All my (vegan) fitness advice - Part 1: Exercise and etiquette
Get big for the animals (redux)
Intro to this series
I know a lot of people who want to get into lifting and fitness. I’ve been giving a lot of them advice in the last year and I want to put it all in a series of blog posts to easily refer back to. This is a big brain dump of most of what I know. I’m also writing this to be the guide I wish I had when I was starting. I’m trying to demystify lifting and fitness as much as possible so that you can start. I’ve tried to make it clear what’s covered in each section so you can skip around to what you don’t already know.
I’m not adding anything to our collective knowledge. There are many guides online like this, but this one is mine. This is an update of an old post. A lot of friends have appreciated having a simple direct write-up of what I do so they can copy it. I’m hoping that after reading it, you can approach weight lifting and other fitness stuff easily without having any sense that you’re secretly missing something big or don’t really belong in the gym. I’m trying to completely demystify fitness so you can read through and think “Oh, this is actually all really straightforward and accessible to someone like me who doesn’t exercise much. I could do this easy.” You can! This is all easy and simple.
I’m vegan for ethical reasons, not health. This is written assuming you want to work out and stick to a vegan diet. I’m not assuming that veganism is optimal for health.
This series is mainly targeted at men, only because I know a lot more about lifting as a male trying to achieve a typical male physique. I don’t have much specific advice unique to women in the gym besides “it is impossible to accidentally put on more muscle than you want.” Most of this advice is the same regardless of your gender, but if you’re going for a different physique you’ll want to do different exercises.
You don’t need to be especially smart to understand any of this. It’s all pretty straightforward. It’s just a lot of minutia. The main challenge of gaining muscle at the gym is rarely about being super smart or working to the point of total exhaustion. It’s almost always about being able to patiently adhere to a lot of boring rules and routines for months at a time. If you can do that, you win.
To the non vegans
It would mean a lot to me if you made sure that you didn’t consume additional animal products as a result of reading this, or at least restricted to pasture raised beef, milk, or whey protein powder (and avoided most eggs, chicken, fish, and pork). I worry in giving workout advice that non vegans I talk to are going to end up eating a lot more chicken and fish. These animals have extremely bad lives on factory farms, probably suffer in morally relevant ways, and I think their general situation is one of the worst things happening right now.
If you’d like to offset your animal product consumption you can donate to especially effective animal charities. FarmKind has a great offset calculator here to determine how much money you’d need to donate to effective charities to offset the effects of eating animal products. You’ll notice it’s not very much money, because the farmed animal welfare movement doesn’t actually have much funding and there’s a lot of low hanging fruit, so even small donations help a lot. You can have a much bigger positive effect on animal welfare by donating to effective animal charities than almost anything else (including veganism) so I’d suggest setting up a monthly or annual donation.
If you use this link and use the code “weirdturnpro” FarmKind will match your first six donations 100% when you set up a monthly donation (so if you donate $50/month, they'll get $300 in matching over the first 6 months). FarmKind’s fund goes to some of what I and others think are the most effective animal charities, including Sinergia Animal, The Humane League, The Good Food Institute, The Fish Welfare Initiative, and The Shrimp Welfare Project1. Other good animal charity aggregators are Animal Charity Evaluators and the EA Animal Welfare Fund.
Part 1: Exercise & etiquette
Summary
The most important thing is to use good form, mainly to avoid injury but also to get the most muscle growth. Always make sure your form is perfect before going up in weight.
Pick a weight routine that works with your schedule from a trusted expert and stick to it consistently for at least 3 months. The optimal routine for you will mostly depend on how often you can go to the gym. Look into what’s best for the number of days you’re going. Make sure you’re hitting each muscle group at least twice per week. Start modifying and optimizing the routine only once you feel really comfortable with the terminology and lifts.
Consistency matters. Most gym progress is actually about being able to put up with the boring repetitive monotony of a routine for long periods of time. It doesn’t depend on your pain tolerance. Use a fitness tracker to motivate yourself through the monotony.
