I don’t enjoy masking

Throughout COVID, I was always very careful to mask, and spent time telling friends and colleagues to buy high-quality N95 masks. I was a teacher, and when school got back in I was careful to mask until I and the students had all had a chance to get vaccinated. It was pretty obvious that the trade-offs made masking worth it before we had an effective vaccine.

Masks also made me somewhat depressed. A lot of normal interactions with students and other teachers felt much more stilted and unnatural because we couldn’t see each other’s full face. I was more than happy to take this hit to keep everyone safe, but my classroom felt more lifeless than normal. It was especially dispiriting because students had also lost a lot of normal time together to school shutdowns over the last year. Normal life still felt very far away. I also personally find masks somewhat uncomfortable, especially when I was lecturing in one for hours a day.

Getting the vaccine was pretty transcendent. Since then, I don’t mask in public unless I’m sick, because I see the vaccine as equivalent to wearing an N95 all the time anyway. I do always mask if I’m sick. I also think everyone should invest in a new high-quality reusable mask (maybe this one, as a heads-up friends debate how comfy it is. Find one that works for you!) to have around in case there’s another pandemic (which AI might make more likely). If we all had and wore high-quality masks all the time in March 2020, many many fewer people would have died and life could’ve been a little more normal than it was.

I say all this to get across:

• If you hate masking, I really really get it.

• I think masks were very important during the pandemic.

• I mostly don’t think masking is useful now unless you’re sick. The most important thing is obviously keeping up with COVID booster shots.

• You should really buy a new high-quality mask in case of another pandemic. Seriously, do it!

But I’ve recently decided to start masking every single time I’m in an airport specifically. The argument here is pretty straightforward.

Why you should always mask at airports

Three simple facts about airports together make it seem like it makes a lot of sense to mask there:

• Airports seem like the single most likely place you’ll get sick per unit of time spent there. You come into close contact with a lot of strangers from all over the country and world in an airport, way more than anywhere else in your life. Whether an illness is “going around” your specific area tells you little about what’s in an airport. Even if the airport is made up entirely of people from your area, you’re still coming into close contact with way more strangers than normal.

• If you’re in an airport, it’s likely that you’ve just spent a lot of money to get somewhere important to you, where getting sick for just a few days takes away most of the value. If you get sick in the airport, a lot of that money (potentially thousands of dollars) will be wasted. You have very few opportunities to travel for fun in life, so the opportunity cost alone is often huge. For every additional person you’re traveling with, the opportunity cost saved by masking roughly doubles.

• You only spend 2-3 hours there. To follow this rule, you just have to be in discomfort in a mask for a few hours each year. Your experience in the airport isn’t super important to the quality of your trip, so it’s the best time to be a little uncomfortable. Masking is uncomfortable and I don’t like it, but this is a place where it seems more than worth it.

So almost every time you’re in an airport, you’re taking on a much higher risk of getting sick right at the moment where getting sick has a drastically higher opportunity cost than normal. You can cancel this out with the mild discomfort of a mask for at most 3 hours during the most boring unimportant part of your trip. You can take off the mask a few minutes after the plane itself takes off, because planes actually have some of the safest, well-ventilated air anywhere.

This argument seems pretty simple and straightforward, but whenever I’m in an airport I see almost no one masking. It’s fine if they want to take the risk, but I think we’re all actually risking a lot of value for some mild comfort during the most boring and unimportant part of the trip. Consider masking whenever you fly (at least on the outbound flight), and also buy a mask for future pandemics.

1. You develop an extremist idea.

2. You bump into a lot of people who disagree with the idea.

3. Almost every single person who disagrees with you comes off as wildly misinformed about basic facts about the world, and have pretty horrible background moral intuitions about simple ethical questions. Their disagreements are also very visible entirely rooted in their pre-existing social identity.

4. You conclude that the vast majority of critics of your extremist idea are really wildly misinformed, somewhat cruel or uncaring, and mostly hate your idea for pre-existing social reasons.

5. This updates you to think that your idea is probably more correct.

My claim here is that the only thing wrong here, the thing that really messes people up, is that last step where you update in favor of your idea.

I’m not against extremist ideas on principle. I have my own, the main one being that animal welfare is a much larger urgent catastrophe than most people believe. But I think extremist ideas should come with a few warning labels.

The main danger with believing an extremist idea is that it’s very very easy to be negatively polarized by a ton of bad conversations with normal people about it, until you feel like the whole rest of the world is crazy and asleep. The reason it’s so easy is that most people are in fact “asleep” about most things most of the time, not super thoughtful in how they develop beliefs, and really only have expertise in a few areas often related to their jobs.

Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct. You learn all about the pantheon of Marxist theorists through the 20th Century. You really dig in and know all the arguments and concepts by heart. It coheres with what you see on the ground: poor people pointlessly treated badly by big systems, a lot of band-aid solutions to poverty that leave workers without authentic power and control over their lives. You update more and more in favor of Marxism. Then you start talking to other people about it.

Consider two categories of people:

1. The number of people in the general population who will object to Marxism.

2. The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect, and can speak to your very specific concerns about worker power and class conflict in a way that gets across how modern social theorists and economists give a more compelling and ethically coherent account of the way the world works, and do so patiently and thoroughly.

How many people will you meet who are in both 1 and 2, vs just 1? I think it would probably look something like this:

With no offense meant to any group listed here, the average person in America didn’t complete college (only 37% have a degree). Fewer than half read a book in the last year. Two thirds don’t know that when inflation happens, money loses value. Many people adopt beliefs because it seems like the people they think of as good adopted them too. What percentage of these people can adequately give a convincing account of why liberal democratic capitalism is preferable to Marxism? Most Marxists I meet have a ton of stories of people they’ve met saying things like:

• Some people need to be rich, and others need to be poor. That’s just the way it is.

• Poor people deserve to be poor. If they worked harder they wouldn’t be having these problems.

• Marxism means everyone needs to be equal, but if everyone were equal no one would be…

This leaves them feeling like most people who criticize Marxism are uncaring, dumb, or crazy, and therefore that Marxism is more likely to be true, and people’s other ideas are more likely to be false. I remember one radical friend was pretty shocked to find out that I identified as a liberal capitalist, and brought up “I knew someone who identified as a liberal a while ago. He didn’t even know what mutually assured destruction is.” I paused the conversation to ask my friend if he thought I didn’t know what mutually assured destruction is. He had some trouble disconnecting that other guy from me, or from the concept of liberalism, or his own belief in Marxism.

My core claim here is that most people, most of the time, are going to be terrible critics of your extreme idea. They will say confused, false, or morally awful things to you, no matter what idea you have. This tells you absolutely nothing about the value of your idea, or the value of the ideas they believe in, and it should not cause you to become more confident in your beliefs at all. The average representative of the opposing side is almost always going to be pretty terrible, but that’s because the average person just doesn’t know much about your hyper specific thing, not that the other side is terrible. The average person (including you and me) is outrageously confused about most things. This means if you take on any idea that stands out as weird and draws a lot criticism, most of that criticism will be wildly confused too. Marxists are right that almost all critics of Marxism give terrible arguments, are confused, and seem to have sometimes reprehensible views about class and poverty and capitalism, but that’s only because a lot of people do.

For any topic that requires some level of understanding, the world is mostly a sea of confusion with small islands of sanity and understanding. Gigantic mountains rise on those islands, with vistas higher than most people in the ocean can imagine. Some vistas are way higher than others, but if you only camp out on your own vista, you might not know that thousands of miles away, through the sea of people who don’t know anything at all about your ideology, there may be vistas way way higher. Human understanding in many fields has depth unimaginable to most people outside of it. Losing sight of that, and only looking down from your local vista on the ocean of confused people, and feeling self-satisfied that you know something they don’t, and concluding that this must be the only vista in the world, is one of the most dangerous moves you can make with an extreme idea.

This happened to me when I was 17 and beginning to identify as solidly left-wing. One day a 19 year old who I knew was very conservative was reading the news and said “Oh my God, Obama just signed a deal with Russia to get rid of a lot of our nuclear weapons. This is terrible.” I asked why that was bad, because Russia was also destroying its nuclear weapons as part of the deal. The guy got mad and said very sternly “How are we supposed to fight terrorists?” I decided the conversation wasn’t worth it, and came away thinking “Man conservatives are so stupid, this is more evidence that conservatives are stupid and I’m right to not be a conservative.” This was a terrible way to think. I know now that nuclear weapons policy is incredibly complicated, experts who spend their whole lives studying it disagree with each other, and it’s rare to find members of the general public who know enough to have a serious conversation about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons policy doesn’t really map onto a clear left-right axis anyway. If a thoughtful, knowledgeable conservative had challenged me on my beliefs about nuclear weapons, I would have probably said something equally or even more stupid. One guy I bumped into happening to know nothing about nuclear weapons should have counted as zero evidence for me about nuclear weapons, or left vs right-wing politics. A lot of people are ideological roulette-wheels adopting random beliefs that pop up in the random political tribes they identify with. I had bumped into one of those people. That was it. I had done the bad thing: updating positively on my beliefs when I heard a bad argument against them.

If you’re a vegan like me, you’ll bump into a lot of people who are pointlessly aggressive and have stupid counter-arguments to veganism (Plants have feelings too, killing is a normal part of nature and evolution, we know for a fact that only humans are conscious, etc.). This can make you feel like all anti-vegans must be equally stupid or blind, and the only people who feel even vaguely awake and intelligent are other vegans. The world outside of your community of vegans can look less interesting, and you’ll assume everyone who “really gets it” is a vegan. This is a very dangerous emotional place to end up! There are actually many compelling arguments against veganism, including many made by committed animal welfare activists. But many vegans I meet don’t seem aware that any exist at all.

In these situations, what the believer in the extremist ideology should do is assume “Most people are going to disagree with me about this. I won’t find many good arguments about this with most people. What I should do if I actually want to expose my belief to criticism is try to find the most compelling, thought-out criticism of the belief that I can and work with that. I should also assume that if I were having conversations with people who agree with me about the extreme belief, I’d still see them as ‘asleep’ about a lot of other stuff in life. There are maybe vistas waiting for me beyond my field of vision. I should be careful to know if they exist.

Thinking this way matters more than ever, now that the internet makes it so much easier to learn a lot about big ideologies and ideas very fast.

Be slightly elitist

What I’m saying is that you should ignore a lot of people’s thoughts on your extremist beliefs. How should you decide who to engage with? I think there are just two basic rules that will always clarify who’s worth listening to:

• The person knows basic facts about what you’re disagreeing about, like

  • Topic: Politics

    • Fact to know: The 3 branches of government

  • Topic: Marxism

    • Fact to know: The basic idea of the labor theory of value

  • Topic: Nuclear weapons

    • Fact to know: Nuclear weapons exist in most countries purely to deter other countries from invading/using their own nukes

• The person is not super fired up and doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team

This is an elitist rule in the sense that I don’t think many everyday people you bump into will actually clear these two requirements. I’d guess that these rules would end a lot of conversations on their own and leave you free to only engage with people who will actually give you good, deep criticism. If you can’t find those people in the real world, turn to the internet and find them there.

