Resurrecting Focus: How to Get More Jacked Than Bryan Johnson
You Don’t Need More Willpower, You Need More Money
This piece is part of my personal development series, Resurrecting Focus. We do big-brain work here, so we have to take care of that brain. This post is about the most important part of your brain – your body.
You can find the first piece in the Resurrecting Focus series here.
One other note: I’ve been experimenting with a more functional style of writing and laying out certain posts. This means bullet points, bolding, frequent subheads, and shorter sentences. You’ll see this below, but it will be limited to “how to” or news posts. I also definitely welcome feedback on formatting.
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Welcome to Sunday. There’s a 45% chance you’ve already given up on your New Year’s resolutions.
Fully 80% of us reputedly give up on our resolutions by February. This post is for those who made a commitment to fitness, specifically. It includes both concrete steps and, hopefully, some motivation.
I think my situation is pretty common: During the first year or two of the COVID-19 pandemic, I kind of stopped giving a damn. In the course of about two years, I went from around 210 pounds all the way up to 225, and even a little bit beyond. At the same time, I was absorbing freakish amounts of job stress as I first covered vaccines for Fortune, then transitioned to the madness of covering crypto at CoinDesk. Getting laid off in August was frankly a godsend in many ways, and having the time to get myself back together physically is one of the two biggest reasons.
Below, I dive into the four key changes that helped me get back to looking semi-decent at age 44, mostly over the course of about four months:
Eat a “Slow Carb” Diet
Lift Heavy Things (On a Schedule)
Have a Gym at Home
Be Unemployed for Months or Be Independently Wealthy
Yes, those last two are a doozy. But we’re realists here, and there’s a brutal truth that’s worth confronting regardless of your situation: self-improvement is often a function of your resources, and specifically, of convenience. This is why the entire project of infamous skinwalker and cancer-patient dumper Bryan Johnson so comical: He’s trying to market and resell insane nonsense like transfusions of his son’s blood, when his real program is just having all the time in the world to care about his apparently fucked-up dick.
I personally have been able to get into nearly the best shape of my life, at age 44, because I moved into a building with a gym, then I lost my job. Between severance and some savings, I’ve been living like a rich guy for a few months now, and let me tell you, it rules. I’ve been in the gym four or five days a week, with predictably awesome results.
It makes the projects of “biohackers” like Johnson seem even more insane and absurd than they already did. Because you don’t need on-call doctors and nightly erection monitoring to remain fit and youthful. You need time, space, and tools.
It’s a brutal truth indeed, but it’s one that’s healthy to acknowledge even if you’re on the wrong side of it right now:
You don’t need more willpower.
You don’t need a personal trainer.
You don’t need an app.
You need more money.
What I mean here most of all is that money creates convenience, and that convenience opens up time. That might seem discouraging - but I hope it’s also clarifying. Because the most important thing to rid yourself of when you’re trying to improve something about your life is the idea that you can “just do it” if you really want it.
There is no “just do it” - there are routines and practices that build up over time. Change is a hundred boring tiny steps. The easier those tiny steps are, the better. At the end of this post, I offer some suggestions for leveraging this insight about money, even if you don’t actually have a lot.
Two particular tiny steps helped me get back into thinking shape: Tim Ferriss’ “Slow Carb Diet,” and three to five days per week of weight training.
(* If you want to see how a statistic gets invented and reinforced, follow the links on that 80% stat. They all seem to go back to an obscure newspaper story that doesn’t cite any actual survey. So it might be made up! But it feels true enough.)
Willpower is a Myth Being Weaponized Against You
I’m in New York, and I can’t say I blame anyone for fading motivation and commitment at the moment. It’s very cold right now, and nobody trusts each other there is nothing more willpower-sapping than that. It makes it seem silly, almost cruel that we make these “resolutions” in the dead of winter in the first place. An accident of the calendar.
Lucky for me, I already got some big resolutions out of the way last year. In 2023, I:
Quit Vaping (more than a decade after I quit smoking – yikes.)
Lost ~25 pounds of fat and gained ~10 pounds of muscle.