Do about 150 minutes of moderate cardio each week, or 75 minutes of vigorous cardio, ideally spread over 3 days or more and not all at once. Don’t run (it’s bad for your joints) or bike on the same road as cars (getting hit by a car is bad for your joints). Stick to the elliptical, stair-master, biking on separate paths, stationary bikes, or swimming.
Push yourself on each individual lift to do the most weight and/or reps based on the instructions of your specific routine.
Making progress just requires adding more weight and repetitions to your exercises over time.
Contents
Weight routine
Lingo
The first thing you’ll need is to understand the basic words and phrases used in lifting:
Rep: A single complete performance (repetition) of a lift. Pushing a bar up and down once at the bench press is a “rep.”
Set: A group of reps you do one after another before taking a break. So for a bench press, if you sit down and push a bar up and down 6 times before taking a break, you did 1 set of 6 reps of the bench press.
__ x __ (Ex: 4 x 6): the number of sets and reps you do for each exercise. The first number is the sets and the second is reps. “4x6” next to an exercise means that you do 4 sets of 6 reps each. Specifically, the lift should feel like you really can’t do 7 or 8 reps during a single set. If you feel like you can do 8 or 9 reps on an exercise that only calls for 6, you should increase the weight.
__ x _ - _ (Ex: 3 x 10-15), a “rep range”: Weight routines will recommend an exact number of reps for some exercises (for example, mine says you should do 4 sets of 6 reps on the bench press), but for others they’ll recommend a “rep range.” This means that you should aim for a number of reps that fall inside the range given. As you improve, you should aim to hit the top of the range before moving up in weight. So if a routine says to do a rep range of 8-15 for dumbbell curls, and I can curl 30 lb dumbbells with good form for 10 reps, I should stay at 30 lbs until I hit 15 reps, and only then go up to 35 lbs and see if I can still fall within the range and do 8 reps on 35 lbs.
Volume: The weight you lift multiplied by the total number of reps you do. This gives you an idea of the total amount that you exerted yourself. So if you’re on the bench press and do 4 sets, 6 reps each at 155 lbs, then your total volume is 4 x 6 x 155 lbs = 3720 lbs lifted in total. This is useful because you’ll sometimes need to adjust how many reps and sets you do, and when you do that the weight will also change. For example, if you can bench 135 lbs for 10 reps, you can probably bench 155 lbs for 6 reps. Multiplying sets by reps by pounds gives you a very rough sense of how much you’re exerting yourself overall. It’s not a perfect measure. There are a lot of times where you should be okay with lower volume to lift more weight per rep, but it works as a rough guide to how much you’re lifting overall.
Form: The specific movements and ways you perform the lifts. Good form means lifting the weights correctly so that you achieve the most muscle growth and don’t put yourself at risk of injury. If you use bad form, you won’t activate your muscles correctly and risk injury.
Progressive overload: Literally just “increasing the amount you lift over time” either in the weight you’re lifting or the number of reps in each set.
Split: How you split up the exercises you do across different days. So if you use one day in the gym to focus on your chest and shoulders, one day for your back and arms, and one day for your legs, your “split” is chest/shoulders, back/arms, and legs. The most popular split is “push pull leg” or “PPL” for short, where you spend one day in the gym focusing on push motions for your chest and shoulders, one day on pull motions for your arms and back, and one day on leg exercises. Here’s a video explaining a push pull leg split. A note on “push pull leg” is that it’s actually just a faster way to say “chest & shoulders, back & arms, and legs.”
Compound lift: Uses multiple joints and several muscle groups at once. Good for building overall strength and muscle mass. Example: squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, pull-up.
Accessory lift: Usually targets fewer muscles (sometimes just one), or focuses on weak points. Helps improve specific muscles or movements and fix imbalances. Example: bicep curl, tricep pushdown, leg extension, lateral raise.