Instead of associating who’s “awake” with your ideology, you should think of “awakeness” as a quality anyone with a careful interest in figuring out what’s actually true has. Assuming that anyone with reasonable beliefs can be “awake” in this way (but that it takes some effort and emotional patience) can make the world seem open and alive again, and make your ideology seem less like a solitary island home in a sea of insanity and more of an interesting puzzle you’re trying to solve with your critics. You should try to keep your sense of awakeness and your specific ideological beliefs as disconnected from each other as possible. This ability to separate specific beliefs from who someone considers to be awake is itself something that makes me experience that person as “awake.”

The sense that the person you’re speaking to is “awake” is intoxicating. It’s a reason people form communities around their belief systems. Feeling like you’re with someone who’s a live player in the world can give you a deep sense of company, a core human need. Straying from your belief system to get that sense of company elsewhere can be scary and intimidating, especially if you haven’t done it for a while. If you’ve recently only really felt that sense of company from people who agree with you about a lot of big core stuff, it’s time to stray.

But in straying, don’t update on the value of your or others’ beliefs based on your interactions with the average person.

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

• The gym is easy

• 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

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.

The gym is easy

This one sounds fake, but is maybe the most true of any of the points here. Working out for muscle growth involves exerting some effort for a few seconds at a time, followed by much longer periods of rest, for 45 minutes to an hour a few times per week. Once you settle into your routine, it’s easy. The reasons most people don’t lift weights are:

• Too much exhaustion from the rest of their day to even do simple things.

• Not enough time to dedicate 45 minutes to a hobby.

• Background bad psychology around weight lifting (what if everyone’s judging me, etc.).

• Boredom.

If you can get passed these, lifting is easy. The person who’s much larger than you isn’t that way because they have access to some secret extra effort and power that you don’t have, they’ve just been going to the gym consistently for more time. That’s all. If you go consistently, keep a good diet, get enough sleep, and have decent genetics for growing muscle, you’ll get as big as them. The process of going to the gym itself becomes easy and relaxing very quickly. You become confused about why more people don’t do this. The people who play up the gym itself as being this intensely challenging thing are usually cosplaying, or they haven’t bumped into the actually challenging parts of life yet.

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.

Summary

• Get enough sleep and eat healthy.

• Make sure you don’t have any vitamin deficiencies. Maybe take a blood test.

• There are only four real gym supplements: caffeine, protein powder, creatine, and beta alanine.

• If you’re okay with a little bloating and no other downsides, you really should take creatine.

• Make sure to take a B12 and Omega-3 supplement. Too many vegans ignore Omega-3s specifically.

• Getting enough protein is important and is slightly harder on a vegan diet. It’s difficult in general and takes planning. Aim for 0.8-1.1 g of protein per pound of body weight every day (or 0.9-1.3 g per pound per day if you’re eating at a calorie deficit to lose weight). Make sure you get at least one scoop of vegan protein powder every day to get all necessary amino acids. In general, add about ~5% to any protein recommendations you read for omnivores, because plant protein is slightly less bioavailable.

• Eating for the gym can often feel like a chore.

• The only two things that seem to work for losing weight are CICO (calories in, calories out) and semaglutides.

• Don’t risk developing an eating disorder. Be kind to yourself and if you think you’re risking disordered eating, stop what you’re doing and make a plan to avoid it. It’s never worth it.

• Processed food is fine.

• Don’t do steroids.

• Soy doesn’t raise your estrogen levels.

• Optimizing your supplement and gym routine can save full days of your life in the time you get back.

Contents

Diet & supplements

• A note on protein recommendations

• Lingo

• Food

  • Macros, bulking, cutting, recomp

    • How do I determine my maintenance calories?

    • When should I bulk? When should I cut?

    • When should I do body recomposition?

    • Do I have to calorie count everything and use kitchen scales to measure everything I eat? That sounds exhausting

    • For weight loss, CICO (or semaglutides) is the only way

  • Avoid disordered eating at all costs

  • Getting enough protein is hard but really really important

  • Healthy fats and carbs are also really important

  • In finding what to eat, protein per calorie is usually more useful than just total protein

  • High protein foods I eat

  • Isn’t globalization magic?

  • Making your own protein shakes is a game changer

  • Be careful with your gut biome and avoid consuming too much artificial sweetener

  • Processed food is your friend

  • Eating for the gym can often feel like a chore

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

• Supplements

  • There are only four real gym supplements. Basically all other gym supplements are fake.

    • Caffeine

    • Protein powder

    • Creatine

    • Beta alanine

  • What about pre-workout?

  • General dietary supplements

  • Consider a blood test

• Don’t do steroids

A note on sleep

Optimizing is important

Diet and supplements

A note on protein recommendations

Many sources of vegan protein are unfortunately slightly less bioavailable than animal protein. This means that vegans need to eat a little more protein every day to hit their goals. All protein ranges I give as recommendations are specifically for vegans. I say this below too, but vegans need to make sure to get plenty of the amino acid leucine which is often low in their diets and essential for building muscle. You can get this by having a scoop of vegan protein powder every day day.

Lingo

Maintenance calories: The amount of calories you need to eat to maintain your current weight, without gaining or losing weight.

Bulking: When you eat 10–20% above your maintenance calories for a few months. Bulking causes your body gain muscle as fast as it physically can. You end up gaining a little fat as well, which you aim to lose during a cutting period. During a bulk, make sure to eat 0.8–1.1 g of protein per pound of body mass.

Cutting: Eating 10–15% below your maintenance calories for a few months. New lifters can expect to still get stronger during a cut. More advanced lifters will often stall their muscle progress but maintain their muscles during a cut as they lose fat. It’s very important to get much more protein during a cut to maintain muscle, aim for 0.9–1.3 grams per pound of body weight.

Body recomposition: Eating at your maintenance calories but at high protein while you’re doing a weight routine to slowly change the composition of your body to decrease the percentage of fat and increase the percentage of muscle. This works best for new lifters. You don’t gain muscle as fast as a bulk but it can be a nice way of getting more trim while still making some muscle progress. Recomposition gets harder for more advanced lifters who mostly have to just stick to cycles of bulking and cutting. Here’s a good explainer of body recomposition. Aim for 0.9-1.3 g of protein per pound of body weight during recomp.

CICO: “Calories in, calories out.” A weight loss approach where you try to burn more calories each day than you consume.

Macros: Short for macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and fats. Hitting your macros means first locking in your daily protein target, then splitting the remaining calories between carbs (primary training fuel) and fats (hormone support, joint health). A typical lifter macro split looks something like:

• Bulk: 30% protein / 50% carbs / 20% fat

• Cut: 35–40% protein / 40–45% carbs / 20–25% fat

Pre-workout: A blend mixed with water taken 20–40 min before training to boost focus, energy, and power. I think it’s mostly not useful if you’re getting other supplements (explained below).

Gear or juice: Steroids (don’t do them!)

Natural/natty: A lifter who doesn’t use steroids. #StayNatty

Food

Macros, bulking, cutting, recomp, and protein

How do I determine my maintenance calories?

This is hard and imprecise. Here’s one way you can do it:

Track how many calories you eat for 1 week. Compare your weight before and after. You have to eat about 3500 calories to gain one pound, so multiply the weight you gained or lost in pounds by 3500. That tells you how far you are from your maintenance calories. Compare how many calories you ate that week to how far you are from your maintenance calories.

Example: I eat 15750 calories in a week. At the end, I find I’ve lost half a pound. This means that I ate ~0.5 lbs*3500 cal/lb = 1750 calories under my maintanence calories, so my maintanence calories are probably 15750 + 1750 = 17500 calories per week, or 2500 calories per day.

When should I bulk? When should I cut?

You can buy a smart scale for $20 on Amazon that sends tiny electrical signals through your body to give you a rough guess of your body fat percentage. Bulk as long as your body fat percentage is below 18% if you’re a man or 28% if you’re a woman. Cut otherwise. Also cut if you expect to want to show off your muscles in a few months.

Remember, during a bulk make sure to eat 0.8–1.1 g of protein per pound of body mass. During a cut, make sure to eat 0.9-1.3 g of protein per pound of body mass.

When should I do body recomposition?

It’s relatively easy to see results from body recomposition in the first 6 months or so of lifting, so that’s the best time to try. Bulking and cutting are probably optimal for muscle growth, but body recomposition is easier, and you’re in the easiest time to try it, so if it’s more fun and motivating, feel free to just do a recomp! Remember that during a recomp you should eat 0.9-1.3 g of protein per pound of body mass.

Do I have to calorie count everything and use kitchen scales to measure everything I eat? That sounds exhausting

No. I think that for a lot of people it makes more sense to just find groups of foods that have roughly the macros you’re looking for, a high protein per calorie ratio, and just eat until you’re a little more full than usual during a bulk, or a little less full than usual during a cut. Track your weight for a week and see if you’re making the progress that you want, and if not, adjust, and maybe measure things more then. I’ve had a lot of success with bulking and cutting without actually adding up all the specific meals I eat.

Of course, we live in the future now. You can just log everything you eat using chatbots and they can give you estimates of all your macros for the day.

For weight loss, CICO (or semaglutides) is the only way

CICO (calories in, calories out) means just watching your net calorie intake. The only thing that has ever worked for me with weight loss is consuming fewer calories than I burn. I have to basically get used to being just a little (not too!) hungry throughout the day.

Cardio health is really really really important, but cardio isn’t useful for weight loss. It doesn’t actually use up calories and if you’re not watching your diet you’ll be tempted to just eat the calories you burned and balance out your effort.

Of course, we now have semaglutides (Ozempic and other products). These cost a lot, but so does the stress of dieting. If you want to lose a significant amount of weight and think semaglutides would help you, they seem worth experimenting with. You should put a dollar value on the stress and discomfort dieting causes you. If you’d pay to remove that stress and still get the benefits of dieting, compare what you’d pay to the cost of semaglutides. It might or might not turn out to be worth it.

Some people suggest that building muscle is also a good weight loss strategy because muscle burns more calories than fat. Once you gain a lot of muscle, it uses more calories to maintain, so you can eat more without gaining weight. This might be a good way of staying trim, but it takes a very long time to gain that amount of muscle. For shorter term weight loss, CICO is the only way.

Avoid disordered eating at all costs

I’m very lucky with my mental health in general and have never experienced an eating disorder. If you start tracking your calories and macros and mention that to friends, you learn just how many people have struggled with disordered eating. They’ll express understandable concern.

Fitness is above all about being healthy. Eating disorders are not healthy. If you think you’re at risk of developing an eating disorder, drop anything that might be causing that. It’s very easy to make gym progress even if you’re not perfectly optimizing your calories or whatever. While I think optimization is important, this rule only works if optimizing your food and exercise isn’t causing you any distress or health problems. If it is, drop it. Making 5% less progress each week is easily preferable to feeling bad all the time. This should all feel fun and interesting. If it doesn’t, go easy on yourself.