That followed cutting way down on my drinking in 2022. I’ll be writing more about the tools and tactics I used to quit the vape, and how goddamn insidious that thing is.
So let’s talk about weight lifting for a second. Being in the gym even three to four days a week (much less four to five) is a major lifestyle change. I’m trying to think back on it now, just four months in, and it’s wild how quickly it becomes second nature – a thing you do, or don’t do, because you feel like it (or, still sometimes, don’t).
But looking back to the start, in August and September, I’m realizing that one key thing that got me in the gym was that I was bored, and that it was downstairs.
Notably, I had the best possible motivation to get back into shape: My wife told me I looked like shit. (In so many words.) That motivation was key – but even that wasn’t enough on its own. Until we moved to our new apartment in August, things had been far too hectic for far too long for me to care about my health, much less my appearance.
Before we get into the details of how I turned this disaster around, a quick reminder of why it’s worth it.
Since Fixing My Body, I:
Have vastly more energy on every front
Am shaking off my pandemic housebound vibe
Have a natural desire to eat healthy
Have a reduced desire for intoxicants
Have a dramatically increased sex drive
Am reading a ton more
That last one might sound tangential, and there are certainly other factors driving my improved reading (which I’ll be talking about here soon). But remember – your mind is a part of your body. There is no separating the two, and the strengths and weaknesses of one will inevitably impact the other.
The Slow Carb Diet
I’m not a nutritionist, but I personally swear by the so-called “Slow Carb” diet championed by Tim Ferriss. The rules are very simple, and most importantly, don’t involve tracking anything. I have never been able to form the habit of counting calories, and frankly it seems like an objective waste of time and mental energy once you’ve tried these rules:
No Carbs that Can Be White. No potatoes, no rice, no bread, no pasta. What you’re left with is protein, vegetables, and legumes – beans and lentils. It’s called the “slow carb” diet because beans have carbs, but not the simple kind that immediately spike your blood sugar and leave you feeling fucked up. The key feature is that you don’t have to count calories because if you don’t eat white carbs, you’ll get full on far fewer calories, every single time.
Yes Carbs Within 30 Minutes of Weight Training. If you spend at least 20 minutes doing serious resistance training, you get a lil’ treat – that is, a reasonable helping of ‘white’ carbs, most of which will go directly to helping your muscles heal.
One Day Per Weak, Eat Til You Puke. Okay, not literally until you puke. But this is the famous “Cheat Day,” and it serves both psychological and biological purposes. Mentally, let’s be real, noone can forgo treats indefinitely. But when you concentrate all of your extravagant eating in one day, it accomplishes two things: First, your body, used to no carbs, can’t even absorb all those calories. Second, the huge calorie spike prevents your baseline metabolism from resetting around the lower-carb baseline you’ve established. You’re essentially tricking your body into thinking you’re still a disgusting fat pig, and it will keep burning calories accordingly.
I am not any kind of nutritionist, and all the above is taken from Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Body. The book contains a lot more detail and nuance of the above, and if you’re really serious, I recommend you read the whole thing. (It also includes, for instance, some seemingly fairly safe supplement regimes for fat-burning, which I can’t personally testify to but might be worth your while.)
Finally, I happen to love legumes, and also avocados, which are a key source of good fat in this diet. If you don’t like beans, slow carb might be tough.
Lifting Heavy Things Is Easy
I’ve always been fairly fit - the decline of the pandemic was a bit of a weird outlier. But by and large I’ve exercised in slow, low-impact ways - hiking and yoga.
I had the idea in the back of my head for years that I would someday “get ripped,” which I think is an idea most guys keep in a kind of eternal hope chest. But I always found weightlifting a little intimidating, or at least a little opaque. Last year was when I figured out that it’s actually incredibly simple.
All you need to start is a simple five-day rotation.
The Five Day Lifting Plan
Leg Day
Back Day
Chest Day
Arms Day
Core and Cardio Day
That’s it, bro. I don’t even use an app to track anything - I just have five recurring events in my Google Calendar. Here’s a fun little glimpse of my stupid days:
Within those recurring events, I just have a list of excercises that I can reference when I need to be told what to do next. I add to and change them semi-regularly as I discover new excercises. For your own routine, start simple and build from there.
