With the year coming to a close, many people are starting to think about new year's resolutions. If 2017 aligns with decades of years previously researched, 'getting in shape' is likely to remain high on those resolution lists.

The fact that the same resolution tends to crop up, year after year, points to an ugly truth: the vast majority of people fall short of their annual get-in-shape goal. There are lot of reasons why they do, and I’ll try to look at a few of them in the days and weeks to come. But one problem that’s increasingly prevalent is that most people focus on ‘working out’ in stead of on ‘training.’

Training is something you do to achieve a specific performance goal or a physiological adaptation. To train, you start with that goal or adaptation in mind, then work backwards to construct a carefully-designed, science-backed plan that will take you, step by step, to where you want to end up.

Whereas working out is an end in and of itself, something you do regularly with a vague sense that it will get you to a nebulously-defined better place. And because you’re not clear on your plan, nor on metrics that will let you measure the effectiveness of your efforts along the way, you default to more subjective evaluations of your gym session. Did it seem super hard? Where you lying on the ground after in a pool of sweat? Are you painfully sore for days to come?

All of those seem like reasonable heuristics. If you’re sore, then certainly the workout did something. And if you toss your cookies midway through, then clearly the workout must have pushed you to the max.

But, in fact, neither of those are reliable signposts. Your sore muscles (or DOMS – delayed onset muscle soreness) simply mean you exceeded your current capacity for safe eccentric contraction. Your mid-workout cookie toss? Just a sign that you built up lactic acid systemically faster than your body could flush it out. Neither necessarily means your fitness level is improving. And it’s perfectly possible to get fitter, faster, without doing either one.

Elite coaches refer to this kind of pointless destruction as ‘monkey stomping’ their trainees. And, indeed, a lot of the GloboGym personal trainers I see seem to design workouts specifically to hit that sort of monkey stomp, knowing that clients want to feel like they left it all in the gym, are more likely to come back for a second session if they just got pushed to their limits in their first. CrossFitters, SoulCyclers, Barry’s Bootcampers, and others thrive on the monkey-stomped feeling. It’s the unspoken core selling point of most group exercise classes: we can kick your ass harder than anyone else.

But, it turns out, getting monkey stomped repeatedly is pretty unpleasant. And once the start-of-year drive towards righteous self-flagellation peters out, people tend to abandon those sorts of ‘take it to 11’ approaches in droves. Whereas people following an actual training approach, who don’t hate every single session, who can start to see meaningful progress from checkpoint to checkpoint and milestone to milestone, tend to increasingly build their commitment over the course of time, intrinsically motivated to further cement the training habit.

So, in short, if your plan for 2017 involves getting into shape, consider searching out professional advice from someone who can help you figure out a training plan rather than just a series of workouts. Ask them what the big picture of their approach for you would be, and how you’ll know if an individual session is pushing you forward. If they can’t answer that – or, worse, if their answer involves some variation of the monkey stomp – then turn and run (or, depending on Thanksgiving-to-Christmas binge eating, waddle) the other way. Make 2017 the year you cross ‘get in shape’ off your resolutions list for good.

[Obligatory deeply self-interested plug: after a bit of scaling up, Composite now has room for a handful of new clients, in NYC and elsewhere; shoot me an email if you’d like our take on what training – rather than just workout out – could mean for you.]

There's a saying in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. That works in fitness, too.

Fortunately, when it comes to eating, it’s even easier. Science shows you don't need to measure – you just need to notice. A slew of recent studies have demonstrated that, simply by journaling what they eat, people lose literally twice as much weight as a non-journaling cohort.

The reason: most people already know how to eat better. (Eat more fruits and vegetables. Eat some protein and healthy fats. Stop eating processed crap.) Sure, we give Composite’s clients a lot of additional guidance to help them perfect their diets. But just following common sense usually gets people 80-90% of the way towards their goals.

The biggest problem, then, isn't knowledge. It’s action. With food, we too often act without thinking. We follow the dictates of our brain stem, the animal part of our brain, without stopping to consciously consider our choices.