Getting enough protein is hard and really really important

It is easy to underestimate just how much protein you need to make the most progress in the gym. If you’re not eating enough protein, you’re wasting a lot of time in the gym because your body isn’t building muscle nearly as fast as it could, or at all. Muscle growth that could take you just one month could take two or three or four or not happen. Every week that you don’t hit some new threshold you could have hit with more protein intake is basically wasted time.

Vegans often say it’s “easy” to get enough protein on a vegan diet. That’s only really true in the sense that it’s hard to develop a protein deficiency, where your health is seriously impacted by how little protein you eat. That’s true, but not relevant at all for lifters. There’s a huge gulf between how much protein you need to avoid a deficiency (0.35 g per pound of body weight) and how much you need to build significant muscle (0.8-1.1 g per pound of body weight bulking, 0.9-1.3 cutting). It is in fact somewhat harder to get this amount on a vegan diet. You need to be more intentional with your eating and be willing to eat more boring or optimized meals.

Healthy fats and carbs are also really important

Make sure to get plenty of good fats and fiber. Good digestion helps with your protein intake and is good for lots of other health effects. Don’t just max out on protein.

An easy hack to get a ton of fiber is to put Lao Gan Ma chili crisp on steamed broccoli. It makes it taste so visceral and good. A perfect simple meal. You should aim to eat a lot of green vegetables and fruit in general.

In finding what to eat, protein per calorie is usually more useful than just total protein

You have a limited number of calories you can eat in a day to hit your bulking or cutting goals. Foods annoyingly never directly report their protein per calorie ratios, but this ratio is usually really useful in determining what to eat. Speaking of…

High protein foods I eat

I’ve sorted these by protein per calorie, is more useful for understanding where this food fits your goals than just total protein per serving.

Protein powder

• g protein/calorie: 0.20 (varies)

• Favorite brand: Sunwarrior

• Eat at least one scoop a day. Vegan diets are often low in some essential amino acids for building muscle, especially leucine. There’s plenty of these in vegan protein powders, so getting a scoop protein powder each day is essential for vegan muscle building.

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.

Pre-packaged protein shakes

• g protein/calorie: 0.12

• Favorite brand: Owyn

• Good to mindlessly consume between meals.

Impossible Lite Ground Beef

• g protein/calorie: 0.12

• This is so tasty and versatile for how much protein per calorie it has.

Flavored Dry Roasted Edamame

• g protein/calorie: 0.11

• Favorite brand: Seaport Farms

• Get the wasabi flavor (hat tip to James).

High protein/extra firm 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.

Andy’s Ultimate Protein Soy Slop

• g protein/calorie: ~0.11

This is my most recent go-to “I need a lot of protein, fast” meal. It’s a protein shake with a block of extra firm tofu mixed in.

Ingredients

• A block of extra firm tofu block, pressed

• Zero sugar soy milk

• Cacao powder

• A few scoops of flavored vegan protein powder

  • My favorite is Sun Warrior chocolate, mocha, and maple french toast

• Bananas

• Frozen spinach (its flavor is masked by all the other stuff)

• Powdered peanut butter

• Flaxseed meal

• Hemp hearts

All thrown into a powerful blender (I use a Vitamix). You can play with the ingredients until you find proportions that work for you. My guess is that this has roughly 1200 calories, 130g of protein, 80g carbs, 20g fiber, and 50g of fat. To be clear, it’s not ideal to consume this much protein in one meal, since there’s a limit to how much protein your body can

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.

Protein chips

• g protein/calorie: 0.08

• Favorite brand: Pure Protein Popped Crisps

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.

Isn’t globalization magic?

There was a time not too long ago where you couldn’t just hop online and order the absolute highest protein vegan snacks from all around the world, or ask o3 to make you lists of new high protein vegan snacks to try. You need to mutter “I’m living in utopia” at least once a day to stay alert to how many crazy opportunities you have all the time to make your life better.

Making your own protein shakes is a game changer

If you drop money on a good blender and take some time to get a sense for the ingredients you like, having one homemade protein shake each day can be a huge game changer for your protein intake. The smoothie I make is just the protein slop without the extra block of tofu:

• Zero sugar soy milk

• Cacao powder

• A few scoops of flavored vegan protein powder

  • My favorite is Sun Warrior chocolate, mocha, and maple french toast

• Bananas

• Frozen spinach (its flavor is masked by all the other stuff)

• Powdered peanut butter

• Flaxseed meal

• Hemp hearts

Consider also Holden Karnofsky’s power smoothie (replace the animal products though).

Be careful with your gut biome and avoid consuming too much artificial sweetener

A lot of stuff you might consume for the gym has artificial sweeteners. These are okay, but too much can really mess up your gut biome. Developing IBS can be severely impairing and unpleasant, to the point that you might not want to work out at all. Excessive artificial sweeteners are therefore another risk to your gains.

Processed food is your friend

The health harms of processed food are often way overstated. Read this book. You should pay attention to the overall nutrients and macros of the food you’re eating, not whether it’s processed or not. The risks of processed food (like high sodium) are usually just bad nutrients and macros that you can just read on the side of whatever you’re consuming. If it doesn’t have stuff that’s bad for you, go ahead and eat it.

Eating for the gym can often feel like a chore

During a bulking phase when you eat at a calorie surplus, it’s very easy to get sick of food. You have to consume a lot every day and if you’re relying on the same protein powder and other protein powders, it can get very monotonous. Be prepared for this monotony. Break it up if you’d like by getting creative with your macros.

Will too much soy raise my estrogen as a male?

Soy contains phytoestrogens (estrogen-like compounds found in plants) and many 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. In many cases, phytoestrogens can actually block stronger natural estrogens from binding, so they sometimes act as weak anti-estrogens rather than boosting estrogen levels.

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.

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. Vegan advocates 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 doing harm to both the image of veganism and people’s everyday understanding of health.

Supplements

There are only four real gym supplements. Basically all other gym supplements are fake.

Caffeine

For energy. Drink coffee or an energy drink before you go to the gym if you’re going in the morning.

High quality sleep is really important for building muscle. Don’t overdo it with caffeine.

Protein powder

For protein. If you’re vegan protein powder is especially important because it helps you get large amounts of amino acids it might be hard to get enough of elsewhere in your diet.

My favorite vegan protein powder is Sun Warrior1. There is no vegan protein powder that tastes as good as whey. They used to make a vegan real whey protein powder made using bacteria instead of cows. It was so tasty. I could mix it in soy milk and actively want to keep drinking it. They cancelled it because the market for that was basically just me.

Creatine

Causes you to muscle faster given consistent workouts and adequate protein intake.

Creatine is one of the most studied supplements. It’s completely safe and the worst side effect is it can make you feel bloated if you take too much. It’s flavorless and can be mixed into a glass of water. There’s a rumor that creatine causes balding, but from what I can tell that’s from a single study in 2009 with eight football players that hasn’t replicated. There’s another rumor that creatine boosts people’s mental abilities a bit, but from what I can tell this is mostly fake news and doesn’t replicate.

If you’re vegan and not supplementing creatine, you’re at a big disadvantage to omnivores. They get creatine in their diets from animal products, but it doesn’t really show up in plant-based foods, so supplementing is the only way to get those benefits.

Don’t buy fancy creatine that advertises itself as having special extra benefits. You just need cheap creatine monohydrate. If you want to splurge on it you can buy flavored creatine that tastes good when mixed with water (I use this one).

Beta alanine

Reduces muscle soreness during workouts and recovery.

What about pre-workout?

“Pre-workout” is just a mix of caffeine, creatine, beta alanine, and a bunch of fake supplements like branch chain amino acids (there’s not enough of these in the powder to actually make a difference). Pre-workout can be a convenient way of getting the few good supplements, and energy right before the gym. Just be aware that you’re paying a premium for having them in a single flavored powder with a bunch of fake add-ons. I prefer to take the supplements separately instead.

General dietary supplements

B12: The one supplement vegans definitely 100% need to take. You can get it from other stuff (like energy drinks) but I think it’s just so important to be 100% sure I’m getting enough that I take a separate pill. Here are the ways a B12 deficiency makes your life suck, let this be an encouragement to take your pill: Feeling very tired or weak. Experiencing nausea, vomiting or diarrhea. Having a sore mouth or tongue. Having yellowish skin. Numbness or tingling in your hands and feet. Vision problems. Having a hard time remembering things or getting confused easily. Having a difficult time walking or speaking like you usually do. Feeling depressed. Feeling irritable.

Omega-3: Probably the most important supplement that many vegans neglect. It’s pretty hard to get enough omega-3s on a vegan diet, and they’re really important. This is the main dietary deficiency I worry might be harming a lot of vegans.

Everything else will kind of depend on deficiencies in your diet in other places. I have a pretty balanced diet and I’m getting good amounts of stuff like zinc and magnesium and iron.

Consider a blood test

Many health insurers cover yearly blood tests, you might end up paying $10-40. You can get a great idea of any vitamin deficiencies and hormone levels. This can be a good way of catching deficiencies instead of just waiting for the bad effects to pop up.

Don’t do steroids

I think a lot of people underestimate how many people are doing steroids. A botec suggests that 1 in every 12 guys you see in the gym are currently taking steroids.

The problem with steroids is only that they’re bad for your health, it’s not that they’re “cheating.” I support any and all healthy body modifications you want to do. Ozempic is a clear example of something that many people consider “cheating” that I think is 100% fine and should be normalized. The goal of exercise is to get to your preferred level of fitness and body size and shape as fast as possible, no matter what that is. This gives you maximum freedom. It’s not about demonstrating that you’re owed some level of fitness by working hard. The world is just atoms and void, there are no fundamental units of deservingness. I look forward to future tech that will allow us to get everything we want out of the gym faster and better with no downsides. If they invented a pill that let you get all the benefits of the gym without going, I’d throw out this whole guide and replace it with “just take the pill bro.” Steroids aren’t that. They have downsides, in my opinion too many to justify.

Here’s a list of symptoms of the side effects of steroids: High blood pressure, blood clots, heart issues, including heart attack, stroke, liver damage, severe acne and cysts, male-pattern baldness, aggression, mania, delusions, major depressive disorder, decreased sperm production, enlarged breasts (in males), decrease in testicle size, increased risk of testicular cancer. They also probably permanently reduce your intelligence. They seem to make your theory of mind worse too, but maybe that’s just testosterone in general.

Jeff Nippard has a good video overview of the steroid epidemic.

The reason steroids are popular is that they do really work for building muscle. A famous 1996 study showed that people who took steroids without going to the gym actually grew more muscle than people who went to the gym without taking steroids. It produced this famous graph, which I’ve annotated on the right to make what’s happening clear.

The steroid epidemic isn’t being helped by a lot male actors taking them for more roles. You can browse /r/NattyOrNot to see people identifying lifters, actors, and other famous people who are on steroids based on some common telltale signs.

A note on sleep

Good sleep is incredibly important for the gym. A lot of the actual muscle building happens when you’re asleep. If you get bad sleep, your body converts way more of the food you eat to fat rather than muscle. If you’re putting so much time and energy into optimizing your gym routine and diet, but not fixing your sleep, a lot of your effort will be for nothing.

