June 16, 2020
The coronavirus has all of us spending more time at home than usual. So I thought this would be a perfect moment to get tips from Steve Kamb, the founder of Nerdfitness.com, which has helped fitness beginners all over the world start on their quests toward better health from the comfortable confines of their homes.
Since he started the site in 2009, Steve has been passionate about showing that nerdiness and fitness need not be in zero-sum competition, and can instead be synergistic. The articles and videos on Nerdfitness.com are as delightful for their Ghostbusters references and Star Wars-themed workouts as for their pointers on the perfect bodyweight squat (which is easier than you think).
Steve is an absolutely lovely guy, and shares some great (and practical) thoughts for homebound fitness in the Q&A below. My personal favorite: “exercise snacking.”
David Epstein: Can you first share a bit about the impetus for starting Nerd Fitness?
Steve Kamb: I was a very active kid growing up, playing sports and building tree forts and having neighborhood-wide water balloon fights, but I also spent my nights and weekends devouring science fiction, like the Redwall series and Lord of the Rings, and playing Super Nintendo.
Despite working out five days a week through all of high school and college, I never shook my identity as a “scrawny, weak kid.” After college I finally discovered how important nutrition is with regards to building strength and improving one’s health. Thanks to some small adjustments — like learning not to hate, and even to like vegetables — I made more progress in six weeks than I had in the previous six years. So I started absorbing everything I could about strength training and nutrition.
It was right around this time I grew disillusioned with my entry level sales job (which I was terrible at), and I stumbled across Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek. I read the book in two days, and fell in love with the idea of creating a tiny business by combining two seemingly unconnected ideas and owning it.
Those two ideas hit me just a day later: nerd culture and fitness novices. So I googled “Nerd” and “fitness,” and not a single thing popped up. I quickly bought the domain, got certified as a trainer, and eventually started writing simple blog posts that encouraged nerds not to feel embarrassed about asking beginner questions or learning the basics about exercise and nutrition.
DE: One reason I wanted to talk to you now is because people are spending a lot of time inside, without exercise equipment, and they’ve lost the normal structure of their day. Can you share a few basic tips regarding the obstacles people face when they’re thinking about starting to do home workouts?
SK: I’ve been writing about how to get in shape at home since day one, as many beginners prefer to start their fitness journey in the comfort of their homes rather than feeling self-conscious in a gym. Now that we’re in the middle of the actual apocalypse, everybody has to quickly adapt to, “How the heck do I get in shape without equipment?!”
Here are the three most common challenges people face in the “home gym” setting:
- You’re on your own, with no trainer, class, or machines with helpful diagrams.
- Your “gym” is also your living room, basement or backyard; your kids might be bugging you, and you might get distracted by the TV or your phone.
- It’s harder to see progress when you aren’t picking up heavier dumbbells, and along with that it’s harder to have accountability.
And here are tips I’ve seen work over the past decade:
- Count any exercise as exercise. Bodyweight training or gymnastics, roughhousing with your children, jumping rope, or even just moving around doing household stuff, known as “non-exercise activity thermogenesis,” or NEAT.
- Establishing a routine is crucial for behavioral change. Specifically, putting workouts in your calendar, having an accountability partner to text or check in with, changing into workout clothes to signal to your brain (and your family) that this is exercise time. If possible, having a part of your house with any equipment you use already laid out and in plain view is huge. Do whatever you can to minimize the steps between you and your new routine.
- If you’re finding your homelife way messier right now, consider “exercise snacking.” For example, what if you had to do a pull-up (or hang) every time you walked under your door frame pull-up bar in the living room? Or you have to do a quick circuit of push-ups and squats in between every 22-minute episode of “Schitt’s Creek” on Netflix. I find doing small movements throughout the day keeps you aligned with the goal of thriving during the apocalypse.
DE: How important do your community members (the “Nerd Fitness Rebellion”) find it is to have a specific goal? Right now, we don’t have that 5K or soccer league to train for. But I noticed that one of your course offerings is “How to do a Handstand: Get to Your First Handstand in 30 Days,” so I was wondering if you find specific goals to be very important.
SK: The majority of us begin this fitness journey because we “need to lose 30 pounds” or “look better in a bathing suit.”
