How to Get Fit in 2026
The fitness advice I actually follow
The calendar’s about to flip, and most of us (79% of resolution-makers) will promise ourselves—again—that this is the year we finally get in shape. For the past seven years, I’ve watched this cycle through Squadra, a fitness program I started for busy professionals.
What follows are the key principles I’ve learned—some from running the program, others from my own practice. Standard disclaimer: this is what works for me, consult your physician, etc. Also, fair warning: this is long and more tactical, less philosophical than my usual fare. If you’re here for stories about Italian garlic hunting or meditations on entropy, normal programming resumes next week.
The Overwhelm
The avalanche of wellness content is exhausting. My friend Bradley Tusk captured it perfectly in his essay “My Wellness Routine is Killing Me”:
I don’t know how much more optimized my life could possibly be. And yet, I still feel like the requirements of being healthy are just too much.
The most extreme example of this trend is Brian Johnson, featured in Netflix’s Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. The man swallows 100+ pills daily, gets plasma transfusions from his son, and—I’m not making this up—compares erection quality with said son.
You don’t have that kind of time. Even if you did, that’s not how you’d want to spend it.
So before diving into my lengthy specifics, let me start with some principles you can apply even if you ignore the rest.
Core Principles
The best workout is the one you’ll actually do. We could debate Barry’s vs. Solidcore vs. CrossFit forever. But if you find movement you enjoy (ideally with some resistance training), start there. Yes, CrossFit has issues—some boxes push newbies too hard, too fast. But they build communities that get people excited to show up. That matters more than perfect programming.
Find age-appropriate sports. Ideally those that won’t destroy your body. I loved basketball but kept getting injured, so three years ago I switched to tennis—it delivers comparable cardio with a fraction of the injury risk, and you can play it into your 80s. Studies show it literally extends your life (one widely-circulated study showing it adds, on average, 9.7 years to your life).
Transformation and maintenance are different games. Losing 30 pounds requires different tactics than staying fit or making gradual progress. I’ve done all three. The aggressive cuts deserve their own post — and require a level of discomfort, obsession, and dedication that is hard to convey over Substack without prompting a wave of unsubscribes.
Intensity beats duration. You don’t need two-hour gym sessions. My typical strength workout is 30-45 minutes of focused work. Push hard, get out.
Create deadlines with vision. Don’t just say “lose 10 pounds by March.” Picture yourself on that Miami beach in March, feeling exactly how you want to feel. I compete in powerlifting every December—not because I care about trophies, but because picturing myself on that platform drives me to work harder in the gym.
Stop researching, start moving. There’s an unlimited amount of information on the internet about how you can optimize your approach. Many of us tell ourselves that merely watching these Youtube videos and listening to podcasts is somehow progress. It risks turning into a tool for procrastination. Instead, settle on a simple approach quickly, get moving and, refine it as you go.
I’ve come to think about health as six interconnected systems: strength, cardio, metabolic health, nutrition, mental resilience, and emotional well-being. We’ll tackle the first four today, since the mental and emotional components are rich enough to deserve their own exploration later.
The Simplicity of Strength
Dr. Peter Attia has a line that haunts me: nobody in their seventies wishes they had less muscle. He’s talking about sarcopenia—the slow-motion catastrophe of age-related muscle loss that starts in your thirties and accelerates every decade until you can’t open a pickle jar or get out of a chair without help. The average person loses 3-8% of their muscle mass per decade after 30, and the rate doubles after 60.
The antidote: eat substantial protein and lift heavy things repeatedly. This is why Squadra revolves around what we call the Squadra 10—ten movements that tell us everything we need to know about someone’s physical capacity. Eight are strength-focused: back squat, hex bar deadlift, bench press, push-up, pull-up, plank, farmer’s carry, and dead hang. The other two test your engine: the 400-meter run and 1000-meter row.
Don’t let the simplicity fool you. These movements hit every muscle group that matters. Each movement gets tested in specific, measurable ways: how many push-ups can you knock out in two minutes? How many consecutive pull-ups before gravity wins? What’s your one-rep max on the fundamental lifts? These aren’t arbitrary metrics; they’re diagnostic tools that reveal exactly where you stand and what needs work.
The beauty of this system is that it strips away the overwhelming complexity of modern fitness and returns us to basics. So much of what you see on Instagram is performance art—trainers doing circus tricks with bosu balls and battle ropes, not because they work better but because it looks innovative enough to justify their hourly rate. Meanwhile, the movements that actually build strength and extend your life are the same ones your grandfather might have done in his garage: pick heavy things up, put them down, repeat.
Wanna Be Strong or Look Strong?
There’s an endless rabbit hole in the lifting world about performance versus aesthetics. Are you training to move heavy weight and live longer, or to look good at the beach? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that you don’t have to choose—but understanding the distinction helps you train smarter.