1 rep max (1RM): The absolute most you can lift if you just did the exercise one time. Someone who can bench press 155 pounds for 8 repetitions in a row is probably strong enough to be able to bench press 195 pounds once. You can calculate your estimated 1RM on an exercise using this formula:
1RM = (Weight you can lift)*(1 + [Reps you can lift it for/30])
So if I can bench press 155 pounds for 8 reps, I can plug that into the formula: 1RM = (155 lbs) * (1 + (8/30)) ≈ 195 lbs. You can also use online calculators like this one too.
Failure: You “hit failure” when you do enough reps in a row that you try an additional rep and fail to do the exercise. So if you’re bench pressing, you “hit failure” when you fail to push the bar all the way up to put it back in the holders. Here’s a video of someone safely failing on the bench press using safety bars:
When you’re doing exercises like this, there’s always a chance that you’ll hit failure. You need to be sure to always always always either have a second person to spot you and help you if you fail, or use safety bars (like in the video) to catch the bar and prevent it from hurting you.
Spotting: Standing near someone as they do a lift to help them push the bar up if they fail, and to watch to see if they’re using bad form. The person in red is spotting the person in blue on the bench press
The basics
How heavy are the weights?
Almost all barbells (the long metal bar you add weights to either side to for exercises like the bench press and deadlift) weighs 45 pounds. Unless a barbell has a special marking on it, you can assume it’s 45 pounds.
Plates are the weighted disks you add to either end of a barbell.
The heaviest plates are usually 45 lbs. They’re seen as big milestones when you can add them. For example, people get really excited about the idea of doing a 225 pound bench press. That seems like a really arbitrary number. Why 225 pounds? The answer is that 225 is the weight of a barbell + four 45 pound plates (2 on each side). Having two “full” plates on each side looks really cool and is a neat milestone to hit.
When doing lifts with the barbell, you usually make progress by going up only 5 or 10 pounds at a time in total. So if I had 25 pounds on each side of the barbell, and I wanted to try lifting more weight, I’d want to add 2.5 or 5 pound plates to either end in addition to the 25 pounds.
Form
The absolute most important thing in the gym is to use good form, to prevent injury and other issues. An injury in the gym is obviously bad in itself and can prevent you from going back for weeks or even months, and might permanently make you less inclined to lift. Even if you’re thinking purely in terms of growing muscle as fast as you can, risking an injury isn’t worth it, because it increases the odds that you spend months away from the gym losing muscle, all for the sake of extremely small gains (if any) in your strength. I’ve never personally been injured in the gym because I’m careful about form.
Be very careful to research what good form looks like at the gym. For some exercises like the deadlift you need to be especially careful to be getting everything right before going up in weight. It’s probably worth the money to hire a trainer for a day to walk you through the form for each exercise. You can do this at most gyms.
Always either have a spotter or safety bars for when you fail
Even with perfect form, there are going to be times when you fail and are unable to get the bar up to a place where you can end the exercise. For any big exercise that could potentially hurt or crush you if you do it incorrectly, you need to be sure to always have either someone to spot you doing the exercise, or safety bars in place to catch the bar before it hurts you. Make sure to read about all safety precautions you should take for big compound lifts before doing them. Don’t get lazy and avoid these safety precautions, ever!
Muscle groups
These are the main muscle groups people talk about when designing a routine, they’re not too complicated. I’ve also listed the specific muscles in each.
Chest - Pectoralis major, pectoralis minor.
Back - Latissimus dorsi, trapezius, rhomboids, erector spinae, teres major/minor.
Shoulders - Anterior, lateral, posterior deltoids; rotator-cuff muscles (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, subscapularis).
Arms - Biceps brachii, brachialis, triceps brachii, forearm flexors/extensors.
Legs & Hips - Quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus maximus/medius/minimus, hip adductors, tensor fasciae latae.
Calves (usually worked separately from the rest of the legs) - Gastrocnemius, soleus.
Core - Rectus abdominis, internal/external obliques, transverse abdominis, multifidus.
