All my (vegan) fitness advice

Get big for the animals

This is all my fitness advice. Nothing here is new or revolutionary but the advice has been useful for me and others so I put it all in one place.

I’m vegan for ethical reasons, not for health. Veganism can be a very healthy diet if done well, but I don’t assume that veganism is always the absolute best diet for your health. This is written assuming you’d like to be vegan and still build a lot of muscle. It’s not written assuming that veganism is the most healthy diet.

• Exercise

  • Weight Training Routine

    • How to design a routine

    • Sets and reps

    • Form

    • My routine: 6 day per week push pull leg

    • You don’t need to push yourself to the limit every trip to the gym

    • The first few weeks at the gym are hard, but after that it becomes extremely easy

  • Cardio

• Diet

  • Basics

  • How much protein should I eat?

  • High protein vegan foods

  • General food stuff

  • Losing weight

  • Will too much soy raise my estrogen as a male?

  • Supplements

  • Don’t do steroids

• Online Resources

Exercise

Weight Training Routine

How to design a routine

For the first 2 years of lifting, your only goal should be to find a routine that works for you and that targets each muscle group at least twice per week (ideally 3 times per week) and then stick to it. You should aim to do 15–20 sets of repetitions of exercises on each muscle group per week. Once you’re doing that, it’s much more important to be consistent about going to the gym than it is to find the absolute best routine.

Sets and reps

You want to aim to do 5–10 repetitions of each exercise per set. I usually limit myself to 6–8. For each exercise, find the weight that allows you to do this number of repetitions with perfect form and without feeling like you could do one or two more reps after each set. Do 3–5 sets of each exercise. If you’re unable to go up in weight on an exercise, aim to go up in repetitions per set instead, see if that improves your strength over time, and then try a lower rep higher weight set. Some muscles are better activates by higher reps, others by lower reps.

Form

In the first month of a routine you should perfect your form on each exercise before moving up in weight. This takes time but you can build a surprising level of muscle memory where it becomes easy to use proper form each time without thinking about form. If you move up in weight and lift it with less than perfect form, you’re at best wasting your time and playing a silly numbers game with yourself, and at worst making it likely that you’ll be injured, which carries any of the following risks:

1. Being away from the gym for months: a much bigger hit to your fitness than a single exercise can make up for, even an exercise that targets the most muscles.

2. Permanent injury: a major hit to the quality of the rest of your life, not to mention making staying fit permanently much more difficult.

3. Chronic pain: much more common than young people may be aware of: “About 20% of people have chronic pain, though this varies widely with the exact survey question, but we are not talking minor aches here. About two-thirds of people with chronic pain describe it as “constant”, and half of people describe it as “unbearable and excruciating”.” Source

The way to avoid injury is to both

• Make sure your form is perfect before moving up in weight.

• Never do fewer than 5 repetitions per set. There’s no reason to “max out” and do a single repetition of the absolute highest weight you can. It doesn’t make you stronger and it’s only for bragging rights. If you are doing it for bragging rights, consider that it would look much more impressive if you didn’t brag and simply had bigger muscles.

To get good form you can either watch YouTube videos and follow their instructions or pay for a personal trainer. My favorite YouTube accounts for form on each exercise are Jeremy Ethier and Jeff Nippard.

My routine: 6 day per week push pull leg

For me a push pull leg routine works best because I have the time to go 6 days per week, so can target each muscle group twice using it. After a lot of reading and experiment, here’s the routine I’ve settled on:

Push Day

• Incline dumbbell bench press 4x6

• Flat barbell bench press 4x6

• Overhead dumbbell press 4x8

• Leaning lateral dumbbell raise 4x8

• Machine fly 4x6

• V-bar pushdown 4x8

Pull Day

• Deadlift - 3 x 6

• Barbell row 4x6

• Lat pulldown 4x8

• EZ bar curl 4x8

• EZ bar reverse curl 4x8

• Rear delt machine fly 4x8

• Chest supported dumbbell row 4x6

Leg Day

• Squat 4x6

• Front squat 4x6

• Dumbbell split squat 4x6

• Leg curls 4x8

You don’t need to push yourself to the limit every trip to the gym

A common misconception with new lifters is that if they’re not extremely tired at the end of a gym session it’s been wasted and their muscles won’t grow. This isn’t true. As long as you’re doing 15–20 sets of exercises on a weight that’s moderately difficult on each muscle group per week, you’ll hit maximum growth. Some days that will feel very tiring and other days it won’t.