Optimizing is important

You’re going to the gym for the end result, not the experience of being in the gym itself. If you can get to the end result faster using reasonable simple changes, failing to make those changes means you’re effectively wasting time in the gym. If you could have achieved a goal months faster and didn’t, all that extra time you spend getting to it is basically wasted.

Optimizing your routine, even with what seem like relatively small changes, can have crazy compounding effects.

For example, the supplement creatine seems to boost gym performance and muscle gain by about 5-10%. It takes a few seconds a day to consume (you can take it as a pill or just with water) and it has no adverse effects, besides a little bloating. A lot of people get bored or lazy and don’t take it or don’t stay consistent, so they don’t get the full optimized effects.

Let’s say you’re doing to the gym 6 days per week for 45 minutes each session. You do this for 1 year. That’s 234 hours in the gym in one year, or almost 10 full days of your life.

This means that with creatine’s 10% boost, after a year of going to the gym where you spent a cumulative 10 full days of your life lifting weights, you would make as much progress as you would lifting for 11 full days without creatine. Creatine saved you a full day of your life (or a full month and a half of going to the gym consistently almost every day).

By trading a few moments each day to take a pill or tasteless powder, you receive an entire extra 24 hour day of your life each year.

The other big ways you can optimize your gym routine are:

• Use perfect form.

• Get enough protein. It’s hard to overstate how important this is for progress, and how difficult it can sometimes be. You need to aim for 0.8-1.1 g protein while bulking, and 0.9-1.3 g while cutting. If you fail to get this, you’ll make significantly less gym progress that will compound over time.

• Do a good routine designed by someone who’s thought about this a lot. Don’t just do random lifts that feel good.

• Get plenty of good sleep.

• Push yourself close to your limit for each set without sacrificing form.

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.

If you want to go deeper and become an expert on the science of lifting, you should just read a ton of the posts on the blog Stronger by Science.

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 doing almost anything else (including going vegan) 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 basics

  • How heavy are the weights?

  • Form

  • Muscle groups

  • Progress

  • Training for strength vs hypertrophy

  • Tracking

  • Use the weight clamps on the barbell

  • Spotting

  • Warm up

  • Rest between sets

• 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

  • Choose a routine from a source you trust, only modify it later

  • Rest days and deload weeks

  • Accumulated fatigue and deload weeks

  • Chatbots are your friends

• My routine

Cardio

• How much to do

• What to do

• What not to do

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

• Don’t hesitate to let a stranger know if they’re going to hurt themselves

• Grunt

• Re-rack your weights in the correct places

• Don’t slam the weights

• Don’t hit on people

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

  

• Hypertrophy: The increase of the size of your muscle. If you’re training to get bigger muscles, you’re “training for hypertrophy.” I make a joke to new lifters that bigger muscles are the ultimate reward of what you’re trying to do, the “hyper trophy”

• Resistance training: Any type of training you do with weights to put resistance on your muscles. Training for hypertrophy where you use weights to try to maximize your muscle size, and training for strength where you use weights to maximize your strength are both types of resistance training.

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 weight 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. It’s okay to feel like you can do one or two more reps after a set, but if you could have done three or four or five more, you’re probably not going to make nearly as much progress as is possible.

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

Training for strength vs hypertrophy

A common misconception new lifters have is that bigger muscles are synonymous with being stronger. This is not actually the case. While there’s obviously some relationship, and if nothing else changes and you have bigger muscles you can probably lift more, the situation is more complex.

Weight training is often called “resistance training” by lifters. This just means “applying resistance to your muscle movements.” There’s also “strength training” where you train to maximize your strength, “hypertrophy training” where you train to maximize your muscle size, and “enduring training” where you build up your body’s endurance to long periods of exertion. The relationship between them looks like this:

Training to make yourself maximally strong involves sets of high weight and low rep exercises. So if you’re trying to maximize your strength on the bench press, it helps to include at least a few sets of just 3 reps at the very most weight you can do (where you feel like you can’t do a 4th set). If you’re training to maximize your muscle growth, sets of 5-15 reps are usually best (though this depends on the specific muscle you’re trying to grow, you can look up recommended reps for hypertrophy for each muscle). Endurance training involves lots of reps on low weight.

When you’re first starting out, you’re going to see a lot of gains in all three. As you grow more, you’ll see sharper and sharper differences in progress based on the way you train.

The science of why this happens is pretty interesting. The blog Stronger by Science is the best source for deep dives on the specific science of lifting and they have a great article on this.

Tracking

New lifters often underestimate how important it is to track your lifts very closely. There are two reasons it’s important:

1. 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.

2. 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 and deload weeks

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.

Over weeks of an intense weight routine, your body builds up accumulated fatigue. This is a general term that refers to a lot of specific symptoms:

• Microscopic muscle damage

• Hormonal strain

• Nervous system fatigue

• Joint stress

• Mental weariness

Building up too much accumulated fatigue is a common way injuries occur. Your form might get worse, or your joints and muscles might just give out more under heavy loads. You need to have a plan to manage accumulated fatigue to avoid injuries.

Accumulated fatigue might also make you more irritable, or leave you more tired or sore. This can all obviously be really bad for your longterm lifting.

Ultimately there’s no way around accumulated fatigue if you’re lifting hard. The only way to recover from it is to let yourself rest. The best way to do this while maintaining your gains is taking a “deload week” where you lift significantly less weight or do significantly fewer reps. So if you normally benched 225 for 3x5, you could either drop that to 155 for 3x5, or stay at 225 but only do 1x5. Deloading keeps you active enough to avoid losing muscle, stiffness and soreness from inactivity, and demotivation from time spent away from the gym.

New lifters should probably aim to deload every ~8 weeks, or when they feel the symptoms of accumulated fatigue.

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

• Incline Bench Press (barbell) 4 x 6

• 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

• Romanian Deadlifts (barbell) 3 x 8

• 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

• Incline Bench Press (barbell) 4 x 6

• 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

• Romanian Deadlifts (barbell) 3 x 8

• 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.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

-C.S. Lewis

Learning a lot of actually useful information is drastically important. It’s maybe the most important thing you can do with your time to improve your life and become more able to act in the world. It’s easy to let a lot of time slip away without actually learning a lot, even if you’re at an elite school or in a cognitively demanding job. Actual consistent learning requires a lot of vigilance, self-reflection, mental fortitude, useful strategies and tools, and accountability systems.

In my experience, people everywhere are deeply excited about finding anyone who’s actually put a lot of time and thought into learning about something and thinking seriously about it, rather than just learning surface level knowledge and knowing the right “passwords” to say at the right time. I experience some people as having a uniquely warm glow of aliveness to them. A sense of presence. Just being in the room with them makes me feel like I have deep company. These people come from very different parts of my life and have very different backgrounds and beliefs. The thing they have in common is that they’ve put effort into actually learning a lot about the world, but are still radically open to new ideas and haven’t walled themselves off from unfamiliar situations and ways of thinking and living. I think putting a lot of careful effort into authentic learning can give you that same glow and can make your personal life (as well as your career) much better.

I’ve collected some useful ways of learning and thinking about learning. These mostly come from ridiculously knowledgeable friends I’ve tried to imitate, authors I like who have written about learning, and my own experiences with my own learning and as a teacher.

I’ve split the post up into Mindset and Tools. Your mindset about learning matters a lot, because what causes people to get stuck in their learning often has more to do with their internal sense of status rather than a lack of information or useful tools.

Subscribe now

Contents

• Mindset

  • Learning vs. pretending to learn

  • Psychological resilience to feeling stupid and accepting how little you know

  • Accepting that a lot of what you’ve learned might be a sunk cost

  • Some useful ideas to hold on to while you feel stupid in a new subject

• Tools

  • Use spaced repetition

  • Choose what to learn

  • Identify core important facts about the world to build a general worldview around

  • Start with a simple narrative you can attach facts to later

  • Commit to strong beliefs when you’re first learning about a new subject and then adjust them over time, instead of staying uncertain the whole time

  • Choose material that will actually help you learn

  • Build systems to test yourself

  • Take lots of notes

  • Talk to knowledgeable friends

  • Use LLMs

  • Write to learn

  • Wikipedia & similar

  • Rituals that help you focus on learning

• Recommended Resources

Mindset

Learning vs. pretending to learn

Memorizing passwords

Forgive me for what I’m about to type, but I enjoyed this Eliezer post on memorizing passwords vs. actually understanding something.

Children get a lot of early examples of smart people who actually just know passwords. A password is basically just a tool to say “Look! I’ve spent hours learning about a topic and have come away with this useful signal that I’ve learned it. It won’t actually help me operate in the world, but just saying it gives me a sense of status as a smart person. You’re obligated to give me status if I say it!” A lot of schooling involves learning passwords.

This can get grim if you meet someone who’s spent their whole life learning about a topic, but who has mostly been prioritizing passwords that they think will give them status instead of actually trying to understand the world. I have some memories of visiting someone’s home as a kid and seeing their walls lined with books about specific topics. This was exciting because they had clearly spent decades of their lives learning and I wanted to hear what they had to say. However, when I started to ask questions about what they had learned, they seemed much more interested in showing me that they could repeat the lines that signaled they were the type of person who had read a lot about the subject. They would always force the conversation back to opportunities to show what they knew, instead of bringing what they knew into contexts where it was useful.

Trying to hold onto the distinction between actually learning and just memorizing passwords is psychologically difficult, because we’re all driven by social status and want to be seen as smart and competent. Asking yourself “Have I actually learned something? Or have I learned a new party trick or way of showing that I’m an intellectual?” is difficult, but vital for actually understanding the world.

Pretending to learn feels good. Actual learning often feels bad.

A lot of people are just pretending to learn (memorizing passwords) when they think they’re learning.

This is a quote from the first volume of Knausgård’s autobiography where he gives my favorite description of pretending to learn and the good feelings that come with it. It’s long but worth reading:

Espen probably didn’t know this himself, since I always pretended to know most things, but he pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot’s description of Orpheus’s gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up.

Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could then be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a completely new and significant light. Espen took that path, and I followed him, like a brainless puppy, it was true, but I did follow him. I leafed through Adorno, read some pages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I never spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn’t furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings.

Now this wasn’t really anything to beat the drums with in an exam or during a discussion, but that wasn’t what I, the king of approximation, was after. I was after enrichment. And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read but in the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno!

A lot of people do the same thing as Knausgård. They read whole books just for the feeling of being the type of person who reads them, and retain no actual information about the world.

Avoiding playing pretend during your valuable learning time is important and psychologically difficult. A lot of people’s learning is limited by their insecurities and need for their social status to be reinforced. It often feels amazing to pretend to learn things, and unpleasant to actually learn. People are drawn to activities that make them feel high status, and repelled from activities that make them feel low status. Actually learning often involves wrestling with strange new ideas that make you feel stupid and that might not fit neatly into your pre-existing worldview. You might learn about whole systems of human endeavor that have nothing to do with what you’ve valued in your own life, or ways of thinking about science or philosophy or art or poetry that obviously confer a lot of status to people who spend decades thinking about them, but that you have just begun to think about. Openness to what you don’t understand is emotionally challenging, and gets harder as you age. Learning basic economics or calculus for the first time at age 15 feels exciting. Learning either for the first time at 30 makes you feel like you missed important opportunities and that you have limited time left. Most people most of the time avoid situations that are such direct reminders of their own limitations. I’ve come around to thinking that being good at powering through these hits to your ego is a core life skill, and just avoiding hits to your ego is maybe the main way you can get stuck and stagnant in life.