Progress
Making progress in the gym is pretty straightforward. If you lift roughly as much as you can for the given sets and reps for each exercise using perfect form, have a good diet with sufficient protein, and sleep well, then over time you should attempt either higher weight or more reps per set for each exercise you’re doing. As long as you’re increasing one or the other, you’re making progress. It’s important to push yourself on each exercise to exert yourself as much as you can under the constraints of the specific number of sets and reps given do you by a program.
I’ll give an example of what progress could look like given fixed reps and then a rep range:
Fixed reps
Let’s say last time I was in the gym, I did 4 sets of 6 reps each on the bench press at 145 lbs and felt like I could do more. The next time, I do my first set at 155 lbs for 6 reps. I feel like I can’t do that again, so the next set I lift 145 lbs for 6 reps and feel like that’s enough. My progression over the next few weeks at the gym could look like this:
First bench day
Set 1: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Set 2: 6 reps @ 145 lbs
Set 3: 6 reps @ 145 lbs
Set 4: 6 reps @ 145 lbs
Second bench day
Set 1: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Set 2: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Set 3: 6 reps @ 145 lbs
Set 4: 6 reps @ 145 lbs
Third bench day
Set 1: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Set 2: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Set 3: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Set 4: 6 reps @ 155 lbs
Now that I’ve maxed out and done 155 lbs consistently for four sets, I can try going up in weight to 165 the next time.
Rep ranges
If you have an exercise that is listed as 3x10-15, that means you do 3 sets of a rep range of 10-15. My progress on an exercise like this might look like this:
First day
Set 1: 13 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 2: 10 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 3: 10 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 4: 15 reps @ 30 lbs
Second day
Set 1: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 2: 13 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 3: 12 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 4: 10 reps @ 35 lbs
Third day
Set 1: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 2: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 3: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 4: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Now that I’ve maxed out the reps on this weight, I can move up in weight.
Fourth day
Set 1: 10 reps @ 40 lbs
Set 2: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 3: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Set 4: 15 reps @ 35 lbs
Tracking
New lifters often underestimate how important it is to track your lifts very closely. There are two reasons it’s important:
It can be hard to remember exactly what you lifted a few days ago for every single set, both the weight and reps. It’s also very important to start with the last weight and number of reps you lifted as a baseline that you can either repeat or add to. This is the only way progress happens.
New lifters underestimate the strange monotony of a months or years-long gym routine. The time blurs together. You’re doing the exact same thing multiple times a week that involves little thought. The progress you’re making isn’t always physically visible on a given day compared to the previous day, either on your body or in the weight you’re lifting. I’ve found that to motivate myself through the monotony, I basically need to have an extremely rigorous record of exactly how my lifts have been increasing over time. I’m always shocked looking back at past gym progress and how low my lifts where when I start. This and friend company are basically the only things that keep me going during low points of feeling strong gym monotony. It’s an exciting interesting thing to see yourself getting stronger. It can be shocking after a few months in the gym to look back at your tracker, see the original maximum weight you could lift, and go back and experience how light it feels now. Even just looking back at the calendar on your lifting tracker and seeing all the days you went to the gym in a given month can be encouraging. So much of gym progress is basically just massaging your brain into believing you’re the type of person who lifts a lot and who belongs in the gym. Trackers help with this a lot.
Anything you use to track your lifting should involve as little thought as possible. You want to be able to quickly and easily record numbers without having to poke around on the app too much. I just use the free phone app Hevy for my routine. You sometimes need to get creative with the free apps. Hevy only lets me save 3 specific workout groups for different days. My push pull leg routine has 5 separate plans for different days, so I just group them together into single push pull and leg days
Use the weight clamps on the barbell
These are weight clamps.
You put them on the end of the plates on a barbell to keep the plates from sliding around.
This is really really important. Plates can slide around. If you tilt the bar a little bit without the weight clamps, there’s a chance that the plates on one side of the bar could all slide off and slam into the floor halfway through your lift. The bar could flip out of your hands with all the unbalanced weight on the other side. You could get injured or break equipment.
