Examine.com Fitness Guide

The problem — when it comes to fitness — is that too many people just focus on building muscle or losing fat. But those are only two parts of a much bigger picture!

Fitness is about optimizing systems of the human body to work well together. That means understanding everything from optimal sleep quality and hormone regulation to joint health.

And years of research have taught us this: fitness is usually oversimplified. For many people, it is all about muscle and fat, weights and cardio; but to solve a puzzle as complex as optimal fitness, hammering the same routines over and over will not work.

You need to figure out your personal bottlenecks among the six main fitness factors and take advantage of the most recent evidence to remove them, or even turn them into strengths!

1. Joint health
   Healthy joints allow your body to deal with the strains of exercise, sports, and normal everyday activities. A lack of pain should be your everyday state!
2. SleepDeep, restful sleep lets your body recover from the day’s activities and wake up energized.
3. Muscle and exercise performanceMuscle is one of the two obvious fitness factors, but optimal muscle mass isn’t just for looks: it helps keep testosterone levels high and lets you enjoy physical activities.
4. Fat lossFat is the second obvious fitness factor: high body fat leads to lower testosterone, lower self-esteem, and accelerated aging.
5. TestosteroneOptimal testosterone levels have far-reaching benefits, including more muscle, greater mental clarity, and better mood.
6. Cardiovascular healthCardiovascular health grows in importance as you age: improving it now will not only boost your recovery but also help prevent future heart complications.

Get immediately download Examine.com Fitness Guide (January 2021)

It’s all interconnected:

Here’s a real-life example: your knees.

Every pound of excess weight you carry means about 4 pounds of extra pressure on your knees when you walk, 8 when you run. In other words, if you’re just 10 pounds overweight, that’s 40 to 80 pounds of extra pressure on your knees with every step you take!

And yet, if you’re overweight, the first thing friends told you was likely to run, either outside or on a treadmill. Miles of running every day. Hours of running each week. “No pain no gain!”

That’s a recipe for disaster.

Instead, you could alternate between running, swimming, and lifting, so that your efforts don’t all put pressure on your knees. You can also decrease your knee pain with smarter nutrition, supplementation, and body positioning at work.

The Fitness Guide gives you a comprehensive approach at fitness, realizing that you should not just improve one facet, but all facets.

We also provide you with free lifetime updates to the Fitness Guide. Originally launched in 2018, we have spent over a thousand hours updating it with the latest research.

Nutrition research never stops — we are always learning something new, and we make sure to pass it on to you.

The Examine Fitness Guide is the best of both worlds: it ensures you have a handle on the big picture of interconnected fitness, and it is meticulously research-backed