All my (vegan) fitness advice - Part 3: Products, mindset, and motivation

Demystify the gym to yourself, you're one of a small percentage of people using it

• Part 1: Exercise and etiquette

• Part 2: Diet, supplements, and optimization

• Part 3: Products, mindset, and motivation

Summary

• Get a gym membership, a fitness tracker, a lot of cheap t-shirts and gym shorts, and maybe a great blender, lifting shoes, and a smart scale to measure body fat %.

• Everyone should experience noob gains at least once in their lives. Progress happens fastest at the beginning. If you work out for 3-6 months, you’ll have a lot of additional muscle you can just maintain and look strong.

• You need to demystify the gym to yourself.

• Lifting has so many crazy mental and physical benefits.

• Let your vanity motivate you.

• Almost no one is actually seriously lifting. You can be one of a very small percentage of the population.

Contents

Product recommendations

• A gym membership

• A fitness tracker

• Lifting shoes

• A lot of cheap t-shirts and gym shorts

• A great blender

• A smart scale to measure body fat %

Mindset & motivation

• Noob gains

• At first you need to think about everything a lot. This can feel overwhelming. Over time you just remember everything and your knowledge compounds

• Developing a sense of yourself as someone who lifts weights

• Demystify the gym to yourself

• The gym starts to feel insanely good after a few weeks

• The crazy mental and physical health effects of lifting and cardio

• There’s a limited amount you can do each day, and this is more than enough

• Gym progress is long periods of mild tedium broken by moments of raw magic

• Let your vanity motivate you

  • Andy’s iron law of compliments

  • Use chatbots for vanity botecs

  • Being very honest

• Almost no one is actually seriously lifting

Product recommendations

A gym membership

Obvious, but worth the money. You should pay for the membership that causes you to go the most. That often means buying one at a decent gym that’s closest to your home or office. I’d recommend finding a gym that has free weights and barbells and not just machines (so most gyms except Planet Fitness).

A fitness tracker

New lifters really really underestimate . I use the free version of Hevy. It just lets you save 3 workouts you can reuse, but I just add some extra exercises to each to make them cover the full 5 workouts I do for my plan (push day is the same both days). I’ve never paid for a workout tracker app, seems like the free options are good enough.

Lifting shoes

This seems silly, but these shoes keep you really stable during exercises you really need to be stable for, like the deadlift and squat.

A lot of cheap t-shirts and gym shorts

It can be demotivating to be out of gym shorts and t-shirts before you go to the gym. Both are pretty cheap. Why not just buy enough cheap comfy shorts and t-shirts that you can complete a six day gym routine without having to do laundry?

A great blender

I bought a Vitamix 5300 Blender almost a decade ago and it’s been one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. It’s still in perfect condition and makes it so easy to make huge protein shakes (and lots of other stuff).

A smart scale to measure body fat %

We live in the future now and they sell scales that can give you realistic estimates of your body fat percentage by sending tiny electrical currents through your body. Sounds fake but it’s real. You can buy them for $20 on Amazon. This is useful because it can tell you the proportion of muscle to fat on your body, which can help you decide when to cut and when to bulk.

Mindset & motivation

This is a bunch of stuff I’d say to new lifters to encourage them to exercise more.

Noob gains

Noob gains are the muscles you gain in your first few months of lifting. After your noob gains phase, it becomes a little harder to gain muscle. The noob gains phase lasts about 6 months.

New lifters often don’t understand just how much of the aesthetic benefits of lifting actually happen in the first few months. A lot of people you see who look fit are actually just hanging out around the end of their noob gains phase and not pushing themselves to go further.

You should feel especially motivated to go to the gym at the start because that’s when you’re gaining muscle the fastest. It’s when it’s the easiest to look really noticeably different after 3 months of work.

I basically think everyone should take 3 months to experiment with a solid gym routine just to see what they could look like with noob gains. If they don’t want to continue with the full program, they can still just exercise once or twice a week to maintain the muscle they gained from their noob gains phase. Even just doing that can make you look pretty fit to the average person. If you have a low or medium percentage body fat, it doesn’t take long to look strong to the average person. If you’re significantly overweight, people might not notice your noob gains muscles until you lose a little weight. That’s okay. You can decide what’s best for you.

At first you need to think about everything a lot. This can feel overwhelming. Over time you just remember everything and your knowledge compounds

At first, fitness can feel like a tidal wave of information and very specific rules. You keep bumping into all the different ways you can get hurt or have something go wrong, and infinite opportunities to tweak and optimize a routine and your diet. This sense of being overwhelmed goes away completely over time. If you let your brain marinate in your routine for a few months, everything becomes second nature. The exercises, your form, your diet, your fitness tracker, all the terminology and lingo, it all just locks into place in your brain.