The one exception to when you should use weight clamps is when you’re bench pressing without someone spotting you.
Spotting
It’s essential to spot people for big compound lifts like the bench press to make sure if they fail they don’t get stuck under the bar. Spotting is pretty easy because if they do get stuck, they usually only need about 20 pounds of force to help them lift the bar up. You don’t need to be able to lift the entire bar to spot someone, you just need to be able to provide a little extra upward force so they can do the rest. If you do a bench press and drop the weight by 30 pounds, you’ll notice it feels ridiculously easy. If you pick up a 30 pound dumbbell, it also feels doable no matter your strength level. These two facts are why people at any strength level can spot other people. You just need to provide that additional pull to help make the lift extremely easy and help your friend get the bar off of themselves.
Warm up
To warm up at the start of your hour in the gym, do about 5 minutes of light to moderate cardio. If you’re doing a heavy compound lift, build up to it with lighter weights first to make sure you’re getting your form right. So if you’re going to squat 225 pounds (two 45 pound plates on each side of the bar), it’s helpful to start by squatting 135 pounds a few times (one 45 pound plate on each side of the bar).
General stretching before a workout seems overrated. I’m not sure it actually adds much. If you do stretch, do stretches related to the specific exercises you’re doing that day to make the motion feel more natural and activate your msucle memory for how the form should feel as you perform the exercise.
Rest between sets
For heavy compound lifts, you can give yourself more time to rest. As much as you need to go back and give the lift as much strength as you can. Between accessory lifts you should really only rest for 60-90 seconds.
Choosing a routine
The main thing that determines the routine you should do is how often you’re planning to go to the gym each week
How often should you go to the gym? Basically the more often you go (up to 6 days a week, always include a rest day) the faster your progress will be, but you have to trade this off with your life and time in general. You can see a lot of progress on a 3 day routine. If you want to get serious about lifting, I’d encourage you to aim to go at least 3 days per week, and beyond that decide what works for you.
For optimal progress you should exercise each muscle group at least twice per week.
This means that if you go to the gym 3-4 times per week, you should aim to do exercises that work a specific muscle group every other trip to the gym. You might want a split that looks like this:
Day 1: Upper Body - Chest, back, shoulders, and arms.
Day 2: Lower Body - Legs, hips, calves, and core.
Day 3: Upper Body - Chest, back, shoulders, and arms.
Day 4: Lower Body - Legs, hips, calves, and core.
You could also just do a full body split and do exercises that target every major muscle group every time you go to the gym:
Day 1: Full Body - Chest, back, shoulders, arms, legs, hips, calves, and core.
Day 2: Full Body - Chest, back, shoulders, arms, legs, hips, calves, and core.
Day 3: Full Body - Chest, back, shoulders, arms, legs, hips, calves, and core.
If you’re able to go to the gym 5 or 6 days per week, a push pull leg routine makes more sense:
Day 1: Push - Chest, shoulders
Day 2: Pull - Back, arms
Day 3: Leg - Legs, hips, calves, and core
Day 4: Push - Chest, shoulders
Day 5: Pull - Back, arms
Day 6: Leg - Legs, hips, calves, and core
Notice that this push pull leg split doesn’t make sense if you’re only going to the gym 3 times per week, because it would mean only hitting each muscle group once. Here’s a good video on the best workout splits based on the number of days you’re going to the gym.
Choose a routine from a source you trust, only modify it later
When you’re starting out in the gym, you shouldn’t try to build your own routine from scratch. Find a routine from a reliable source, either a highly regarded online trainer or a trustworthy community. /r/fitness has good resources. Trusted YouTube sources like Jeff Nippard also have good routines. Chatbots are good summarizers for routines. I wouldn’t rely on them for form, but if you punch in how often you want to go to the gym each week and how intensely you want to lift in ChatGPT or Claude, it’s probably going to give you a better routine than most resources right now.
Rest days & fatigue
Rest days are really really really important. Make sure to build them into any routine. It’s dangerous to push yourself too hard and can reduce the amount of muscle you gain. You should always get 1-2 rest days per week.
