Absolute Fitness

💭 Your actions expose your priorities.

Not your intentions.
Not what you say matters to you.

Your actions.

⚖️ The truth is, we all have competing motivations.

💪 We want to get fitter.
😴 We also want to sleep in.
💰 We want to save money.
🍔 We also want the takeaway.
🏋️ We want to exercise.
🛋️ We also want to sit on the sofa.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's part of being human.

🧠 But if you want to know what your priorities really are, don't listen to your thoughts.

👀 Look at your actions.

They’re the most honest reflection of what you’re choosing today.

🥩 If you only changed one thing about your diet, what would give you the biggest results?

The answer.

Eat more protein.

It's difficult to overstate how much protein influences your results. It helps you build and maintain muscle, keeps you fuller for longer, improves recovery, and makes losing fat easier by helping preserve lean tissue.

Before worrying about meal timing, supplements, or cutting out entire food groups, make sure you're consistently eating enough protein. For most people trying to improve their body composition, that's likely to have the biggest payoff of any single dietary change.

How much protein do you need at each age?

18–29: 1.6–2.0 g/kg

30–39: 1.6–2.0 g/kg

40–49: 1.6–2.0 g/kg

50–59: 1.6–2.0 g/kg

60–69: 1.6–2.0 g/kg

70+: 1.6–2.0 g/kg

Turns out, it doesn't really change.

Your goal matters far more than your age.

• 📉 Losing weight: Aim towards the higher end. If you lose weight without resistance training and enough protein, some of that weight loss will come from muscle.
• ⚖️ Maintaining weight + resistance training: You can usually get away with the lower end.
• 💪 Building muscle: Aim towards the higher end.

One reason recommendations are given as a range is because people don't all respond to protein in exactly the same way. Some people appear to need more than others to maximise muscle growth or retention.

The good news?

There is very little downside for most healthy people to aiming towards the higher end of the range. It's simple, it's safe, and it means you're unlikely to fall short if you're one of the people who benefits from a higher intake.

The recommendation barely changes.

Your circumstances do.

Looking after yourself isn't just about you.

It's a moral obligation to the people who love you.

You can't guarantee you'll avoid illness or injury.

You can't guarantee you'll live longer.

But you can significantly reduce the chances that someone you love has to put their own life on hold to care for you because of preventable health problems.

Train.

Eat well.

Stay active.

Not because you owe your body perfection.

Because you owe the people who care about you your best effort.

It's possible for your weight to change by 1–3kg in just a few days from changes in your carbohydrate intake alone, without gaining or losing any meaningful body fat.

Why?

• Carbohydrates are stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen.

• Every gram of glycogen is stored alongside roughly 3 grams of water.

• Eat more carbs than usual and you'll store more glycogen and more water.

• Eat fewer carbs than usual and you'll lose glycogen and the water stored with it.

Other things that can affect the scales too:

• A salty meal.

• Hormonal changes.

• A hard training session.

• Hydration.

• The amount of food in your digestive system.

The scales measure your body weight.

They do not measure your body fat.

This is why one weigh-in tells you very little. The trend over weeks is what matters.

"Better than nothing" does not mean you're not going backwards.

It's one of the easiest ways to justify not doing enough.

Telling someone, or accepting for yourself, that what you're doing is "better than nothing" simply encourages you to keep doing something that isn't as good as it could be.

🧠 Information over load!

People aren't struggling in the gym because they're lazy. People struggle because there's so much fitness information available now that many people end up overwhelmed.

Should you lift weights or do cardio?
Full body or upper/lower?
Low carb?
High protein?
Intermittent fasting?
10,000 steps?
Heart rate zones?
Cold plunges?

Most people don't need more information.

They need fewer decisions.

Hopefully the last few years of Absolute Fitness posts have demonstrated that there are hundreds of things that can influence your results.

The problem is that most people don't have the time, interest or experience to work out which things matter most for them.

At Absolute Fitness we do our best to stay up to date with best practice, so you have less to think about and can focus on the bit that actually matters:

Turning up consistently.