To avoid this sense of being overwhelmed at the start, I’d recommend:

• Get a fitness tracker that doesn’t require almost any thought from you so you can mindlessly log your lift numbers.

• Choose a pre-made routine from a trusted source and commit to doing it for 3 months without tweaking or optimizing it at all.

• Spend the first few weeks getting your form exactly right through high quality online advice, a knowledgeable friend, or hiring a trainer.

• Choose a simple healthy diet that gets you enough protein and commit to sticking to it without tweaking it at all.

• Buy the supplements you want to start taking and maybe put them in one of those weekly pill trackers.

Reduce the mental load as much as possible. Over time this will all start to feel natural and intuitive to you.

Developing a sense of yourself as someone who lifts weights

I’ve found that the single thing that prevents my friends from lifting weights is that they often feel like they secretly don’t belong in the gym, or they’re not the type of person who lifts weights. This can be a surprisingly powerful barrier. Our narratives of ourselves have strong effects on how we behave.

I think this comes from a few places. The nerd vs jock dichotomy. Maybe an unacknowledged hit to their sense of status being able to lift way less than the people they see around them. Low self esteem in general. I don’t know.

There are a few ways to get over this:

• Literally just commit to going for 3 weeks. The feeling of unnaturalness/silliness drops off fast. You start to notice that no one is noticing you. Everyone’s just in the gym to do their own thing.

• Be aware that a ton of people from different backgrounds lift.

• If you have a nerd vs jock dichotomy in your head, consider that being a nerd about lifting gives you clear advantages in building muscle. You can do a bunch of weird optimized stuff. Feeling like a nerd should make weight lifting feel more accessible to you, not less.

• Go with a friend who enjoys lifting who will make you feel good. This can be very motivating and welcoming.

Once “I’m someone who sometimes lifts weights” is an easy part of your identity, it becomes much easier to go to the gym regularly.

Demystify the gym to yourself

Similar to the last post, weight training sometimes looks from the outside like this incredibly complex rigorous thing that’s only accessible to extremely committed crazy people. It’s actually all just so simple and straightforward. There are a limited number of major muscles in your body, you move things up and down to make them sore, there are different things you do for each, that’s it. Once you go for a few weeks the mystique falls away.

The gym starts to feel insanely good after a few weeks

The first few weeks of a gym routine can be demotivating. The individual exercises can feel unpleasant and painful and scary. You think “how could I possibly motivate myself to be this sore and tired every day for months? I can’t do this over and over again.”

New lifters don’t understand just how much this changes, or how fast. Your body physically adapts really fast, so much that lifts go from painful and unpleasant to feeling great. For me it takes 3 weeks for this to happen. The gym switches from being a painful and unpleasant chore to one of the things I look forward to most in my day.

Here’s o3’s explanation for what happens in the first few months of lifting that causes it to suddenly feel really amazing to lift weights:

Why it hurts at first

1. Untrained muscle fibers tear easily. The first time you lift again, eccentric contractions rip tiny holes in the muscle and its connective tissue. The damage triggers an inflammatory response—prostaglandins, bradykinin, histamine—that sensitizes pain nerves. The result is delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), peaking 24-48 h after the workout.

2. No “repeated-bout” protection yet. A single session can cut DOMS by ≈40-60% the next time you do the same lift, because fibers add sarcomeres, satellite cells reinforce weak spots, and connective tissue stiffens slightly. Before this remodeling, everything hurts.

3. Poor metabolic and cardiovascular conditioning. Low mitochondria and capillary density mean faster lactate/H⁺ buildup, glycogen depletion, and higher heart-rate and blood-pressure spikes, all of which feel awful.

---

Why it feels great after a few months

1. Structural adaptation. Stronger fibers, tougher tendons, and better joint stability mean the same workload no longer causes micro-tears or joint irritation, so soreness plummets.

2. Neural adaptation. Motor units fire in cleaner patterns; antagonist co-contraction drops. You generate more force with less effort, so perceived exertion falls.

3. Metabolic upgrades. More mitochondria, enzymes, and capillaries clear metabolites quickly and keep ATP high. Sets that once burned now feel smooth.

4. Chemical mood boost. Regular training elevates baseline β-endorphin, endocannabinoids, dopamine, serotonin, and BDNF. These blunt pain, lift mood, improve sleep, and increase stress resilience—so the same session starts to feel euphoric rather than punishing.