Here’s what Back Day looks like:
I’m not going to get into specific exercises here, because they don’t matter nearly as much as you might assume. What matters, especially at the start, is being in a location with a rough plan, then lifting heavy things until you can’t anymore.
Sets to Failure
This is the one fundamental principle if you’re trying to build muscle - lift more than you easily can. Whatever movement you’re doing, it’s ideal if you get to about eight reps then literally can’t keep going. Rest and repeat. This is known as going “to failure,” and it triggers muscle growth. Lifting light weights many times, by contrast, is essentially cardio, not weight training.
Building a Routine
My recommendation for building a portfolio of exercises is really simple: Google it, then focus particularly on YouTube videos. They’re invaluable for learning form. You’ll want to have about five to seven exercises per day, and do sets of roughly 3x12.
Especially at first, pick excercises that resonate with you for whatever reason. Over time, you’ll wind up with a roster of exercises built around what you enjoy. For me, for instance, discovering rope pull-downs was a breakthrough - they’re very satisfying.
It’s genuinely not more complicated than that - Five days, five to seven exercises per day, at weights that push you to failure.
Rigor is the Enemy of Discipline
But here’s the real trick - you don’t have to do all five days. Like I said, I wind up averaging 3 or 4 gym days per week. I don’t even keep track.
I would sum my lackadaisical philophy about fitness up in one slogan: rigor is the enemy of discipline.
I don’t think it’s productive to check boxes, or to beat yourself up when you fail to check certain boxes. I don’t count calories, and I don’t track sets. I don’t get my BMI measured. I just lift heavy things and keep doing that.
This may change - tracking sets and weight can make things more efficient, so I’m in the market for a good app or other tools. But the larger point is that these changes need to become part of a routine you don’t think about, not something you yell at yourself to do all over again each day.
But sadly, here’s where the premise of this entire post gets really real: Going to a gym sucks in every way, and makes it harder to build a frictionless, reflexive routine. Having my own gym in the building was absolutely crucial to my getting back on track – mainly thanks to the convenience, but also because you’re not competing for equipment and space. For a lot of people, there’s also the intimidation factor - for the record, nobody is actually watching you and silently critiquing your form, but it’s an understandable anxiety.
(Granted, my previous gym situation was particularly shit. We live in eastern Bushwick, and our best option was a very crowded Planet Fitness that was a 15 minute walk away. And the cable machines were basically impossible to get access to.)
What if you’re not rich or unemployed?
I wish I could neatly pivot all of this to explain how you can still accomplish similar results at a crowded gym 15 minutes away. But I’m not going to bullshit you: You probably can’t.
Especially if you also happen to have a so-called “job,” family, or other obligations.
Based on my experience in the last four months, I’m never going to bother with a sub-par public gym again. If I were to find myself back living somewhere without one in the building, I’d focus on figuring out what my options were at home. Remember, the real secret isn’t discipline - it’s eliminating friction.
If you live in a normal American home, you probably have space for a bench and a set of free weights. I’m not an expert on equipment, so I’m not even going to link anything here, but you should be able to find a functional starter setup for about $200, and maybe less if you buy used.
The second thing I’d consider, which takes up even less space and actually gives you more options, is a kettlebell. Get a weight you can get up off the ground, but have difficulty lifting over your head. Again, the Four Hour Body contains a lot of excercises using the kettlebell (and no, I swear this post is not an ad).
Finally, while this is definitely a pro-lifting post, it’s not anti-aything. I don’t happen to enjoy jogging (and it’s probably best avoided by anyone weighing over two bills), but if you’re into it, do it. I’m currently not doing any yoga, mostly to save money, but it has been a wildly transformative force in my life and I’ll probably write something about it soon.
It sounds ridiculously simple, but the point boils down to this: do what feels good, and make it as easy as possible to do it given the options in front of you.
It’s not about willpower, it’s about logistics and strategy.
That’s really all there is to it.