The authors of this article, Marti Soosaar and Krete Junson, both studied physical education at the University of Tartu. Marti Soosaar founded Stebby, Estonia’s largest health services marketplace, and FitQ, software designed for personal trainers. Krete Junson is the recreational sports manager at the University of Tartu Academic Sports Club.
How can you finally get a beautiful, fit body? This is undoubtedly a frequently asked question for many people, and the computing power needed to solve it seems to fall somewhere between that required by the Bitcoin system and the energy it would take to calculate the final value of pi.
The subject is approached from different angles quite often, so you may already have read a dozen such articles to pass the time. In the worst case, however, your fitness may have moved backwards rather than forwards between reading them. Were those articles uninformed and badly written? We probably will not be revealing any X-Files-level secrets when we say that the lack of results you have achieved is largely not the fault of those articles, but of the fact that you have not actually done much yourself.
With this article, you once again have two options. Read it and do something, or read it and do nothing. The results will follow accordingly. If you have finally decided to say goodbye to the quitter’s mentality, not finishing this article is no longer an option.
Do you have time to work out?
Before we get to the real substance, we need to deal with this question. Ask yourself whether you have time to exercise. A survey conducted among Stebby users a few years ago found that more than 90% of people value an active lifestyle and exercise, yet almost half reportedly fail to exercise enough because they do not have the time.
So what is the truth about time? We all have 24 hours in a day, yet some people manage to work out while others never seem able to fit it in. Interestingly, if you look more closely, it appears that the people who find time to exercise tend to be more energetic and successful in life. How does it make sense that people who are more successful in what they do have more time to work out than others? Could it be that the time they invest in exercise, and the energy they get in return, is exactly what has helped make them successful?
Let’s call a lack of time what it honestly is —one big, fat excuse. Anyone can complete a good workout in just 30 minutes. On FitQ, for example, you can start a video workout wherever you happen to be. Put on your workout clothes and start sweating, even at the office. You will also save the time you would otherwise spend travelling to a gym.
Fine-tuning your motivation is key
To turn a lifestyle change into a lasting habit, you need motivation and a goal. Your goal does not necessarily have to be setting an Olympic record. It can be something much closer to home, such as overcoming persistent back pain through movement or feeling 10/10 in your body every day. If that goal motivates you more than a pint of beer or a slice of cake, there is hope that things will start moving in the right direction. Still, if you enjoy beer or cake, you are bound to slip up sooner or later.
So here is the first practical tip for making your life more active: never abandon your entire journey just because you overindulged one day. Throwing in the towel is a guaranteed route back to square one—or even lower.
What we are really looking for is balance in our lives, and mentally beating yourself up will ultimately do neither your wellbeing nor your results any good. So try to find a balance between exercise and “enjoying life.” Believe that it is possible.
In the long run, you need to develop a habit that becomes part of your life and matters more than your initial motivation or goal. Goals come and go, but habits remain. Do you remember how hard it was to learn to read or ride a bicycle, and how easy it is today? The same applies to an exercise habit: until you have one, getting out of the house can feel incredibly difficult. Once the stone has started rolling downhill, however, it is hard to stop.
Getting started with movement
First, let’s distinguish between everyday movement and exercise. Ideally, you need both in your life. You have probably heard here and there that you should take 10,000 steps a day. There is no particularly precise or scientific answer as to why it should be exactly 10,000. Someone once threw out that number, and a large number of people and media outlets picked it up and kept the idea going. Still, there is some truth to it. Anyone who works in an office, drives to work and has ever tracked their everyday movement knows very well that an ordinary workday tends to add up to only 2,000–3,000 steps. That is why you need to make an active effort to move both at work and at home. It is undoubtedly one of the keys to a much healthier life.
Everyday movement keeps your body working and helps prevent various aches caused by prolonged static postures. It also burns calories, which in the modern world come at us from every direction and in larger quantities than we planned. If a colleague has a birthday and offers you a slice of kringel pastry, you would probably prefer to accept it politely and enjoy it, wouldn’t you? Yet that calorie bomb was probably not in your original plan for the day. Of course, colleagues and their birthdays are likely to come around much more often than once a year. Thirty unplanned slices of kringel a year eventually equal roughly 1 kg of unplanned fat stored on your hips. On the other hand, turning down 30 slices of kringel while the rest of the team happily indulges like Erik Orgu amounts to 30 frustrating moments a year. Neither option is good. Moderate physical activity gives you healthy muscle tone, which adds energy to every day. In addition, 30 minutes of moderate daily movement burns 200–300 kcal, allowing you to accept that slice of kringel from your colleague if you wish and sincerely congratulate them on gaining another year of life experience.
Do not forget your workouts either
Beginners often ask whether they should pay more attention to nutrition or exercise. Which one should take priority? It is as difficult a question as whether the chicken or the egg came first. Without the egg, there would be no chicken, and vice versa. The same applies to getting into good shape. If you put your foot down at the dinner table like Ott Tänak, you will end up with abs like Baruto. He is a very athletic man, isn’t he? If sumo is not your sport, however, you will unfortunately need to place some limits on how much food you devour—unless you burn as many calories each day as Rein Taaramäe on a mountain stage of the Vuelta.