🌐 www.absolute-fitness.je

🦵 How often should you program unilateral exercises?

Following on from yesterday's post. There are no solutions in life. Only trade-offs.

Single-arm and single-leg exercises are great. Possibly even the best.

They can help expose strength differences between sides.
They can improve balance and coordination.
They can often be more joint friendly.
They can often help you achieve a deeper stretch.
They are less systemically taxing on the body.
They can help address weaknesses that bilateral exercises occasionally hide.

The downside?

⏰ They take ages.

A set of split squats isn't really one set. It's a set on the left and a set on the right. If you're short on time, that matters.

If I only had 1-2 hours per week to train, I probably wouldn't build the entire program around unilateral exercises.

I'd likely have one or two appear regularly to expose and improve any gaps. The rest of the program would probably be built around exercises that train both sides at once.

Squats.
RDLs.
Rows.
Pulldowns.
Presses.

Because at some point you have to ask: "Is the extra benefit worth the extra time?"

Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes the answer is no.
There are no solutions in life. Only trade-offs 👊

💪 If you only had 1-2 hours per week to lift weights, how should you structure it?

My answer, annoyingly, would be: it depends.

First. What are you training for?

📅 How many sessions can you realistically do? If it's one session, that's easy.
➡️ Full body.

If it's two sessions, then ask:

📅 How far apart are they? Monday and Tuesday?
➡️ Upper body / Lower body might make more sense.

Monday and Thursday?
➡️ I'd probably lean towards Full Body / Full Body.

🏋️ Are you trying to build muscle, get stronger, lose fat, or just stay healthy?

If your goal is general health, you probably don't need much volume.
If your goal is maximum muscle growth, the answer changes.

💪 Are you prepared to train hard?
One hard set taken close to failure is worth far more than three half-hearted sets while scrolling your phone.

🏃 What else are you doing?
Running 4 times a week?
Playing football?
Training for a triathlon?

The weights need to fit around the rest of your life.

🤕 Do you have any injuries?
The best program on paper is useless if it aggravates your shoulder, knee or back.

⚖️ Is the program balanced?

Upper and lower body balanced?

Pushing and pulling balanced?

Muscles on the front and back of the body balanced?

🦵 Is there any unilateral work?

I'd generally want some single-arm or single-leg work appearing regularly to expose and improve any gaps between sides.

📈 Can you track progress?

If you're not gradually lifting more weight, doing more reps or improving performance over time, the structure probably isn't your biggest problem.

A good program done for a year beats the perfect program done for three weeks 👊

🥣 Will women lose muscle if they skip breakfast?

Not automatically.

Skipping breakfast doesn't automatically make you lose muscle.

If total daily protein, calories and resistance training are adequate, skipping breakfast does not guarantee muscle loss.

Many women already struggle to eat enough protein.

💪 Remove a meal and you've removed one of the easiest opportunities to get it in.

If someone needs 120g of protein per day and eats between 12pm and 8pm, It's still possible.

🍗 40g protein at lunch
🍗 40g protein at dinner
🍗 40g protein in snacks

Technically, you can get all your protein in between lunch and dinner.

But many people end up full before they get there.

So the issue is often protein compliance, not breakfast itself.

👩 Is it worse for women than men? Potentially.

Women generally:
💪 Have less muscle mass to begin with
🍽️ Tend to eat less total food
🥩 Tend to consume less protein than men

That means they often have less room for error.
A 95kg man can accidentally eat 130g protein.
A 60kg woman trying to get 100-120g protein while dieting may have to actively plan for it.

🏃 Does fasted cardio cause muscle loss?

Not directly.

A 30-45 minute walk before breakfast is unlikely to cause meaningful muscle loss.

The concern becomes greater when multiple factors stack together
❌ Large calorie deficit
❌ Low protein intake
❌ Lots of cardio
❌ No resistance training
❌ Significant weight loss

👨 Is it the same for men?

Largely, yes.

Men don't have magical protection against muscle loss.

However, men carry more muscle and consume more protein, they often get away with poor meal timing more easily