To avoid pretending to learn, you should focus on choosing material that will actually help you learn, setting clear specific goals for what you’re hoping to learn, build systems that test whether you’re actually learning, and try to become more psychologically resilient to feeling stupid and bad in a new subject.

This point was made well in a short simple book called Why Don’t Students Like School? which had a big influence on me as a teacher.

Psychological resilience to feeling stupid and accepting how little you know

A similar unpleasant part of learning is realizing that depth of your understanding of the world is often an illusion. You may imagine that you’ve thought about a topic for years, but when you examine what you actually know you realize that all you have is 5 or 6 simple slogans about the topic you repeat in your head a lot.

I had a reputation for knowing a lot about philosophy in college. I ran my college’s philosophy club for 3 years and did well in my philosophy courses. I put a lot of time and effort into learning about philosophy, and had a puffed up sense of status about it. Years later, I became friends with a former philosophy major who clearly knew a lot more about each area of philosophy than I did. I was excited to talk to him but was disturbed by how quickly what I thought was my deep knowledge of philosophy caved and crumbed, and turned out to be just a few slogans. I remember a conversation about philosophy of language being especially disturbing, where I realized most of my knowledge of it was basically just a few memorized thought experiments without an underlying grasp of how language worked. This was a huge status hit and felt pretty bad. I felt like I had spent a lot of time basically playing mental games with myself tricking myself into thinking I was knowledgeable about this. It feels very childish. The experience was pretty unpleasant, but necessary to help me learn more. The status hit was a necessary obstacle to overcome.

You need to build in lots of opportunities to bump into the limits of your own knowledge. Otherwise, it’s easy to pretend that you understand a subject for years without noticing how little you actually know. A good trick to discover the actual depth of your understanding of a topic is writing to learn (discussed more below). It can be disorienting to sit down to type out a simple essay about something you’ve thought about for years, and then finding you maybe have 4 or 5 sentences to type about it before hitting a wall. Another useful trick is just answering questions about the topic with other people (or LLMs).

Accepting that a lot of what you’ve learned might be a sunk cost

In college I spent a pretty ridiculous amount of time reading about Marxism. I was interested in leftist politics and could tell that a lot of leftist discussions came with the presumption that Marxism was correct. I figured that regardless of whether Marxism was correct, it would be worth understanding to swim in leftist ideological waters. I read most of Marx’s major works and learned the ins and outs of Hegel and Gramsci and Althusser and the rivalries between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin and Mao and Zhou Enlai and Trotsky and Stalin. All of this turned out to be basically useless and a waste of time, for three reasons:

• I became less interested in far-left politics and realized that the core ideas of Marxism are wrong for simple boring reasons.

• The far left in America didn’t end up being nearly as important or influential as I expected it to be in 2011.

• Most leftists themselves didn’t actually seem to care much about the details of Marxism and were kind of sloppy with how they applied the ideas, so knowing a lot about Marxism didn’t help much in conversations with them.

A similar problem happened with education and pedagogy. I spent a year learning about a lot of different pedagogical theories while I was training to be a teacher before realizing that almost none of them replicated and the whole field is completely awash in fake studies and vibes. Another year wasted!

I could have saved a lot of time in both cases just accepting that everything I had learned so far was a waste of time, but I powered through and kept learning about both for too long because I was irrationally hoping that they would turn out to be useful. Learning to accept and move away from sunk costs earlier would have been useful.

Some useful ideas to hold on to while you feel stupid in a new subject

These are some ways I motivate myself to power through the unpleasant feeling of learning new difficult stuff.

Feeling high status in other ways

It makes it easier for me to learn about macroeconomics knowing that I have a strong network of friends who will hang out with me even if I don’t know the deal with macroeconomics. This sounds silly, but we’re social animals and the background feeling of social stability I feel makes it much easier to take status hits in other areas.

Thinking in terms of compound interest about how much more knowledgeable you could be with effort

Day to day, I often feel pretty stupid in trying to learn new topics, but over time the compound interest of learning a lot begins to build up and I notice that I have a much deeper well of knowledge to draw from. I’ve met a lot of people in life who at first seem fundamentally much more capable than me, almost like they’re a different species. Over time and interacting with them I start to notice the rungs of the ladder they used to get to where they are, and it’s usually the result of daily diligent learning and the resulting compound interest of that. Interviews I saw as a teenager with thinkers who looked impossibly smart are funny to come back to years later with more context. A lot of them end up looking simple and even ridiculous. Compound interest reveals new vistas to you. The more you learn about a topic, the easier it is to take in new knowledge about the same topic, so an expert might be able to ingest new knowledge at something like 100x the rate of a novice. Reminding yourself that learning can turn you into a radically better version of yourself through the power of compounding returns can be incredibly motivating.

Little things add up

I listen to audiobooks on my walk to work and in the gym. My walk to work is 10 minutes there and 10 minutes back. 20 extra minutes per day of reading doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of a year that’s an additional 75 hours of reading. At the rate I listen to audiobooks that’s about 3,800 additional pages of reading. The gym is an hour, so over the course of a year that’s an additional 16,000 pages of reading per year. All because I’m making a daily decision to hit play on an audiobook instead of music. There are a lot of small pieces of low hanging fruit that yield ridiculously overpowered results like that you can find in your daily life.

Balancing the facts that a lot of people just pretend to know stuff and their knowledge about a lot is very surface level with the fact that people can and do possess deep important knowledge that it takes a lot of work to access

It is both the case that there is a lot of bullshit and a lot of deep knowledge to be had in the world. It can be demotivating to see how far you can get just bullshitting, but I’ve basically never regretted putting a lot of time into learning about subjects I was pretty sure were useful to understanding the world. For any one field, most people don’t know very much about it at all, but a few do, and the rewards for being in the select few who do are often very high.

Your time to learn is crushingly short, because life is crushingly short. Use it well.

Picking up a book to read doesn’t feel like a huge decision, but unfortunately life is so short that every specific long book project you take on will be a significant chunk of your total lifetime reading. If you read 20 books per year, your entire 20’s will consist of just 200 books. Look at this image of 200 squares. Think of each one as a book you get to read in your youth. How many of these would you fill up with books that don’t matter very much to you?

There are 168 hours per week. Each hour is valuable. Choose how you use them well.

Abyss Staring as a Core Life Skill

I enjoyed this blog post on learning to face unpleasant facts as a pretty important tool for success. Building resilience to unpleasant facts might help you learn more!

Tools

Use spaced repetition

Spaced repetition is the most powerful single tool for learning you can use. There’s a lot of data backing this up. Andy Matuschak has a good summary of spaced repetition here and a good comparison between spaced repetition and just using books to learn here. I use Obsidian for notes and just use its spaced repetition plugin. I should be using it more!

Choose what to learn

Prioritizing what to learn has a ridiculous payoff. It can give you a massive leg up over people who are less disciplined about what they focus on.

A lot of the world exists in power law distribution, where effectiveness is tightly clustered at one end of an axis. Take global health interventions ranked by their cost effectiveness in DALYs per dollar spent:

Choosing what to learn has, I suspect, a similar power law distribution. It’s much much much more useful for acting in the world to have a basic grasp of mainstream economics than to learn the nitty gritty of Dune lore. Being very honest with yourself about what’s going to be worthwhile to learn about can be very difficult, but worth it for seeking out especially useful information.

A lot of things people choose to learn about are fake. I mentioned two examples I fell victim to above (Marxism and a lot of pedagogy theory). Being honest with yourself and adjusting what you learn to what you actually think is useful will go a long way.

Identify core important facts about the world to build a general worldview around

It’s helpful to have a cluster of ideas you mostly don’t have to think to question that can act as a kind of foundation you can lean up against when you’re engaging with new ideas. You should obviously still be open to questioning these, but having a short list of stuff you mostly don’t think to question can help you build a basic narrative to understand the world that you can attach new facts to. My list would include these:

• Evolution is true.

• Energy is conserved.

• Magic isn’t real.

• A lot of human civilization can be understood as a way of creating more and more incentives for more and more complex positive-sum interactions.

Start with a simple narrative you can attach facts to later

A few years ago I decided to try to learn a lot more about China. I started with a pretty simple book called Wealth and Power that gave simple biographical sketches of important people in modern Chinese history. Having major figures in Chinese history in my head as simple characters was actually pretty useful, even though it drastically simplified reality. The actual history is incredibly complicated, but having a basic story I could make more complicated over time made it much easier to learn than diving into more nuanced reading at the start. Don’t be afraid of starting off with an incredibly simplistic narrative of the world. You just need to add complexity to it later.

Commit to strong beliefs when you’re first learning about a new subject and then adjust them over time, instead of staying uncertain the whole time

A surprisingly powerful trick when you’re learning about a new field is to start off by committing to strong beliefs about core facts and adjusting that belief over time based on evidence, instead of going in with an open mind. This is counter-intuitive, but has worked for me in a lot of fields.

I used this trick to learn more about philosophy of mind. There’s a core debate in philosophy of mind about whether qualia exist. I could have read a lot of papers while maintaining total uncertainty about qualia (which is rational, since I don’t have nearly enough of a background to have a strong opinion) but if I did that a lot of the ideas wouldn’t stand out as much. With a strong belief about qualia, I’d bump into facts and say “Wow, this sticks out a lot as challenging my view, it seems pretty important!” Pre-committing to a strong belief and then adjusting it can be surprisingly powerful as a mental trick to retain more information.

Choose material that will actually help you learn

I feel great whenever I listen to a podcast about something I already understand or agree with. It’s nice to hear confident-sounding people say things that I can predict and understand but that I know a lot of people don’t know about. I could spend days doing this, but it’s a clear example of pretending to learn. It’s a game I’m playing with myself to feel smart. I know that if I swapped a podcast with a dry audiobook on a subject I don’t understand well I won’t be having as much fun, but I’m likely to learn a lot more. Making the decision every morning on my walk to work to listen to a drier but more informative audiobook feels meaningless in the moment, but it adds up to an additional 75 hours of reading time over a year. Making a list of types of material that help you actually learn vs. material that just makes you feel smart is useful as a first step to learning more. This will be different for each person. Experiment and try to figure out what works best for you and then prioritize that!

Build systems to test yourself

Spaced repetition, diligent note taking, and writing to learn are the three systems I use that help me test my learning. There are probably lots of other things you can be doing to test yourself. Try to find systems that work for you in examining your own learning.

Take lots of notes

Having a good note taking system is surprisingly powerful on its own for retaining information. I use Obsidian for notes and try to mimic Andy Matchusek’s system of taking evergreen notes. I think of Obsidian as building my own personal Wikipedia of information about the world relevant to me specifically.