This is why we say: “We don’t care where you came from, only where you’re going.” Whatever brought you to Nerd Fitness, great!
We use each person’s goal as a north star to help build a daily routine. And over time, the mental shift from aesthetic based goals (“Are we there yet?”) to performance based goals (“What am I capable of now?”) is where the magic happens.
So if you want to run a marathon, let’s focus on building the daily habit of running and fueling your body for long runs. If you want to do a handstand, here’s a plan you can follow each day and how to eat to build muscle.
I’d say in 95% of our success stories, the most common thread is: “I started this journey to lose weight, and I don’t know how the heck it happened, but now I actually look forward to exercising.”
DE: What has been your most popular post or program ever, and has a particular post or program seen a surge of interest during social distancing?
SK: The most consistently popular article is my Beginner Bodyweight Workout. I filmed the workout back in 2009 when I started the site. The best part? My shorts are on backwards in the video, [fact check: true ✓] which I didn’t notice until 5 years later. Since the pandemic began, the most popular video, unsurprisingly, has been “7 At Home Workouts.”
DE: Another new obstacle for a lot of people is that not only do they have to workout at home, but they have kids around at the same time. Just, how? Drop some knowledge on me…
SK: Parents, congratulations! You are playing Apocalypse Simulator 2020 on Hard Mode. Very early on when I started Nerd Fitness, I recognized that I was just one guy on a fitness journey, and that other people had other challenges. So I’ve always tried to include expertise from people in different life situations so that everybody reading the site had somebody they could relate to. Now we have 15 full-time coaches at Nerd Fitness who are available to train online clients, and many of the coaches are either married with kids at home right now, or they’re single parents. It’s why we put together this resource, “How to exercise with kids at home.” Not only how to get them involved, but even how to have them serve as giggling and wiggling weights too!
DE: You’ve inspired a lot of people who didn’t have an exercise history to get started. So can you leave us with a few inspiring words?
SK: We’re all just figuring this stuff out as we go, right? There’s no playbook on how you should feel or react when quarantined during a global pandemic.
So don’t compare your health baseline to what you were like pre-pandemic. That is gone. Done. Your new baseline is today. Tomorrow, see if you can find a way to sneak an extra vegetable onto your plate. Knock out a set of 10 push-ups right now on the side of your desk. Go up and down your stairs one extra time. “Better than yesterday” starts to get pretty meaningful when you can do it consistently.
DE: Steve, thanks so much for taking time for me, and I know if people want to learn more about your journey from construction-equipment salesman to writer/personal trainer/extremely fit nerd, they can read about it in Level Up Your Life.
The book is hilarious. It starts out with a description of growing up in a town called Sandwich, before moving on to how Steve’s boss at his sales job put a GPS device on his vehicle and could see when Steve started late. Steve nonetheless managed to spend a lot of time on the road reading Harry Potter. And then he had a panic attack and decided it was time for a change.
LIGHTNING ROUND
- The people I wrote about in chapter 10 of Range have been making “eerily accurate predictions about COVID-19.” Or, as one scientist put it: “How does he keep doing this???”
- “What Protests Can (and Can’t) Do.” This FiveThirtyEight story takes a look at what political science can tell us about protests, and includes an interesting graphic of Google search terms that are on the rise.
- ”Are Americans As Stupid As We Seem on Twitter?” (h/t @nuclearbdgr)
- Even the news version of a new chicken-or-egg scientific publication is pretty technical, but here’s the upshot: both DNA and RNA probably coexisted before life on Earth.
- Travel watch: the number of passengers going through TSA has doubled in the past month, but is still down 80% from a year ago.
Thanks so much for reading. Until next time….
David
p.s. I’m doing a short virtual talk at 12pm EST today, discussing some of what I learned while researching Range about developing individuals and organizations to be adaptable in times of rapid change. You can register (it’s free) and submit a question here.
p.p.s. If you have a friend who might enjoy this newsletter, please consider sharing! They can subscribe here.
p.p.p.s. The last Range Report, about a man who died in police custody in Minneapolis 10 years ago, was the most read yet. You can find previous Range Reports here.