Strength training is about neural efficiency and power. You’re teaching your nervous system to recruit more muscle fibers simultaneously, improving coordination through compound movements, and progressively adding weight over time. This is why powerlifters can look relatively normal yet lift extraordinary amounts—they’ve optimized for performance, not size. The longevity research suggests this matters more than pure muscle mass: being able to generate force quickly (think catching yourself from a fall) correlates more strongly with healthy aging than bicep circumference.
Hypertrophy training, meanwhile, is the pursuit of muscle size. It uses moderate weights and higher repetitions to create metabolic stress and muscle damage—the stimuli that trigger growth. This isn’t just vanity though; bigger muscles improve glucose regulation, boost metabolic rate, and enhance fat metabolism. The bodybuilder might not out-lift the powerlifter, but they’re carrying around metabolically active tissue that functions like armor against aging.
The practical application is straightforward. For pure strength, lift heavy for low repetitions (3-5 reps per set). For muscle growth, use moderate weight for higher repetitions (12-20 reps), potentially adding techniques like pause reps or slow eccentrics to increase time under tension.
At Squadra, we track both dimensions for the main powerlifts (squat, deadlift, bench):
One-rep max: The maximum weight you can move once—pure strength
Rep test: How many times you can lift a moderate weight in two minutes—muscular endurance that drives hypertrophy
Members typically start the rep test with weight they can manage 6-8 times, and within six months they’re hitting 25+ reps at that same weight. Then we increase the load and repeat the cycle.
Without these benchmarks, you’re just wandering around the gym hoping something happens. A Navy SEAL buddy recently shared the standards his friends kick around, which I’ve been experimenting with. They’re ambitious (and specific to men) but give you targets to chase if you’re advanced enough to need them.
For the hex bar deadlift, they consider 1.5 times bodyweight for 5 reps as standard, 2 times bodyweight as elite, and 2.5 times as pro level. The broad jump starts at your height for standard, adds 12 inches for elite, and 24 inches for the truly explosive. Planks run from 2 minutes at the standard level to 2.5 for elite and 3+ for the pros. Pull-ups begin at 10 consecutive for standard—already beyond most people’s capability—then progress to 15 for elite and 20+ for the pros.
Most people can’t do a single proper pull-up, let alone ten, so these standards need modification for beginners — probably 2-3 lower performance bands at the least. But the point is that the group of SEALs are smart to create simple steps they can all strive for. It gives them as sense of pride and accomplishment as they ascend.
Now, a few quick strength points before we move on to cardio, since I know someone will ask about these:
The fitness world is currently obsessed with single-leg versus bilateral movements—should you do Bulgarian split squats or traditional deadlifts? I’m following this debate closely and may eventually incorporate more single-leg work, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.
I avoid Olympic lifts like snatches and jerks. Yes, they look impressive and the people who master them have my complete respect, but the ratio of technical skill to actual strength gain doesn’t pencil out for most of us. You’ll spend six months learning to jerk properly when you could have just gotten strong doing basic movements.
Breaking my hand last year taught me something useful: nearly every barbell movement has a decent machine equivalent. If you’re traveling constantly or the barbell still intimidates you, machines can deliver 70% of the benefits with none of the setup time or technique demands. I don’t use machines unless I have to (that extra 30% is important to me). But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
As for training volume, I follow Mike Israetel’s wonderfully simple framework: hit a muscle group once a week to maintain, twice a week for steady progress, three times for rapid gains. This assumes you’re actually working hard during those sessions. If you’re putting in legitimate effort and tracking progressive overload (adding weight or reps over time), this basic math holds remarkably well.
Cardio
My approach to cardio is deliberately simple. At Squadra, we focus on three workouts and tests:
The 400-meter run is our primary test—a perfect distance that takes 1-2 minutes and tells you a lot about your anaerobic capacity and speed. The 400m is unique because it sits right at the intersection of the body’s energy systems: too long to rely purely on explosive power, too short to cruise on aerobic capacity alone. Your time reveals how well you can buffer lactate, maintain speed under duress, and push through that special hell when your legs turn to concrete at the 300-meter mark. Nearly every high school track in America has one, so it’s easy to standardize for our dispersed community.
The Norwegian 4x4 is where things get spicy. Four minutes of near-maximal effort, four minutes of recovery, repeated four times. It’s brutal, effective, and the fastest legal way to improve your VO2 max—which might be the single best predictor of how long and how well you’ll live. Squadra members who do this consistently see their VO2 max jump 5-10 points in a matter of months. Some achieve transformations that border on miraculous: my friend and Squadra member Ryan Hill performed this workout three times a week and saw his VO2 max climb from 35.5 in March to 59.3 in August. That’s the equivalent of reversing years of aging from a cardiovascular perspective—going from average for his age to the fitness level of an elite college athlete.