Talk to knowledgeable friends

If you have a friend who’s knowledgeable about a topic you’re trying to learn about, just meeting with them and bouncing ideas back and forth can be ridiculously overpowered. 1-on-1 meetings for learning about a field are just incredibly useful. Among other things, an expert in a subject is much better at detecting small subtle mistakes you might be making and directing you toward the most important material and ways of thinking in the field. The social ritual of signifying what’s most important in a field can also be really useful to help you intuit what to prioritize.

Use LLMs

I try to spend at least half an hour a day writing back and forth with an LLM about something I’m trying to learn about. If you haven’t played with Claude or ChatGPT yet you’re missing out on one of the most useful new learning opportunities that exists right now. LLMs are like a much more responsive Wikipedia that can understand even vague questions or uncertainties you have about a topic.

Write to learn

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it. - Paul Graham, in Putting Ideas into Words

That Paul Graham piece and this Holden Karnofsky piece are useful summaries of how and why to write to learn. In the same way that you need a pencil and paper to do math, you arguably also need writing to do complex thinking. I sometimes like to think about my writing as a part of my extended mind. A lot of my thinking has happened outside of my brain. I’ve found that I’m ridiculously more articulate in conversations about topics I’ve taken some time to write about. It feels like magic.

Wikipedia & similar

Wikipedia is underrated as a learning resource. The writing is direct and comprehensive. Setting a goal of reading x number of Wikipedia articles each day on a relevant topic and taking notes might give you more useful knowledge than most other ways of learning about it.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a similar resource. It’s ridiculously underrated for learning about philosophy. Reading articles there can give you a more comprehensive understanding of a philosophy topic than a majority of the individual philosophy books I’ve read.

Rituals that help you focus on learning

I have three tools for reading a lot that have helped me get a lot more learning time in.

• A nice e-reader (I have a Kobo Libra Color) that doesn’t let you browse the internet. It’s very calming to just sit back without the ability to scroll and focus entirely on a book for long periods of time.

• A text-to-speech app for listening to articles and books. I use this to get a lot of additional reading in during the day. text-to-speech apps have become much better in the last few years thanks to AI. Basically anything you want to read can now be uploaded and turned into a decent audiobook. I use Speechify.

• Hanging out with friends who are also reading. I have a few friends I’ll meet to read with at a cafe or library. This hacks my social brain and helps me focus for much longer periods of time.

Finding rituals like this that guide you to learn more can make your learning feel more relaxing and less forced.

Recommended Resources

• Andy Matuschak’s website has a lot of great resources on learning to learn

• The Obsidian subreddit has useful tips on note taking

• I’ve heard good things about this book but haven’t explored it as much

• This is an interesting video on passive vs active learning

I'm embracing my role as a lifestyle influencer for people who base their whole belief system on blogs. A lot of bloggers I read have written general product recommendation posts. It’s time to write mine. This is a list of products that have made my life better and that I often tell other people to buy. I’ll circle back and add to this as I find more stuff I like.

I'm vegan, so a lot of these will be specifically product recs for vegans.

I’ve tried to mostly list relatively cheap stuff. I have a few expensive items but I’ve only selected things that I think actually scale in quality with cost, actually add to my quality of life to the point that they’re worth the money, and aren’t just a signal that you’re wealthy.

Clothes

I dress to signal that I’m a dynamic but replaceable cog in the great transient rootless cosmopolitan urban capitalist machine. Clean minimalism with basic colors that can be paired with any of the other colors in my wardrobe + always white shoes. I won't wear anything flashy except on special occasions. I want my clothes to signal that I'm basically competent and not trying to draw attention to myself; I'm here to listen to your idea for an AI task management app. I want people around me to feel like they’re in a relaxing mall, like this song. Everything I wear is vegan (no leather or wool). If you would also like this look:

• Uniqlo Supima cotton crew neck T-shirts

  • Reliably great, especially for the price.

• A nice OCBD

  • Cheap: JCrew Factory.

  • Mid range: Spier and Mackay.

  • Expensive: Asket.

• L.L.Bean Men's Organic Cotton Waffle Sweater, Rollneck Crew

  • My favorite sweater. A compliment machine. I don't buy wool sweaters because they’re not vegan, and this is imo the best cotton option at a reasonable price.

• Truth Vegan men's belt

  • Many vegan belts are poorly made and start to show signs of wear pretty quickly. This belt has lasted me for 5 years and still looks brand new. It's more expensive but you end up saving a lot of money because you don’t have to replace it.

• Bonobos Chinos

  • The best men's pants I've found. I have a more "athletic build" (kind of chubby) and the athletic fit on these fit me much better than any other chinos I've tried.

• White Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars

  • One of the best looking pairs of vegan shoes.

• Timex Weekender

  • I was once sitting in a circle where someone said that he looked like a fuck-up. We all went around talking about whether each person looked like a fuck-up. When it came to me, people said I definitely didn't look like a fuck-up because I was wearing a watch. Which watch was I wearing? The Timex Weekender. It's a (relatively) very cheap and good looking option for wearing a watch to signal basic competence. I like the look a lot. Make sure to get one that fits the size of your wrist well. I don't like how smart watches look and I'm not interested in having another screen to look at.

• A Harrington jacket

  • It's hard to find minimalist jackets that don't look dated, Harringtons are my favorites. I think bombers are fun but feel like a throwback to the 2010s. Harringtons feel more adult. Unfortunately my favorite brand for Harringtons (the Orvis windbreaker) isn’t being made anymore and I'm not sure where else to find one that's both not too expensive and looks really good.

• The Everlane bomber jacket

  • If you do like the bomber look, the Everlane bomber is imo the best looking in its price range. It has a great weight and feel to it as well. Fun to wear in the fall.

• Lifting shoes

  • If you lift weights, you absolutely want to be sure that your feet do not slip around and are being given enough support while you deadlift or squat. This is one of the goofier gym investments I’ve made that I’m pretty sure has actually paid off a ton.

If you’re a guy trying to be more stylish, it also just helps a ton to have at least a little muscle mass to fill out a shirt. Here is how I get muscles.

Electronics

Computer

Apps

• Alfred

  • Hotkeys will save you.

• Claude

  • I use Claude every day when I’m trying to learn stuff. If you haven’t played around with an LLM much yet, you should definitely at least try. Claude’s the best one as of writing.

• Kiwix

  • Download all of Wikipedia. Good for situations where you're stuck without wifi.

• Obsidian

  • I'm in the cult. I take notes for everything now and it's made me much better at learning. I use it as a flashcard app too with the flashcard plugin. Do not neglect spaced repetition. Explore the Obsidian subreddit for advice on how to use it.

Hardware/desk stuff

I believe it's good to splurge a little on the place you'll spend 8 hours/day.

• The Logitech MX Master 3S mouse

  • The most comfortable mouse in the whole world I love this thing.

• An external monitor (don't know which brands are especially good)

  • I took way too long to try out an external monitor. Makes working much more pleasant. I tried using two monitors for a bit but decided that having just one large monitor worked better for me.

• A big desk pad

  • These are cheap and nice.

• I don't have many thoughts on which keyboard's best, but for ergonomic keyboards my friends swear by this one.

• Laptop stand for travel

  • When I'm traveling I take my mouse and keyboard with me and prop my laptop on a computer stand. Makes it much more comfortable to work a lot from anywhere. I use this one.

• A little orb lamp for my desk

  • I like orbs.

Other Electronics

• Kobo Elipsa 2E (large ereader)

  • It's great to be able to read a lot without having to look at a screen or be distracted by other apps. I used a Kindle for about 7 years but switched to a Kobo because it’s much easier to upload a lot of different types of documents to it. I’ve really loved it. It might be my favorite object that I own. Ereaders have helped me do a lot more focused reading. They’re a huge life improvement for me. The ereader and eink subreddits have opinions on good ereaders. I wanted a really large screen, and the Elipsa 2E is 10.3”. I strongly prefer this to smaller ereaders. It feels luxurious, much easier to get lost in what you’re reading, and you hit fewer formatting issues with specific documents compared to smaller ereaders. I want to be able to focus a lot during my learning time. One of the nicest ways I spend time is taking my ereader out to my deck in the early morning on a weekend with a coffee and getting lost for a few hours.

• Marshall Monitor III headphones

  • These are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as a lot of the headphones in the range they’re competing with. Of the headphones I’ve tried, these are far and away the comfiest, have the longest battery life, and the sound is amazing to me. I’m not really an audiophile and most high quality headphones are passed the point where I can tell whether they’re good. I even prefer the way they look on my head to other headphones. You could drop an extra $150 for the latest Sonys, but in my opinion the Marshall Monitor III is perfect and I don’t expect to want to upgrade for a long time.

• A travel battery

  • Makes travel so much easier.

• Tribit Bluetooth Speaker

  • The best cheap bluetooth speaker I’ve used.

• A TV

  • When I was a kid big TVs were very expensive status symbols. It took me a while to notice that TVs have become incredibly cheap given their size. You can get a 50 inch TV for $210 on Amazon as of this writing. I really like watching movies, and getting to sit back and watch them on a TV as opposed to hunched over my computer feels really luxurious relative to how cheap it is to get one.

• LED bulbs with >90 CRI

  • I knew for a while that when lighting an office, it’s good to have floor lamps at around 2700k of warmth and desk lamps at maybe 4000k, but I was completely neglecting a light bulb’s “Color Rendering Index” or CRI. This measures a light source's ability to accurately reveal object colors compared to natural sunlight (sunlight is 100 on this scale). A lot of LED bulbs have CRI in the 80’s, which is okay, but can make some colors look washed out and unnatural. Incandescent bulbs don’t have this problem. It’s very likely that since you replaced your incandescent bulbs with LEDs, the colors have looked off. For a while I assumed I could dodge this by not buying abrasive high blue light bulbs (5000k or greater) but it turns out there’s a separate important axis where bulbs can misrepresent the true colors of objects in your room if their CRI is too low and make the room look unnatural. You can buy more expensive LEDs that have very high CRIs at places like WaveForm Lighting. I feel like this expense is worth it, because you basically don’t need to replace LEDs, and this affects how everything I’m around looks for a lot of the day.

Kitchen

Items

• Instant Pot

  • Makes life easier.

• Vitamix blender

  • Expensive, but I bought mine in 2017 and I've had zero issues with it after 7 years of use. Makes it easy to make post-workout smoothies among other things.

Food

• Celsius

  • Gang.

• Creatine

  • Buy the cheapest powdered version you can. Makes your muscles big.

• Edamame & Mung Bean Fettuccine from Explore Cuisine

  • Insane amount of protein in pasta that tastes pretty okay.

• Lao Gan Ma chili crisp

  • Makes things taste good.

• MSG

  • Gang.

• Nutritional yeast

  • Gang.

• Soy Curls

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

• Sun Warrior vegan protein powder

  • The least bad tasting of the vegan protein powders I've tried. Especially like their maple french toast flavor.

Other

• Stannous fluoride toothpaste (Example)

  • Toothpaste with stannous fluoride works better than other types of toothpaste but that isn’t super well known. Read more here. An essential part of being a cog in the rootless cosmopolitan capitalist machine is consuming more fluoride.

