do as many push-ups as I can fit within my HIIT pattern, then flip to my active work (e.g. jumping jacks or burpees).
• Tuesday: arm pull — pull-ups (with L-sit, as below) and inverted rows (“Australian pull-ups”)
• Wednesday: core — L-sits, planks (3x — 10 sec on each of front, right, left)
• Thursday: handstands — working toward handstand push-ups as the “vertical push”
• Friday: legs — squats (as HIIT), and Nordic curls (hamstrings & lower back)
• Saturday/Sunday: rest — just walking. Ideally hitting 10k steps/day but no pressure to do so, if I’m starting to feel sore.

For ones that I couldn’t do initially (e.g. pull-ups, handstands, L-sits, Nordic curls), I used progressions to work my way there step by step. For pull-ups, that meant doing negatives / eccentrics by jumping up and slowly lowering myself down over multiple seconds, then repeating. For handstands, I face the wall to encourage better posture, so it’s been about longer holds and figuring out how to bail out so I can more confidently get vertical. For L-sits, I follow this progression. For Nordic curls, I’m doing slow negatives as far down as I can make it, then dropping the rest of the way onto my hands and pushing back up.

On days with multiple exercises for the same muscles, I’ll typically try to split them up so they fit more easily into a workday. For example, I’ll find 10 minutes mid-morning between meetings/calls to do one movement and 10 minutes mid-afternoon for the other. This is the same time I might’ve spent making a coffee, before I started focusing on fitness.

Combined with the walks, this plan gets me moving 4 times a day — two 20-minute walks and two 10-minute workouts, for a total of 1 hour each day. The great thing about this approach is that I never feel like I need to dedicate a ton of time to exercise, because it fits naturally into the structure of my day. I’ve also got an additional 40–60 minutes of slow walking while at my desk, which again fits easily into my day.

What I’ve learned along the way

As you can see, I’m currently at 1x/wk for non-core exercises, which is a “traditional split.” That means I’m splitting up exercises, focusing on just one set of muscles each day. The problem is that the frequency of training for each muscle group is low, which I’d like to change so that I can build strength more quickly. 

I’m switching to “paired sets” (aka “alternating sets”) that alternate among different muscle groups, so I can fit more into the same amount of time. Here’s how that works: if you were taking a 3-minute rest between sets, that gives you time to fit in an unrelated set of muscles that you weren’t using in the first exercise (e.g. biceps & triceps, quads & hamstrings, chest & back). I do this as an alternating tri-set (arm pull, arm push, legs) with a 30–45 second rest between each muscle group, and a 1.5–2 minute break between each full tri-set. You might also see “supersets,” which is a similar concept but with no breaks within the tri-set. I’ve found that I tend to get too tired and sloppy if I try a superset, so I do alternating sets instead.

In addition, I’ve done a lot more research on strength training after getting started. For LISS and HIIT, I had a strongly research-driven approach before beginning. For strength training, I went with some more direct recommendations and only did additional academic research later. Here’s what I’ve learned since then:

• Higher-load (80%+), multi-set workouts 2x/week are optimal for maximizing both strength and hypertrophy, according to a 2023 meta-analysis.
• One ideal size of a set to maximize benefits seems to be 6-8 repetitions, with a 3-minute break between sets to maximize energy restoration. 6-8 reps seems like a sweet spot between strength and hypertrophy (muscle size). For endurance, 15+ repetitions should be the goal. If you want to build all of those characteristics, you should probably alternate rep counts with different loads.
• Time efficient workout design: Use compound exercises and include both concentric & eccentric movements. Perform a minimum of one leg-pressing exercise (e.g. squats), one upper-body pulling exercise (e.g. pull-up) and one upper-body pushing exercise (e.g. push-up). Perform a minimum of 4 weekly sets per muscle group using a 6–15 rep max loading range.
• Eccentric / negatives are superior to concentric. Don’t neglect or rush through the negatives / eccentrics. That’s the part of an exercise you ignore by default — letting your weight come down during a squat, pull-up, or push-up rather than when you’re pushing/pulling it back up. Take your time on that part, because it’s actually more important.
• Doing something as quick as 3-second negatives, 4x/wk, will improve strength.

Overall, that suggests a workout design that looks like this (2 days a week):

• 2+ sets of each: Compound exercises for arm push, arm pull, leg press
• Aim for whatever difficulty is required to max out at 6–8 repetitions for strength & hypertrophy (muscle size), or up to 15 if you’re focusing on endurance
• Do slow eccentrics / negatives on every exercise

The new routine

To incorporate this research into a redesigned routine that also includes HIIT and core work, here’s what I’ve recently changed to (most links go to “progressions” that will help you get started):

• Monday: Strength: push-ups, pull-ups, squats as alternating set
• Tuesday: HIIT (burpees, mountain climbers, star jumps, etc)
• Wednesday: Core & Flexibility: L-sits, planks, Nordic curls, stretches
• Thursday: HIIT (similar routine)
• Friday: Strength: handstand push-ups, inverted rows, squats as alternating set
• Saturday/Sunday: Rest days

Also, 4+ days a week, I do a quick set of a 5-second negative for each type of compound exercise (arm push, arm pull, leg press). That’s just 2 days in addition to my strength days, so I usually fit it into HIIT warm-up or cool-down.

On each day, my overall expected time commitment will be about 10 minutes. For strength training, all the alternating sets will overlap with each other. Even with a 3-min break between each set for the same muscle group, that should run quite efficiently for 2–3 sets. For HIIT, it’s already a highly compressed routine that takes ~5 minutes including warm-up and cool-down, but I need another 5 minutes afterwards to decompress after exercise that intense. You may notice that I only have one dedicated day to work my core (Wednesday), but I’m also getting core exercise during push-ups (as I plank), L-sit pull-ups, and handstands (as I balance).

The research recommendation to increase load to 80% of your max can seem more challenging with calisthenics, since it’s just about bodyweight. However, it’s always possible by decreasing your leverage, using one limb instead of two, or increasing the proportion of your weight that’s applied by changing your body angles. For example, you can do push-ups at a downwards incline with your feet on a bench/chair. You can also do more advanced types of squats like Bulgarian split squats, shrimp squats, or pistol squats.

Summary

My cardiorespiratory fitness, as measured by VO2 Max (maximal oxygen consumption) on my Apple Watch, has increased from 32 (the lowest end of “below average,” for my age & gender) to 40.1 (above average). It continues to improve on a nearly daily basis. That’s largely happened within just a couple of months, since I started walking every day and doing HIIT. 

My blood pressure (one of my initial concerns) has dropped out of pre-hypertension into the healthy range. My resting heart rate has also decreased from 63 to 56 bpm, which was a long slow process that’s occurred over the entire course of my weight loss.

On the strength side, I wasn’t expecting any gains because I’m in a caloric deficit. My main goal was to avoid losing muscle while losing weight. I’ve now been strength training for 2.5 months, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the “newbie gains” (which people often see in their first year or two of strength training). 

For example, I couldn’t do any pull-ups when I started. I could barely do a couple of negatives, by jumping up and letting myself down slowly. Now I can do 4 pull-ups (neutral grip). Also, I can now hold a wall handstand for 30–45 seconds and do 6–8 very small push-ups, while I could barely get into that position at all when I started. 

Overall, clear results emerged almost instantly for cardiorespiratory fitness, and as soon as 6 weeks after beginning a regular strength-training routine. If you try it out, let me know how it works for you!