There are different types of fatigue that can set in from a workout. You can feel immediate tiredness from lifting, but over time you can also develop systematic fatigue where over weeks and months of lifting you begin to get more fatigued in general. Look for signs like irritability, trouble sleeping, or feeling very demotivated or sore during gym time, or hitting walls where you can’t make progress. When this happens, you should consider taking a full week off lifting, or take a deload week where you still lift but significantly reduce your volume to go easy on yourself. This is very very very very important for gym optimization. If you’re powering through fatigue, your muscles won’t grow nearly as fast as when you give them meaningful amounts of time to recover. Muscles don’t grow when you’re at the gym, they grow when your’e recovering from the gym. Burning yourself out to the point that you can’t meaningfully recover is bad for muscle growth. Take breaks
Chatbots are your friends
Designing a gym routine is basically a perfect use for chatbots. They excel in fields where there’s widely known expert opinions on what work that are buried in giant piles of minutia. I’ve been really impressed by their suggestions for friends. If you want to design a routine, it might not hurt to tell a good chatbot like o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude 4 (basically any of the very newest models) that you want to work each muscle group 2 times per week and see maximum optimal gym progress given your time constraints. Make sure to include the number of days you can go to the gym each week and how much time you’ll have to spend there.
My routine
I do a 6 day push pull leg routine. I think this routine only makes sense if you’re actually going 6 days per week.
Here’s my current routine. Special thank you to
for help designing. I’ve added a few notes on form where I think they’re important. I’ve linked videos showing how to perform each exercise. You’ll notice that the big compound lifts (the ones that work a lot of muscles) come first. This is because they’re the most important ones to do for growth. You could 80/20 this routine by just doing the first 2 or 3 exercises from each. The others are just accessories to work individual muscles a little bit more. One thing this means is that you should expect to be REALLY tired about halfway through the routine. The last few exercises don’t exhaust you nearly as much as the first few, so you shouldn’t assume that the rest of the routine is nearly as difficult as the first two exercises.Our name for this very specific routine is our Responsible Scaling Policy.
1: Deadlift Pull
Deadlifts (barbell) 4 x 6
Lat Pulldowns (machine) 3 x 8-12
Rows (machine) 3 x 8-12
Curls (dumbbells) 3 x 8-15
Reverse Curls (EZ bar) 3 x 8-15
Face Pulls (cable) 3 x 15-20
2: Push
Bench Press (barbell) 4 x 6
Overhead Press (barbell) 4 x 6
Lateral Raises (dumbbells) 3 x 10-20
Tricep Pushdowns (cable) 3 x 8-15
Machine Flys (machine) 3 x 12-15
3: Plank Double Leg
Squat (barbell) 4 x 6
Leg Press (machine) 3 x 10-15
Lying Leg Curl (machine) 3 x 12-20
Planks (bodyweight) 3, 90 seconds each
4: Row Pull Day
Rows (barbell) 4 x 6
Lat Pulldowns (machine) 3 x 8-12
Curls (dumbbells) 3 x 8-15
Reverse Curls (EZ bar) 3 x 8-15
Face Pulls (cable) 3 x 15-20
5: Push Day
Bench Press (barbell) 4 x 6
Overhead Press (barbell) 4 x 6
Lateral Raises (dumbbells) 3 x 10-20
Tricep Pushdowns (cable) 3 x 8-15
Machine Flys (machine) 3 x 12-15
6: Cable Single Leg Day
Squat (barbell) 4 x 6
Single Leg Press (machine) 3 x 8-12
Lying Leg Curl (machine) 3 x 12-20
Cable Crunches (cable) 3 x 12-20
A few important notes on form for specific exercises
Deadlifts
Deadlifts have a high risk of injury if you do them incorrectly. Make sure to consult guides before deadlifting and consider paying a trainer at your to walk you through them and comment on your form.