That's where food journaling comes in. Just a brief moment of pause to document what you're about to eat is enough to trigger cortical involvement, bringing in your more evolved conscious brain. In turn, that leads people to make better, more goal-oriented choices.

There are a nearly endless number of ways to food journal. In practice, however, we find the perfect is the enemy of the good. While apps like MyFitnessPal are comprehensive, they're also a pain in the butt to reliably use, so people tend to use them for just a few days before falling off.

Instead, we’ve found a much simpler solution works just as well, yet is far easier to sustain over the long haul: use your smartphone to take take a picture of your food before you eat it.

For Composite clients, we set things up so that those pictures are submitted automatically to their coach, who can provide additional accountability. But you can also act as your own nutrition coach: every few days, look back over the food photos you’ve taken, and ask yourself what the health impact would be of keeping up that same way of eating for the rest of your life. Or consider how you would feel if you had to show the last few weeks of pictures to your physician, coach, or trainer.

If your nutrition isn’t yet dialed in, I’d highly recommend trying this out. For the next two weeks, every single time you eat something, take a photo first. It doesn’t seem like much, but science and clinical experience backs us up: it really works.

Thus far, we’ve looked at why getting some sun is actually good for you, how to wisely choose and apply sunblock, and how to time your sun exposure to allow the maximum number of hours outside.

Today, however, we’ll be working from the inside out, starting with Polypodium leucotomos, a green leafy fern found in the wilds of Central and South America. Polypodium initially evolved as an aquatic plant, before a changing environment forced it to adapt to life on land. Unable to leverage the sun-blocking effects of water-cover as it had when it lived underwater, the fern instead evolved to produce powerful antioxidants that offset the free-radical damage of all-day above-water sun.

As recent research has shown, those fern antioxidants work nearly as well inside of you, too. By taking pills that contain Polypodium leucotomos extracts, like Heliocare or Solaricare, you can triple or quadruple your natural resistance to burns. In other words, if it might normally take you 15-20 minutes to scorch at a given UV intensity, you could instead hold out for a full hour.

And while, in most cases, that’s not enough to supplant sunscreen, given how quickly sunscreen sweats and washes off (as previously discussed, ‘waterproof’ sunscreens are designed to weather just 40 minutes of swimming and sweating), a belt-and-suspenders approach seems like reasonable insurance.

Pick up some Heliocare or Solaricare, pop one in the morning, and another before and every few hours during your time in the sun. If nothing else, you can offset the $20 cost of a bottle by the money you’ll save on aloe vera. (Which, as we’ll see in the next installment, doesn’t really do much of anything anyway.)

Researchers who follow hunter-gatherer tribes in tropical and dessert areas have found a nearly universal pattern: during the very hottest hour or two of the day, the members of the tribe get out of the sun completely, to relax and eat in the shade.

Over the course of a summer day, the UV index – the amount of UV radiation reaching ground level – varies hugely. At 12:30pm today in New York, for example, the UV index was at 10, enough to cause burns in just 10 minutes, blazing through even strong sunscreen. Whereas by 1:15, the index had dropped to a 6, allowing for a half hour before burning without protection, and for several hours of happy sun time with a layer of (full-spectrum) sunscreen applied.

A team of outdoorsy engineers in New Zealand recently released a free app, UV Lens, which provides daily hyper-local UV forecasts. With the app in hand, you can easily plan your schedule to mimic the wisdom of our hunter-gatherer ancestors: enjoy the sun in the morning, take a brief, strategically timed mid-day lunch break in the shade, and then head back out once the very highest UV stretch of the day has passed. That way, you can spend far longer outside overall, while still greatly reducing the risk of sun-damage and burn over the course of the day.

As I shared in Part I, getting some sun is good for you, at least if you’re smart and careful about it.

Your first step to that end: get some good sunscreen.

Sunlight is made up of two kinds of ultraviolet rays: UVA and UVB. It’s the latter, UVB, that causes sunburns, so for decades sunscreen was designed to block UVB. But more recently, research has shown that UVA rays, which penetrate deeper, also substantially increase skin cancer risk, and cause wrinkles. (The EPA estimates that up to 90% of aging-related skin changes are actually caused by a lifetime’s exposure to UVA.)