• A cheap used car (I drive a 2015 Toyota Corolla)

  • I think it makes sense to spend $15,000 on a car. I also think it makes sense to spend $100,000 on a car. A car is either a reliable vehicle to get you to where you need to go, or an intense status symbol. What doesn’t make sense to me is buying in the middle of this range. Buying in the middle doesn’t improve your driving experience much (what I need in a car is bluetooth, a backup cam, a seatbelt, and a reliable motor) and what exactly is the signaling value of a $30,000 car over a $10,000 car? “Hey look at me, I’m not just middle class, I’m UPPER middle class.” Is that really so important for you to get across? If you gave me an extra $20,000 to spend on myself to make myself maximally well-off, I can think of a lot of things I’d spend it on before a pure signal to strangers that I’m kind of sort of well-off.

  • Unfortunately, even living in one of the best transit cities in America, a car made my life drastically easier. Sorry to the urbanists. We’ll have automated cars in like 10 years so owning a car won’t be a common thing longterm anyway.

This is a list of my favorite vegan food and restaurants in the DMV (for those visiting, that’s the DC-Maryland-Virginia area). This isn’t meant to be a list of all the good vegan options in DC, it’s a list of my very favorite places that I’d want friends visiting DC to try.

Contents

• Favorite restaurants for vegans in the DMV

  • Not specifically vegan restaurants

  • Vegan restaurants

• My top 5 favorite bites of vegan food in the DMV

• Anti-recommendations

Favorite restaurants for vegans in the DMV

Not specifically vegan restaurants

Breakfast

DC is lacking in great vegan breakfasts, but a few places are pretty good:

• Busboys and Poets - Underrated spot for a great vegan breakfast. I really like their tofu scrambles.

• Silver Diner - Only a few vegan breakfast options but they’re all very good and you can substitute the eggs in their omelets with Just Egg. You can also get a vegan shake for the full diner experience.

Chinese

• Mama Chang, Peter Chang, and Chang Chang - All restaurants started by Peter Chang, a legendary chef in the DC area whose Wikipedia page includes a section called “Disappearances and movement.” This is my favorite Sichuan food in the area. Mama Chang might be my favorite restaurant period. Tyler Cowen’s most recent interview with Fuchsia Dunlop was hosted at Mama Chang. The tofu skin salad with hot and numbing sauce and the sesame noodles at both are my #3 and #4 favorite bites of food in DC.

Ethiopian

• Nazret Ethiopian Restaurant - My personal favorite Ethiopian restaurant in the region, which is saying something because we have the largest Ethiopian American community and the options are fantastic. Truly amazing food, with really fun drinks too. I got the peanut tea, which was a little like drinking peanut butter before I mixed it well, then it was perfect. The spice Ethiopian tea is also so good. At any Ethiopian restaurant you should make sure to get at least one separate extra order of shiro.

• Chercher Ethiopian Restaurant - There’s consensus from friends that this is the best Ethiopian food in DC proper.

These are also great Ethiopian restaurants and which one to go to really just depends on where you are in the area:

• Tsehay - Adams Morgan

• Enjera - Arlington

• Das - Georgetown

Fine dining

• Elizabeth’s - This is a very expensive multi course meal restaurant. It is the best experience with food that I have had. I’ve only ever done it once. I feel guilty about spending too much money on lavish experiences because of my belief system, but I have to say if you’re looking for a very upscale vegan restaurant in DC this would be my rec. I haven’t done other very upscale dining in DC so there might be other good options.

• Oyster Oyster - Also amazing but very expensive vegan multi course meal restaurant.

Indian

• Indigo - My favorite Indian restaurant in DC.

• VegZ - Great cheap(ish) Indian food. It’s pronounced “Veg-ez” not “Veg-Zee.”

• Himalayan Heritage - Indian and Nepalese food. You need to get the vegetarian mo mo with the fake meat, not the veggie one.

Pizza

• Andy’s Pizza - I feel solidarity with this restaurant. Great vegan pizza.

• Wiseguy Pizza - Also great vegan pizza. Might be better than Andy’s but I gotta ride or die for fellow Andys.

Southeast Asian

• Eden Center - The largest Vietnamese commercial center (and largest Asian mall in general) on the east coast of North America. Lots of amazing restaurants, shops, and a massive grocery store. People come from all over to try it. I haven’t scratched the surface of everything that’s good at Eden Center despite working a few blocks away from it for 6 years. My 2 favorite Eden Center places:

  • Dieu Huong Vegetarian Restaurant - Vegan Vietnamese food. Their spring rolls are my favorite bite of food in DC. Perfect texture and flavor, though this is very polarizing. Some friends agree with me and insist we always visit to get some, others are confused and don’t see how they stand out. There’s this one dish they have right now that mimics a really fatty cut of pork (I think it’s the vermicelli with grilled meat) that I haven’t found anything similar to elsewhere. Make sure to try all the common sauces in the metal containers on the table, they’re all made by the restaurant. Friends always leave here stunned and happy and talking about how great it was. There’s a separate section in the restaurant with vegan meats, which you can either have with rice there or take to go. Be sure to try those too, you need to ask about them separately.

  • Thanh Son Tofu - Everything here is to-go. The main attraction for vegans here is that you can buy a pound of fried tofu for $5. The three fried tofu flavors are lemongrass, mushroom and onion (my favorite), and plain. If you spend more than $30 you get a free sweet soy milk. Buying 6 pounds of tofu to get a free soy milk is a Powerful Vegan Move. They also have lots of flavors of sticky rice and great sesame balls.

• Laos in Town - Great Laotian food.

Other

• Falafel Inc - Extremely cheap compared to the high quality. If you’re looking for a very cheap vegan sandwich you can’t go wrong here.

• Daikaya - Great vegan ramen.

• China Chilcano - More expensive, a José Andrés Peruvian/Asian fusion restaurant. Very good.

• Chaia Tacos - Vegetarian, a lot can be made vegan. Great mushroom tacos.

Vegan restaurants

I don’t actually go to all-vegan restaurants often, because most DC restaurants have a lot of vegan options now, but these stand out and are each worth visiting regardless of whether you’re vegan:

• Shouk - Israeli Street Food. My favorite fast casual place in DC by a mile. Could eat this every day. The shawarma sandwich is my #2 favorite bite of food in DC. Their hummus is my favorite I can buy in the area. I am sad to say that Shouk has closed their DC locations. I miss the mushroom shawarma every day.

• Galaxy Hut - Fantastic vegan junk/bar food like poutine and cheesy tater tots.

• NuVegan Cafe - Vegan soul food. My favorite vegan mac and cheese anywhere and that mixed with other stuff they have is my #5 favorite bite of food in DC. The restaurant isn’t great for people staying and eating inside anymore so plan to get it to go. Closed!

• HipCityVeg - More expensive vegan fast/comfort food, a lot of burgers and chicken sandwiches. Best option for both in DC.

• DC Vegan - Expensive for what it is, but the food can be very satisfying. I’d just go for the main entrées and appetizers and avoid the salads and sandwiches.

My top 5 favorite bites of vegan food in the DMV

These are the bites of food in the area that haunt me the most. All of these are actually pretty affordable and not super upscale. These aren’t really the best dishes, they’re the best individual bites of food. Utilitarians can fight it out in the comments about what the difference is. In order of how much I like them:

1. The spring rolls from Dieu Huong Vegetarian Restaurant

2. The shawarma sandwich from Shouk Shouk has unfortunately closed its DC locations.

3. The tofu skin salad with hot and numbing sauce from Mama Chang and Peter Chang

4. The sesame noodles from Mama Chang and Peter Chang

5. A bunch of stuff from NuVegan all mixed together, make sure to include the mac and cheese Sadly this is also closed. My pantheon crumbles.

Anti-recommendations

I think these restaurants are pretty good, but you have much better options while you’re in DC. They come up a lot in conversations with vegans and I think they’re a little overrated:

• Loving Hut - Pretty good Asian food (and it’s run by a mostly harmless cult who believe that veganism is part of a galactic-scale battle against the forces of evil, and it plays lectures from the cult leader on a big TV in the corner, so it gets some points for that) but it’s not quite as good as a lot of what you can get at Eden Center nearby.

• PLANTA Queen - Pretty expensive, their vegan sushi is just okay.

• Pow Pow - Some friends love this place but it’s too decadent for me and makes me feel a little gross after. I’d prefer a cheap Chinese restaurant like Isshin.

History

America

• What God Hath Wrought

• Battlecry of Freedom

• Freedom From Fear

• Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

• Reconstruction: A Concise History

• Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865

• Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

• Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

• The Robert Caro Books

• Albion’s Seed

China

• The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present

• Maoism: A Global History

• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

• Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Europe

• The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

• The Second World War by Antony Beevor

• The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor

• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Africa

• The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence

General/other

• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

• The Arabs: A History

Animal Welfare

• Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

• Eating Animals

Politics

• The Wizard and the Prophet

• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

• The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

• The End of History and the Last Man

• The Anatomy of Fascism

• Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Tech

• Chip War: The Quest to Dominate the World’s Most Critical Technology

• The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

• The Prize and The Quest by Yergin

Other

• The Knausgaard Books

• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t

Contents:

• Working from a nice office with great people

• Getting Things Done-style checklist and inbox

• Increasing baseline energy levels

• Fixate on actually finishing things

• A nice comfy work station

• Time blocking

• Peer coaching and goal setting

• Being very careful with social media/phone use

• Being around people who value working hard on important things

• Avoiding addictive hobbies

• Mindset stuff

• Other productivity advice posts I've enjoyed

Working from a nice office with great people

I have the option to work remotely or from an office, and choosing the office is the most productivity enhancing thing I do. After experimenting with working from home it became obvious that I'm much more productive and feel better about work when I'm around other people and in a different physical space than home. My brain is very social and feels a push to focus much more on work when I'm around people who are also focused and working. I also feel noticeably different when I've left my house, like the day has started. Working with friends is a great plus.

I used to be a teacher, and when I left teaching working from home felt like an insane privilege that I just needed to work out how to do better. I realized later that my entire concept of "Going into work" didn’t match what an office would be like at all. I associated going into work with getting physically tired throughout the day implementing what you'd worked on on your computer, and only being able to do focused computer work in a cramped teachers lounge for 45 minutes at a time. The only time I was able to do real long focused work on my computer was when I got home, so I learned to think of home as where more serious distraction-free work could happen. I hadn't considered how nice an office could be in comparison. I used to think of work as where you go to give your energy away, but working in a nice office gives me a lot of energy.

Getting Things Done-style checklist and inbox

Getting Things Done is the obvious choice for the one book you should read about improving your productivity. You should read the book cover to cover. The main idea of the book is that nagging thoughts about other stuff you should be doing hold back your productivity while you work, so you should dump literally all your possible tasks into a well-organized but simple system so that you can always focus on the task at hand, and have ways to catch new tasks and ideas quickly as they come to you. I've started to think that a lot of productivity is just allowing yourself to work without getting bothered by what you should be doing instead. You can turn your to-do list into a kind of boss where you just defer to it for most of the week without thinking much about meta work you need to do, and then do a weekly review at the beginning or end of the week to think about bigger picture stuff.