Bench press
The incline and flat bench press has a high risk of shoulder injury if you’re doing it wrong. Make sure to consult videos and guides before doing it. The main thing is to keep your arms at a 30-45 degree angle from your torso. Some people incorrectly assume your arms should be flared out 60 or even 90 degrees. This is wrong and very dangerous. There are a lot of other important parts of bench press form that you should make sure you understand by watching videos and reading articles before attempting it.
Always always always make sure to either have a spotter or safety bars to catch the barbell if you fail at the bench. Failure is pretty common on this exercise. If you’re alone, don’t bench unless you have access to a bench with these safety bars. If you don’t have a bench like this, do dumbbell bench presses instead. It’s easy to stay safe during failure when you’re using dumbbells instead of a barbell.
Squat
Always always always make sure that you’re squatting in a rack with safety bars that can catch the barbell if you fail and fall. The squat can be incredibly dangerous without these.
Leg Press
Never extend your knees all the way out, always leave a little bend.
Face pulls
I would strongly recommend attaching two ropes to the cable instead of one as explained in the linked video.
Cardio
How much to do
You should aim for about 150 minutes of moderate cardio each week, or 75 minutes of vigorous cardio, ideally spread over 3 days or more and not all at once.
Moderate cardio: brisk walking, light cycling, casual swimming, easy jogging, mowing the law. Anything where you’re working, but can still talk in full sentences without gasping
Vigorous cardio: running, fast cycling, swimming laps hard, HIIT, playing singles tennis. Here talking becomes hard. You can only speak a few words before pausing for breath.
What to do
Walking or hiking
Walking everywhere is so good for your cardio health. See if you can find places to walk where you can fit in. Even small things count. The building I work in has an elevator, but I always choose the stairs instead to get a small hit of cardio.
Elliptical
In my opinion this is the best exercise if you can put up with being inside running in place. It’s easy on your joints and otherwise gives you a great workout. If you’re bored you can bring a show or movie to watch. Remember that we live in the future and our magic flat screens are available 24/7 to entertain us now.
Biking on completely separate bike trails, or on a stationary bike
Biking is super easy on your joints and easy to get a good cardio workout out of.
I only ever bike in places I have zero chance of being hit by cars: bike paths completely separate from the road. This says bikes have an injury rate of 1032 per billion miles. That’s very high by the standards of most transit:
The goals of fitness are to make you feel great and healthy and make your body look the way you want it to. Getting slammed into by a car would be a big hit to those (and other) goals. Why take the risk when you can just bike on beautiful side trails or do other cardio instead? Obviously you can also just use a stationary bike in a gym. It’s not nearly as fun, but it does the job.
Stair master
So great for higher intensity cardio workouts. I like having super clear goals in cardio like an exact number of steps to climb. Stair masters are the most entertaining high intensity cardio to me.
Swimming
Maybe the king of cardio if you have easy access to a pool. Good on your joints, works your muscles as well. Great all around.
What not to do
Running
Sorry. A lot of people I know who run seem to have developed some kind of significant joint or other issue (plantar fasciitis is another big recurrent problem). I think the optimal cardio is going to involve zero serious risk of injury and joint problems. Again, the goals of fitness are to make you feel great and healthy and make your body look the way you want it to. Joint problems don’t fit that goal.
I’ve gotten enough feedback from runners that 1) The data on this is actually mixed and there’s good evidence that running’s good for your joints, and 2) Running is so fun and inspires so many people to do cardio that I shouldn’t make a blanket recommendation not to do it. I personally don’t do it, but a lot of people I know do it and love it. Maybe you will too!
Biking where there are cars
Too high of a risk of injury to justify in my opinion. You have so many other options for good cardio exercises!
Gym etiquette
No one at the gym is looking at or judging you, unless you’re being lazy with your form and lifting in dangerous ways
No one I know looks at a new lifter and thinks “weak… they don’t belong here.” That’s crazy. The gym is often an upbeat supportive place where people are excited that you’re also interested in fitness. If you’re feeling out of place at the gym, that’s entirely weird brain chemicals you’re receiving because you (like most people) might have some weird hangups about social status and fitness that will go away after a few weeks of exposure therapy.