The first few weeks at the gym are hard, but after that it becomes extremely easy

When I restart a routine after a few months off, every exercise makes me feel extremely sore and is not fun at all. It’s an actively painful experience to be at the gym and I feel exhausted when I leave. I imagine most new lifters feel this way. If I stick with it though, after just a few weeks the gym feels completely different. Each exercise is both exciting and relaxing to perform, even at high weight, and it’s my favorite part of my day. This sounds fake, and it’s hard to convince new lifters just how much the gym rewires your brain and body to enjoy it. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. New lifters will do a few sessions, feel extremely sore and unhappy, and look at people who have been lifting for years and incorrectly assume those people have intense willpower and self control. How else could they power through that much pain and fatigue each day? This is drastically incorrect. Those people have had their brains and bodies rewired to love going to the gym, and it will happen to you if you stick with it. To decrease soreness in the first few weeks I strongly suggest taking beta alanine.

Cardio

If you’re trying to build muscle you probably shouldn’t do intense cardio more than 3 times per week. It’s still very important for general health to do some cardio. I do cardio 3 days per week. Each session I aim to burn roughly 400 calories as measured by the machines I’m using. I almost never run, I worry about joint health and running seems to be bad for that. Instead I use an elliptical machine or bike.

You shouldn’t do cardio immediately before lifting weights, except for short warm-up sessions. The data seems to vaguely suggest that the best way to maximize gains and cardio health is to separate weight training and cardio by as much time as possible. This could look like weight training in the morning and cardio in the evening or vice versa.

Diet

Basics

The basic diet goal for gaining muscle without gaining too much fat should be to eat a ton of protein, get complete proteins, get all other essential nutrients required to stay healthy, and eat enough fiber to keep your digestion normal.

There are three phases of a diet you can be in:

Bulking: Eating 10–20% above your daily maintenance calories.

• This is the fastest way to gain muscle. You end up gaining a little fat as well, which you aim to lose during a cutting period.

Cutting: Eating 10–15% below your daily maintenance calories

• Aiming to lose weight while retaining muscle. Very hard to gain muscle on a cut.

Body recomposition (recomp): Eating at your maintenance calories but at high protein.

• Slowly changing the percentage of fat to muscle in your body. It takes longer to build muscle doing this than bulking, but is definitely possible in the first year or two of lifting.

How much protein should I eat?

You can vary your protein and calorie intake by whether you’re bulking, cutting, or doing a recomp. If you want to make progress in the gym, the single most important thing to get right is your protein intake.

If you’re bulking: 0.7–1 g of protein per pound of body weight per day

If you’re cutting: 0.8–1.2g of protein per pound of body weight per day

If you’re doing recomp: 0.7–1 g of protein per pound of body weight per day

When trying to convert new vegans, some vegans will tell you that you “don’t actually need that much protein to survive.” This is kind of a half truth. Protein deficiency, the condition where you have so little protein in your diet that you develop health problems, is very rare, but eating a high protein diet will in fact make your muscles grow faster and deliver a lot of other benefits, and it is slightly harder as a vegan to get that amount of protein in your meals. I haven’t had any trouble gaining muscle as a vegan, but I need to be honest and say that I need to be a little more intentional about food to make that happen.

High-protein vegan foods

Protein powder

• g protein/calorie: 0.20 (varies)

• Favorite brand: Sunwarrior, Vega Sport

• Eat at least one scoop a day, in part to make sure you’re getting enough leucine.

TVP chunks

• g protein/calorie: 0.14

• Favorite brand: Bob’s Red Mill

• Texture like ground beef and can be mixed into a lot of different foods, soups, etc.

Edamame & Mung Bean Fettuccine

• g protein/calorie: 0.13

• Favorite brand: Explore Cuisine (only one that makes it)

• Amazing texture and decent taste. Protein content is crazy high. Very versatile and can mix into most meals.

High protein tofu

• g protein/calorie: 0.11

• Favorite brand: Wildwood

• Has the texture of mozzarella cheese and basically zero flavor. You need to get creative with it.

Soy curls

• g protein/calorie: 0.09

• Favorite brand: Butler Foods

• Texture of chicken and absorbs any flavor you cook them in. Very high fiber too.

Soy milk

• g protein/calorie: 0.07

• Favorite brand: Silk

• It seems like soy milk was eclipsed by other milk replacements, which is a shame because in my opinion it tastes better, has a better consistency, and has more protein than most other milk alternatives.

Steel cut oatmeal

• g protein/calorie: 0.03

• Favorite brand: McCann’s

• Higher protein/general nutrition than other oatmeal, good on its own and in smoothies.

Nuts and seeds

• Favorites: peanut butter, pumpkin seeds, etc. These are a good natural source of protein and fats.

General food stuff

Outside of getting enough protein, general recommended daily nutrients, and eating mostly non processed foods, I don’t have much good diet advice, it seems like there’s not much we actually know. Here’s some stuff I stick to:

• Every morning I have steel cut oatmeal mixed with peanut butter, a scoop of protein powder, a banana, and soy milk for breakfast. It’s very tasty and high in protein.