Zone 2 cardio forms the foundation of everything else. This is the pace where you can still hold a conversation but would rather not—fast enough to work, slow enough to sustain for an hour. It builds your aerobic base, improves mitochondrial function, and teaches your body to burn fat efficiently. Think of it as the cardiovascular equivalent of compound interest: boring but enormously powerful over time.
My personal mix: Zone 2 daily (either a short 1-3 mile run or an hour of tennis), the Norwegian 4x4 once weekly, and a 400-meter time trial monthly. Next year I’m pushing that last one to weekly.
I avoid long-distance running entirely. Anything over three miles starts trading cardiovascular benefits for orthopedic problems—the research on runners’ knees and hips is sobering enough to keep me off the marathon circuit. Sprint work is different; short bursts actually strengthen connective tissue rather than grinding it down, though that’s a technical progression I’ll spare you.
If you’re doing cardio primarily for fat loss, some YouTuber with too much time strapped on metabolic testing equipment and compared every form of cardio for caloric burn. You can watch his video here or check out the final results here.
You’ll notice that jogging is surprisingly efficient. From a calories per minute perspective, it’s nearly as good as sprinting. But you can’t sprint for long, so jogging is almost certainly our best bet.
Biomarkers
Every Squadra member tracks body composition—either body fat percentage or skeletal muscle mass, often both. We ignore the scale because weight alone tells you nothing useful. You could lose ten pounds of muscle while gaining five pounds of fat and the scale would congratulate you on your “progress.”
DEXA scans remain the gold standard, but InBody machines work fine for most people as do a handful of other models. We test three times yearly, which sounds obsessive but we’ve found that knowing you have to face down the hard numbers every few months motivates folks to lock in.
Beyond body composition, we monitor four critical biomarkers (all optional): VO2 max for cardiovascular fitness, ApoB for heart disease risk, HbA1c for metabolic health, and bone mineral density for structural integrity. We provide age-indexed percentiles for each marker so you know exactly where you stand against your peers. Our full biomarker guide (available here) breaks down why these specific markers matter more than the dozens of others your doctor might test.
I’ve gone deeper down the testing rabbit hole than most sane people. The Prenuvo full-body MRI ($3,000+) found a node on my pancreas that triggered months of specialist visits (I’m fine, probably). The medical establishment can’t decide whether these commercial MRIs are revolutionary prevention or expensive anxiety generators. When I had the New Yorker’s Dr. Dhruv Khullar on my podcast to debate this, we reached no clear conclusion, though I’ll note that a different scan saved my father’s life. Make of that what you will.
For blood work, I use Function Health, which tests over 100 biomarkers for $499 annually. It caught a thyroid issue my regular doctor missed—apparently, insurance-approved testing means “the bare minimum to avoid lawsuits.” Function also calculates your “biological age,” which is probably nonsense but calibrated to give us all something to brag about.
On the wearables front, I currently use both an Apple Watch and a Whoop. Apple’s sleep tracking is garbage and it’s workout tracking is far too generous with its calorie burns. But it has specialized apps like Dawn Patrol for surfing that don’t exist elsewhere. Whoop tracks recovery better and has no screen to distract you. The Oura ring is apparently great for sleep tracking, and serious runners swear by Garmin, but I haven’t tested either.
For genetic insights, I uploaded my 23andMe data (acquired before their implosion) to Nebula Genomics. They provide genuinely useful analysis of genetic predispositions—far beyond the level of detail I’ve seen anywhere else. And they update their dataset regularly based on new studies (and will even message you with any new findings related to your genetics).
Nutrition
My approach to food isn’t very complicated.
Protein: 1 gram per pound of bodyweight daily. I won’t get into that holy war here, but there was a helpful discussion of it on this week’s episode of Peter Attia’s podcast. The most reliable way to hit this target: two scoops of whey protein with water in the morning, two scoops of casein before bed. Casein digests slowly overnight, providing steady amino acid delivery while you sleep. This AM/PM combination alone provides 60-80 grams before you factor in whole food sources.
Calorie tracking: I maintain when satisfied with my body composition, cut by a few hundred calories when I need to lose fat. Nothing extreme—aggressive deficits sacrifice muscle unless you keep protein high and resistance train — something hard to do fasted. I use Lifesum to track, though any food diary app works.
I skip breakfast to save calories for more enjoyable meals later, not because I believe in intermittent fasting. Carbohydrates remain a significant part of my diet. Sedentary workers might benefit from lower carb intake, but that’s a different discussion. But at the moment I am on my feet cooking half the day and walking, running, or lifting for much of the afternoon and evening.