5. Lower chronic inflammation. Habitual exercise keeps systemic cytokines down, so joints ache less day-to-day.

6. Psychological reinforcement. Visible progress and habit formation activate reward circuits and self-efficacy; you begin to associate the gym with competence and stress relief, not pain.

Bottom line: Day-one pain is mainly tissue damage plus poor conditioning; month-three pleasure is the flip side—reinforced tissue, efficient metabolism, and a brain rewired to reward the effort.

New lifters sometimes assume that people who go to the gym every day are just enduring the first 3 symptoms listed at the top. What’s actually happening is they’ve stopped feeling them, and they’re addicted to the bottom 6 symptoms.

The crazy mental and physical health effects of lifting and cardio

Source

Strength training seems to have a big positive impact on depression, anxiety, self-esteem, sleep, and cognitive function. Strength training also has crazy bone health benefits which are important for managing aging. It reduces all cause mortality.

Cardio significantly reduces all-cause mortality, lowers blood pressure, has a strong antidepressant effect, and helps with cognitive function and sleep.

Weight training and cardio are basically the easiest and most obvious “life hacks” that will make most aspects of your life better. I find that when I’m lifting and doing consistent cardio it’s much much much easier for me to focus and stay upbeat during the day. Being away from it for a while I forget how different it feels. It’s like being sick and forgetting what it’s like to be well. If you haven’t had a truly great fitness routine before, you might be missing out on a lot of great feelings day to day.

I recently convinced a friend to join for my full routine when he said “I just use this one machine for my workout and that’s it, because the machine feels good” and I said “What if instead you could feel good literally all the time you weren’t in the gym?”

There’s a limited amount you can do each day, and this is more than enough

Making gym progress involves a lot of rest. It wouldn’t make sense to spend every waking moment in the gym. So so much of the progress you can make can happen by going 3 times per week and doing heavy compound lifts for 45 minutes at a time. Just doing a good simple routine consistently is so much more than enough to make serious progress. You shouldn’t stress out that you’re not able to spend 3 hours in the gym every day.

Gym progress is long periods of mild tedium broken by moments of raw magic

There will be weeks or even months when nothing feels different and the days blur together. You might not go up in the weight you can lift. Your body might look the same. Your mood might not change at all. Then, out of nowhere, a lift that you’ve never done before suddenly feels doable, and soon even easy. Your mood during the rest of the day suddenly feels lighter and easier. You look different. There’s something crazy and magic about taking stuff like this that feels completely set in stone and changing it with persistence and focus. It’s hard to describe to new lifters. It’s also hard to describe how common it becomes once you start a routine.

Let your vanity motivate you

Andy’s iron law of compliments

If you follow my routine exactly, get enough protein, and get adequate sleep, I have an iron law that within 3 months someone who doesn’t know you’re going to the gym will mention that you look stronger. I pledge to you that this will happen.

Use chatbots for vanity botecs

A botec (back of the envelope calculation) is a fun simple tool to make guesses. If you’re feeling vain and want to know where you are in terms of the average person’s lifting ability, you can ask o3 or other chatbots what percentage of Americans can do your lift.

Being very honest

A friend once suggested I get more into functional fitness, focusing only on strength I’d actually use in my day to day life, like biking and climbing. I responded that physical strength is like 5% of why I want to go to the gym. The rest is general health, good brain chemicals from lifting, and mostly the fact that people are just nicer to me when I have big shoulders. Acknowledging your actual vain motivations is fine.

Almost no one is actually seriously lifting. You can stand out with a little effort

It’s kind of crazy how few people go to the gym, and how fewer people go consistently enough to actually get really strong.

Take the 225 pound bench press. This is seen as a “solid lift” where if you can do it, you’re an “intermediate lifter.” It seems like only 1 in every 125 men in America can do this.

You might occasionally see someone in the gym bench 225 pounds. That will be rare. Becoming very strong relative to most people is surprisingly achievable if you just follow a simple routine and stick to it for a few months. Most people don’t.

Getting to a 225 pound bench press can take years, but if you do it you’ll be beyond the top 1% of physical strength for men in America. Seems neat. Just don’t feel bad that you’re not lifting crazy heavy in the first year of your program. Basically no one ever lifts that much, and you have a real chance of being one of the few who do by just sticking with it.

Most people are wildly inconsistent with their gym routines. If you’re not, you’ll be in a small minority and making faster muscle progress than most people on Earth.