The one exception to this rule is if you have bad form. I’ve seen a lot of people use really goofy form to try to lift more than they can. This leaves me shaking my head, and I feel some obligation to go over and say “Hey… you’re gonna hurt yourself man” which breaks me out of my upbeat mindset. Use good form.
I once saw two much younger guys using ridiculously bad bench press form, like the worst I’ve ever seen, and they kept hyping each up while they were doing it. One paused and said “Basically the only way to gain muscle is to eat chicken literally all the time.” I shook my head, muttered “carnists don’t know” and walked over and warned them that they were gonna get hurt with the form they were using. This leads to my next point.
Don’t hesitate to let a stranger know if they’re going to hurt themselves
A simple utilitarian comparison says that the slight embarrassment you might feel at correcting someone in the gym is worth them avoiding a months-long injury. If you feel comfortable and can tell someone’s clearly going to hurt themselves with the form they’re using, let them know.
Grunt
Making noise while you lift has been shown to help you lift more. Some people think lifters only do this for attention. Planet Fitness has elevated this misconception by installing the infamous Lunk Alarm that goes off whenever someone grunts.
Unless you’re, like, screaming, people in the gym won’t be bothered if you grunt while you lift, unless you’re at Planet Fitness.
Re-rack your weights in the correct places
They trained you to be thoughtful about placing plates on the correct notches in preschool.
I lose respect for people who can’t be bothered to put a 30 lb dumbbell in the spot labeled “30 lbs.” When re-racking plates, try to give each number its own rung and put heavier weights closer to the floor if possible.
Don’t slam the weights
This distracts other lifters and is bad for the equipment. It’s also a sign that you’re letting the weights fall when you should be pushing against their motion to bring them down slowly and maximize your muscle activation. Basically any lift should involve you putting effort into making the weights go down slow instead of fast. If you’re letting them go down so fast that the weights slam, you’re missing out on time under tension.
Don’t hit on people
This one hopefully goes without saying. People at the gym want to be left alone. They definitely don’t want to have to do the awkward social dance of rejecting you while they’re trying to do a workout.
I see a few others have pushed back on the running point also. But "Don’t run (it’s bad for your joints)", is not true.
I raced cross country and track throughout high school and college, have logged over 30,000 miles over the past 15 years, etc. So I've got some "joints in the game", and have looked into this extensively. There is no reason to think that even quite large amounts of running have a net negative long-term impact on joints (injuries are possible, but protective and strengthening effects are more common). I think that this myth persists because it is narratively seductive.
Now, what is true is that running has a fairly high incidence of various short-term soft-tissue injuries for people who are starting from a sedentary baseline - plantar fasciitis like you mentioned, shin splints, tendinopathy, etc. In some sense this is a skill issue; you just need to ramp up much slower than it feels like you have to, because the cardiovascular and muscular adaptations for running are faster than various tendon/soft tissue adaptations. If you are already athletic and active, this is less of an issue, but for those of us working modern office jobs and not working out, it very much can be (or other people will be fine).
Now, I also just want to say that running is amazing! My very best experiences in life are kids and family related, but not so far behind are some amazing experiences running. The feelings of power, freedom, fluidity, connection to and mastery of my environment, etc. etc., are really unmatched. I've also achieved my best meditative states/ego dissolution etc. while running, and it's also a great time to think and daydream.
Of course, it can suck when you first start. Absolutely dreadful. And the injury gauntlet to getting started is very real. But the payoffs might be a lot larger than you're expecting. If you do fall in love with running, it will be transformative to your health and may just become your most pleasurable hobby.
I've met many people who have fallen in love with running and gotten into great shape. I haven't met anyone who has fallen in love with the elliptical or regarded it as anything but a chore. I'm genuinely unsure how the utils net out when you account for actually enjoying the exercise and the induced additional exercise from this