Good sunscreen is therefore ‘full spectrum’ or ‘broad spectrum’, and blocks both UVA and UVB. While those were previously specialty products, in the last year or two, almost all the major sunscreen brands have released reasonably-priced, widely-available versions that block both spectrums. Make sure you only buy sunscreens that do.

Three more sunscreen tips: slather it on, do it often, and stop going nuts with the SPF.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, most people apply only 25-50% of the amount of sunscreen that they need per application, which reduces an SPF 30 sunscreen to an SPF 3. SPF ratings are based on applying two milligrams of sunscreen per square centimeter of skin. Which is a lot. Basically, you should briefly look like Casper each time you apply a layer if you want your sunscreen to actually do anything.

Next, a sunscreen is FDA-certified as ‘water resistant’ if it can hold up to 40 minutes of swimming or sweating. After that, all bets are off. So, while you’re on the beach, you also probably need to reapply every hour or so.

And, finally, just buy some SPF 30; after that, the numbers get kind of meaningless. A few years back, Procter & Gamble even sent a letter to the FDA, asking that the numbers be capped at 30, because real-world and laboratory light conditions are different enough to make higher SPFs of “dubious value” that are “at best, misleading to consumers.”

So, to recap, buy some SPF30 full-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen. Put on a bunch, and keep reapplying. And then enjoy the sun!

With beach weather upon us, I’m spending this week on a roundup of summer sun tips, with the science behind each, so you can make smarter choices about what works, and what doesn’t.

First up: get some sun. It’s good for you.

While people completely ignore most public health advice, it seems we’ve actually taken warnings about the dangers of tanning too much heart.

Excess sun exposure (and sunburn) increases the risk of skin cancer. But too little sun exposure dangerously decreases your level of vitamin D (which your skin naturally produces when exposed to sun), increasing the risk of a slew of other cancers and heart disease.

As one recent review study concluded, “the overall health benefit of an improved vitamin D status may be more important than the possibly increased melanoma risk resulting from carefully increasing UV exposure.”

In other words, it’s healthy to get back out in the sun. Just be smart and careful about how you do it. Tune in tomorrow, and learn how to wear (good) sunscreen, the right way.

For the most part, you should run the other direction from crash diets, fast fixes, and “one weird trick” solutions. But with summer upon us, there is at least one exercise you can still deploy in the last couple of weeks that will make you appear noticeably slimmer when you hit the beach.

It’s called the ‘stomach vacuum’, and it’s an old bodybuilder standby, used by competitors to achieve the waspish waist that was the hallmark look of that sport’s golden era.

The stomach vacuum works the transversus abdominis (or TVA), a deep postural core muscle that serves as essentially a natural corset, holding in your guts. Improving the maximal contractive strength of the muscle also increases the muscle’s tone – its degree of resting contraction. Which, as a result, will carve an inch or two visually off your waistline, even in just two or three weeks.

Here’s how it works:

1. Ideally, do this first thing in the morning. Or, at least, on an empty stomach.
2. Start lying on your back, with your feet on the ground.  
3. Take a full breath, then exhale through your mouth until you've blown out all the air.  
4. Once your lungs are empty, pull your bellybutton down to your spine, as hard as you can. Really pull it down; the harder you pull, the closer to your spine your bellybutton gets, the better this works.
5. At the same time, try to make your chest as big as possible (i.e., lift your chest up), though while still pulling down hard on your bellybutton.
6. Hold that for 15 seconds.  
7. Then relax, breathe normally for 15-30 second, and repeat, 2-4 times more.

If you stick with this exercise over the course of the summer, you can slowly increase the duration of each hold, adding 5-10 seconds each week, until you’re holding for 60 seconds for each of your 3-5 sets.

Again, this should drop two inches off your waist in just two to three weeks. And, as a bonus, engaging your TVA improves power transfer in athletic movements, and may even protect your low back from tweaks and injuries.

Suck it up, indeed.