• This video convinced me that I should aim to eat a kiwi per day.

• I try to eat a lot of leafy greens like kale and spinach.

• Frozen vegetables are actually more nutritious than fresh vegetables

• I don’t drink alcohol, mostly for ethical reasons, but I do think that if you want to maximize muscle growth you want to drink as little alcohol as possible.

• If you’re vegan make sure you’re taking a vitamin b12 supplement or adding it to your food in other ways, such as nutritional yeast.

Losing weight

The only thing that has ever worked for me in losing weight is portion control/calorie counting, and making sure to eat enough protein to retain muscle at the same time. It’s important to get used to feeling a little hungry consistently throughout the day.

Will too much soy raise my estrogen as a male?

High estrogen can be extremely bad for people who identify as male. If you’re male, it’s a completely valid concern to want to keep your estrogen levels low. Vegans should be very careful not to dismiss this concern. It’s not sexist or problematic to want to avoid higher estrogen levels, and if you imply otherwise you’re probably doing a lot of harm to both the image of veganism and people’s everyday understanding of health.

Soy contains phytoestrogens (estrogen-like compounds found in plants) and many everyday people worry that this means eating too much soy will increase your estrogen levels. I basically can’t find any convincing evidence that this is true, and a lot of compelling evidence that it’s false. This meta survey finds no relationship between soy intake and increased estrogen.

If you don’t believe me and would like to eat high protein vegan foods with zero soy, there are still plenty of vegan protein options to choose from. Admittedly avoiding soy as a vegan is another dietary challenge that restricts your choices and makes things a little harder.

Supplements

After a lot of digging I’m convinced that there are only 4 supplements with actual effect on gym performance:

• Caffeine

• Creatine

• Protein powder

• Beta alenine

I’ll use all of these, I’ll talk about each below.

Caffeine

I drink a cup of black coffee immediately before going to the gym.

Creatine

You should take creatine regardless of whether you’re working out or not. It can sometimes lead to bloating, but besides that it has absolutely no negative effects, is very cheap, and is one of the only supplements that actually has lots of positive effects on building muscle, and also may have some cognitive benefits. It makes building muscle easier and vegans especially should be taking it since they’re probably not getting enough in their diets. I find it easiest to take in capsule form but you can also get powder that’s tasteless and mixes pretty well into anything. There’s a rumor that creatine accelerates balding in men who are genetically predisposed to balding. After a deep dive I’m almost certain that this is false and based on a single flawed study of a few football players in 2009.

Protein powder

There’s a rumor that protein powders contain heavy metals/increase cancer risks and you shouldn’t use them. Both claims are fake news. You can do your own digging but this video summarizes the evidence. There are more heavy metals per calorie in fresh organic fruits and vegetables than in protein powders. There are a crazy amount of benefits to a high protein diet and basically no downsides if you’re getting all other nutritional requirements and eating enough fiber to keep your digestion normal. Protein also takes more energy to digest, so it contributes less to fat gain than other nutrients. Vegan protein powders also contain more leucine (an essential amino acid especially important for building muscle) per calorie compared to other vegan protein sources:

Beta-alanine

This is the supplement I forget the most. Having more in your system prevents your muscles from getting too sore between sets.

Don’t do steroids

A lot of people outside of the weightlifting community are not aware of how common steroid use is. About 2.7% of young American adults use steroids. Only 27% of Americans report weight training at least once a week. Doing some intense hand waving with these numbers implies that about 1 in 10 people you see weight training will be on some form of steroid. Seeing people who look really drastically muscular can be discouraging. I’d very strongly encourage you not to use steroids. This is what I’d say if you’re considering steroids:

• My objection to steroids isn’t that they’re unnatural. If that were the case, I also wouldn’t use protein powder, creatine, or even weight train in the first place. My main objection to using them is the health effects.

• It may be that steroid use in small quantities is not too dangerous, but crossing that line opens up the temptation to use more, which could become life ruining. After a few months of going, the gym and the progress you make there becomes addictive. I know that I wouldn’t trust myself to use steroids because it’s easy for me to get addicted to a routine.

• I wish this weren’t the case but if I exercise consistently and develop muscle I find that people are nicer to me. The social benefits are real. This is a big reason I go to the gym. I think that people new to lifting significantly underestimate just how quickly they’ll get those benefits if they find a routine and stick with it. I was able to put on noticeable muscle after 3 months. After only 6 months I would have people I just met tell me I look really strong. Beyond that initial phase of gains the benefits drop off, where some people will be more alienated if you develop an intense amount of muscle or simply not notice. If like me you’re significantly motivated by the social benefits of the gym, steroids are just absolutely not necessary.

Online Resources

YouTube Channels

• Jeremy Ethier

• Jeff Nippard

Forums

• /r/fitness

• /r/veganfitness