Keep your-to do system simple. Designing and redesigning more complex systems is often just a way to feel productive while actually avoiding work. I use a Notion database for all my tasks and have a shortcut to update it with new tasks on my phone so it's easy to catch new stuff.

This is a summary of the book.

Increasing baseline energy levels

Having higher energy throughout the day makes focus much easier and makes you feel much better as you work. This is what I do to keep my energy levels up:

Good sleep is probably the most important thing for maintaining a high energy baseline.

• Consider not drinking coffee, or at least very little.

  • I hate that this is probably good advice. Coffee seems to work for a little while but then you hit a new normal where you need an x amount of caffeine to get back to base level, and it always has the risk of disrupting your sleep.

• Get up early and get sun in your eyes quickly. Go for a short walk first thing in the morning. Maybe give yourself a little task or goal outside.

• Go to bed at a reasonable time and avoid screen time for at least an hour before bed.

  • Have some books on hand.

  • Consider listening to a light and relaxing audiobook to fall asleep rather than scrolling on your phone.

  • Get creative with the lighting in your room to lower the brightness before bed. Consider using just a desk lamp for an hour before bed.

Make sure you're eating a balanced diet and getting all essential vitamins.

As a vegan I need to be especially careful about this. It might be worth getting a blood test to see if you have any significant deficiencies making you tired. It’s likely that your diet isn’t as great as it could be and you should think about how to make it better. Meal prep more and eat out less.

Get consistent exercise

• Cardio: I'm much less antsy and fidgety when my cardio health's good. If you feel uncomfortable sitting still for a while and suspect you might have bad cardio health, try doing cardio exercises for a few weeks and see if you're able to do focused work for longer after.

• Weightlifting: If I've been consistently weightlifting for a month I feel much much more comfortable in my body. This doesn't have anything to do with a sense of looking physically better. Being comfy just means feeling like I am my body rather than a mind floating above it. This feeling is reinforced by doing a lot of strenuous activity like weight lifting. Sitting doing focused work is much more pleasant when I'm feeling like this.

• Here’s my post on my exercise routine.

I enjoyed this blog post with more advice on improving energy.

Fixate on actually finishing things

notes an observation from Cal Newport here:

The path to achievement lies not in mastering productivity systems, but in cultivating an obsession with finishing what you start. In "The Art of the Finish: How to Go From Busy to Accomplished", Cal Newport's research suggests that many highly accomplished people are actually quite disorganized. What sets them apart instead is their relentless drive to complete projects, whether through scheduled chunks or last-minute pushes. Newport's solution is "completion-centric planning" - a simple system centered on a single page of a few clearly defined projects across life domains, with daily focus on maximum progress toward completion rather than task management. By adopting this approach, followed by deliberate rest periods between project batches, individuals can move beyond mere busyness to genuine accomplishment, challenging the prevalent belief that better organization alone leads to success.

A nice comfy work station

The average American buys a car for around $30,000, which I think is a crazy mistake. In comparison to that, spending $1000-$2000 on the main area you spend most of your time seems pretty reasonable. A big monitor, a nice mouse and keyboard, comfy chair, decent computer, and some decorations to make the space nice are more than enough to make doing work much more comfortable. A height adjustable desk is a huge plus.

A nice workstation can also hack your personal sense of status, like "I'm the type of person to do serious work because I have this nice setup." This is dumb, but we play a lot of games like this with ourselves. It feels good to come into work and sit down at a nice desk setup. If hacking your brain by making the space you spend 8 hours/day in a little nicer makes you more productive, that seems worth it.

Subreddits like /r/workspaces or /r/battlestations are fun places to get ideas for making your workspace nicer.

Time blocking

Scheduling tasks from your to-do list on your calendar and committing to only working on them during that block of time. This helps you notice which tasks are taking a lot longer and shorter than you would expect, and reduces the nagging feeling that you should be working on something else instead. At the start of each week I’ll fill my Google Calendar with longer tasks in the morning and early afternoon (I leave late afternoons free for less focused one-off tasks) and commit to not working on other stuff until those are finished.

Peer coaching and goal setting

Meeting up once a week with a friend or colleague to review how your weekly plan is going and being very honest about what’s working and not working. This makes it harder to lie to yourself about times you’re just being lazy. It can give you some social pressure to cut down on distractions. It’s also useful to get a second opinion on projects that you do think are important, it might be that there’s a lot that you’re missing.

Being very careful with social media/phone use

Don't check social media first thing in the morning.

You are likely checking social media more than you realize. Install a free website blocker like Cold Turkey and keep your phone out of reach for long periods.

The Cal Newport deep work story is basically true. Context switching is actually insanely costly if you consider the compounding effects of focus. I sometimes think of myself as only having a few real context switches available to me before I lose the ability to do deep focused work for the whole day, and phones provide multiple possible significant context switches.

Being around people who value working hard on important things

"You're the average of the 5 people you're closest to" is pretty true. A lot of people will put down hard work as either lame, a zero-sum status game that's evil to play, or a way of being tricked by powerful people into doing free work. If you want to work hard consistently you need to make sure to balance these people with at least one friend who's excited about working hard on important things. I'm extremely lucky to have many strong friend groups from very different backgrounds who are excited about acting in the world and trying to work hard on big problems.

Avoiding addictive hobbies

Maybe the best thing I’ve ever done for my productivity was quitting video games when I was 18. I have a strong tendency toward fixating on/getting addicted to stuff and if I hadn’t quit video games it’s likely that I would’ve sunk a crazy amount of time into them, and they wouldn’t have actually made me happier, a better person, or more productive at work. My hobbies of choice are spending time with friends, reading, movies, music, and exercise. I mostly don’t drink and don’t do any other drugs. Life is incredibly short and sinking time into stuff that isn’t actually making it better is a profound loss.

Mindset stuff

A lot of getting more productive can also involve playing better mental games with yourself. These are some ideas for how to think about work that have been good for me:

Not being afraid of success

I sometimes suspect that a lot of people secretly enjoy their productivity problems because they don't want to complete their tasks and take on new unknown stuff. It's nice to have something to complain about. Problems give us structure, and it can feel intimidating to think about yourself being free to act in new ways and having more expectations on you as a result. Try to ask yourself if you actually kind of enjoy having problems with productivity, and whether that enjoyment may be a big part of what's holding you back.

Being more successful also makes your past failures and wasted time more apparent and makes you think about ways you could have been much better. Not always pleasant!

A way to test if you have this problem is to imagine having a button that would immediately complete all tasks and projects that you have to do, from your email inbox to your huge work tasks, leaving you completely free to do other things. Does pressing this button this feel good or scary? If it’s scary you might be avoiding completing some stuff to maintain the structure the problems provide.

Excitement about your work

It's convenient that I'm doing work that I'm actually excited about, so I feel a lot of intrinsic motivation to do more.

Focus on the depths of what's possible

The compound interest of hard work is real. When you get a little older you really notice who's been working hard on big projects and/or understanding the world for long periods of time. It's important to remember that doubling your effort or focus on something can 100x your output/understanding in that thing if you keep at it. A quote from Richard Hamming I think about a lot:

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done.

-Richard Hamming

Understanding that a lot of people's output is low. It can be motivating to notice that any additional work is a huge value add.

The average knowledge worker's only really productive for about 3 hours a day. If you can get your productivity higher than this you're already beating a lot of people. This article has a lot of interesting info on an average person's productive hours. If you're struggling to solidly focus for a full 8 hours per day consider that few people can, but don't allow yourself to get comfortable if you think you could get more out of yourself. It’s possible to stand out a lot by getting more out of yourself, or finding more ways to fill your time productively.

I’ve come around to thinking that the average person with a computer job might just have very low output and be moderately bad at it, and you noticing your own bad/low output is the first step of waking up to the idea that you could be doing much more, and a lot of people just never take this first step.

Chipperness and gratitude

I've been in a lot of work environments where people get mopey about the system they're working in. There are times when that's legit, but I think that if you're making a good salary (compare your salary to the median American income of $59,384/year, and the median global income $12,235/year), aren't being asked to do anything ridiculous, and aren't being bullied by your superiors, you should try to find ways to make the most of your situation instead of dwelling on what you can’t control about it. Being upbeat about work is a self-reinforcing cycle that gives back a lot of unexpected rewards over time if you can maintain it.

Zero-sum vs positive-sum thinking

I sometimes meet people who have an extremely zero-sum view of the world. There's this idea that when you're working you're either having value stolen from you by a boss or you yourself are moving up some status hierarchy at the expense of someone else. I think this story is pretty straightforwardly wrong and understanding the idea of positive-sum trade-offs can actually noticeably improve your mindset around work and make acting in the world feel better and more exciting.

Getting good at abyss staring

I really liked this blog post about looking at difficult facts. There are times when you need to acknowledge unpleasant facts related to work, like:

• Your nice fancy productivity system isn't working mainly because you're being a big baby and are avoiding work because it's unpleasant.

• You might be in the wrong career or working on the wrong thing.

• Your project might need a big overhaul.

A lot of procrastination might happen as a result of avoiding difficult ideas like this. Setting aside time to review your work/life as a whole might help.

Not overthinking things and accepting that you’re sometimes just being silly

It’s very easy to get drawn into long periods of introspection about productivity. If you’re comfortable gently roasting yourself, it might be helpful to tell yourself that the reason you’re not getting something done isn’t because of some small complex issue with your work setup, it’s because you’re being lazy/a big baby. If I’m taking a while on sending an email, it’s often much more helpful for me to step back and say “This is a dumb problem. You’re an adult. Just write the email.” than it is to try to unpack how I’m feeling.

Other productivity advice posts I've enjoyed

• Alexey Guzey has a brutally honest post about productivity here that's really fun to read

  • I mostly don't read Guzey and think he's wildly overconfident and wrong about most stuff but enjoyed this a lot.

• Devon Zuegel

• Nabeel

• Tyler Cowen here and here

  • “The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.”

Top 10 favorites

These are my favorites because they’re insanely interesting to listen to, not necessarily because they’re the absolute most informative or useful. Sorted newest to oldest.

• #166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere

• #152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

• #145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

• #115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications

• #102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

• #100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome

• #86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us

• #83 - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons

• #45 - Tyler Cowen's case for maximising econ growth, stabilising civilization & thinking long-term

• #35 - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission

All other standouts

• #191 - Carl Shulman: Part 1 and Part 2

• #187 - Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a “space bastard”

• #180 - Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

• #175 - Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

• #158 - Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they're no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk

• #156 - Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models

• #142 - John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction

• #155 - Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after

• #122 - Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising

• #116 - Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all

• #112 - Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

• #111 - Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms

• #110 - Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass

• #109 - Holden Karnofsky on the most important century

• #105 - Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

• #103 - Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

• #90 - Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

• #81 - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

• #69 - Jeff Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both

• #67 - David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

• #62 - Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brain

• #61 - Helen Toner on emerging technology, national security, and China

• #60 - Phil Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it better

• #53 - Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism

• #46 - Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia

• #44 - Paul Christiano on how we'll hand the future off to AI, & solving the alignment problem

• #42 - Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity

• #21 - Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil’s plan to do the same

• #16 - Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals

• #15 - Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise

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 it. 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.

• 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