Alcohol presents the biggest challenge. Wine and whiskey have been constants in my social life for decades. But the evidence is clear: alcohol disrupts sleep, impairs recovery, increases inflammation, and interferes with protein synthesis. Huberman’s 2022 comprehensive episode on alcohol documents the damage in detail. I’ve recently shifted to special occasions only—the last month I drank once, at a vineyard visit with my cooking class. Whether this restraint lasts remains to be seen, but the improvement in sleep quality and training recovery has been noticeable enough to motivate continued semi-abstinence.
I use a food tracking app called Lifesum, but there are plenty of strong alternatives.
Supplements
I take the following supplements and medications:
Rosuvastatin: Prescription statin for managing ApoB levels, given my family history of heart disease and previously elevated numbers.
Fish Oil (Wild Alaskan EPA/DHA): Omega-3s have decent research behind them for heart and brain health, though the effect sizes are smaller than supplement companies want you to believe.
Vitamin D: Most people are deficient (especially those with darker skin like me), and the downside risk is essentially zero.
Multivitamin: Insurance against nutritional gaps. Probably unnecessary.
Broccoli Seed Extract (Sulforaphane): Supposedly activates cellular detoxification pathways and has promising cancer-prevention research, though mostly in mice.
Rejuvant (Alpha-Ketoglutarate): Early research suggests it might slow aging markers. The science is thin but intriguing enough that I’m willing to be a guinea pig.
Rapamycin: The most promising longevity drug that nobody talks about, with actual human data showing immune function improvement. I take it weekly under medical supervision, which I mention because this isn’t something to mess with casually.
Creatine: The most studied supplement in existence—proven benefits for strength, muscle mass, and possibly cognitive function.
Whey Protein: For reasons mentioned above.
I’ve discontinued several supplements that the longevity crowd loves but the evidence doesn’t support, including NMN/NAD, Metformin, and Resveratrol. This is the David Sinclair starter pack. After diving deep into the research, I’m convinced Sinclair (Harvard professor, author, entreprenuer) is better at selling books than interpreting data. The human studies don’t support the mouse hype, and Sinclair’s tendency to have financial (or ego) interests in the compounds he promotes doesn’t inspire confidence. Metformin particularly bothers me—it blunts the exercise adaptation response, meaning it might actually interfere with the benefits of training.
The Bottom Line
After all these words about protocols and percentages, here’s what actually matters: you need a system simple enough to follow when life gets complicated. Because it will.
Start with a vision that means something to you. Not “lose weight” or “get healthy”—those are abstractions that die by February. Picture something specific: playing basketball with your kids without getting winded, deadlifting twice your bodyweight at 60, looking good enough at the beach that a special someone notices. Whatever keeps you moving when motivation evaporates.
Break that vision into quarterly benchmarks that you can actually measure. Arnold famously kept his goals chalked on the wall of his dingy gym in Munich—not in some app, not in a spreadsheet, just chalk on concrete where he’d see it every day.
The people who transform their bodies do the boring basics consistently. They show up when they don’t feel like it. They add five pounds to the bar when it feels less heavy. They run the 400m when it’s raining. They track their protein even though it’s tedious. They understand that fitness isn’t about optimizing every variable—it’s about not quitting when most people do.
You already know what to do. Start today. Keep it simple. And remember: the goal isn’t to live forever—it’s to be hard to kill while you’re here.
Resources
Powermonkey: To level up your strength training. They have an app and a Youtube page that both walk you through proper form. (Disclaimer: my co-founder of Squadra is the co-founder of Powermonkey as well - though I have no financial relationship with them other than as a paying customer myself)
Rennaissance Periodization: To level up your hypertrophy (muscle building) training. They are funny and extremely well informed. Youtube page here.
Dr. Peter Attia: By far the most comprehensive, evidence-based site available. For a fee, you get access to voluminous write-ups from Attia on every conceiveable topic. It’s a bit advanced, but he does a good job of summarizing his key takeaways. Available here.
FoundMyFitness: Site from Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Similar to Attia’s site but with some differences in emphasis (e.g., she seems more focused on heat/cold exposure and microplastic contamination than Attia). Here.
Nebula genetic testing and analysis: Mentioned above. Here.
Squadra: My fitness community. We aren’t starting another cohort until early 2026, but if it speaks to you, you can apply on the site and get to the front of the list. Here.
Prenovo scanning: Mentioned above. Learn more here. And here is my interview with the New Yorker’s Dhruv Khullar about the merits and downsides of these scans.
Consumer Lab: Independent testing of nutritional supplements. Here.
Analog
In the last post, I announced Analog — a new writing class I am teaching in 2026. We’ve already had more applicants than slots — and are reviewing and accepting on a rolling basis — so if you are interested, you will want to get yours in before the December deadline (I am considering a second cohort for a different night). You can learn more about it here.