But can you become slim without exercising? If simply getting slim is your goal, the answer is yes. But do you want to look good or look starved? Unfortunately, there is no way to get a good-looking body without exercise. We can therefore confidently say that both are fairly equally important. Nutrition experts say that around ⅔ of the emphasis could be placed on nutrition and ⅓ on exercise, but fortunately this is not an eighth-grade maths problem with only one absolutely correct answer. “Life is not just black and white,” Best B4 once sang, and we likewise recommend paying conscious attention to both sides.
The beginner spotlight
Imagine a dream. You are at the gym for the first time, and it feels as though everyone is staring at you and smirking at your clothes and a few extra kilos. The laughter becomes especially wild and deafening when you pick up a piece of exercise equipment and try to do something with it. Even the receptionist cannot suppress a grin, despite sitting with their back to the gym and not being able to see you at all.
Unfortunately, for many people this is not merely a nightmare. We have heard from several people who seem to have fears like these in real life and feel that everyone else has come to the gym and paid for a ticket solely to watch them with a critical eye.
The reality is that everyone at the gym is focused on themselves and their own workout, and nobody has time to stare at you. If you feel that you do not know how to use a particular machine, ask a fellow gym-goer who looks friendly. They will certainly be happy to help. At larger gyms, of course, you will usually be given a tour before or after joining and shown everything you need to know. You can find libraries of free-weight exercises with instructions online using your phone, even during your workout. This reduces to almost zero the chance that you will become the new star of some silly dumbbell-flailing video in a YouTube clip with a billion views.
If you keep training long enough to become an old hand yourself, you will understand that everyone does their own thing at the gym, every new face is expected and welcome, and people have not come there to watch you work out.
The workout gear dilemma
Does good workout gear make you a good athlete, or should you be a good athlete before owning good gear? There is no particularly good answer to this question. Either approach can work.
If money is not an issue for you and your bank account became so full yesterday that the bank called and asked you to withdraw some of it to make room, there is certainly nothing wrong with buying the latest and most expensive equipment. You can then show your friends how the derailleur on your bling-bling carbon-ultra-extra-max bicycle is so cutting-edge that it shifts gears in response to your thoughts. Expensive gear is not a sin. What matters is that it motivates you to move.
The main thing you should never assume is that an active lifestyle is not for you if you cannot afford to buy any equipment at all. With excuses like that, you definitely will not get any further than watching “Home and Away” (and after watching season 33, episode 212, you will add that you do not really have the time either).
You do not need any particularly special equipment for walking or jogging, especially during the summer. Even in winter, you can go for a slightly brisker walk that does not quite leave you dripping with sweat while wearing your ordinary clothes. At home, you can do push-ups and a full-body workout in your underwear if you like.
If you use a lack of money as a reason not to be physically active, you will instead end up in a situation where you also lack the energy and strength to take a more active approach to your work and escape your difficult financial circumstances. Movement can help you with that too.
How hard should you push yourself?
To get into good shape, you need to get both your everyday nutrition and your levels of movement and exercise right. You have certainly read that you should not overdo it. You have also experienced firsthand that too little effort does not produce results. So how much is enough? As a rule of thumb, a training load that improves your fitness starts at three workouts a week. In practical terms, that means working out at least every other day.
Here is a practical tip for beginners: do not exhaust yourself. Or do so only very rarely and on a very special occasion. For example, if you go on a long day of canoeing with friends, it is fine to feel quite tired by the evening, but do not do that every week.
With marathons and other kinds of craziness, what ultimately happens is that you exercise for one day and then do nothing for a week. In the end, you discover that, summa summarum, you have exercised less during that period than you would have without that one day of extreme effort.
A good training load is one that leaves you feeling that you have moderately challenged yourself and are slightly tired by the end of the workout. You will recover comfortably by the following day. Eventually, your fitness will improve so much that your distances become longer and your weights increase almost without you noticing over time.
By exercising moderately, you will not put your health at risk either. Of course, if you are training towards a specific goal, light effort alone will unfortunately not be enough. In that case, you should definitely have a health check when you begin so that a sports doctor can give you an honest assessment of your condition. And unless you happen to have Mati Alaver’s level of knowledge yourself, you should also enlist the help of a coach.
What coach? I’m only a recreational athlete!
As mentioned, hiring a coach makes sense when you want to achieve a specific goal rather than simply enjoy moving. A good coach naturally expects to be paid for good work. It is therefore up to you to decide how important achieving your higher goal is and whether you are prepared to invest money as well as your time.
Working with a personal trainer as a recreational athlete does not mean returning to the junior class at your old sports school, where a pot-bellied man with a stopwatch aggressively blew his whistle whenever he thought you were not trying hard enough. And he seemed to think so about once a minute. You can forget those childhood nightmares, because today you can choose your own trainer, largely on your own terms.
What expectations should you have when training with a coach? Clearly, if you are not Katrina Lehis, there is no point going to Nikolai Novosjolov and saying that you want to become an Olympic champion, then expecting the coach to carry you all the way to the Olympic podium, where you can listen to the national anthem with a tear in your eye. That certainly will not happen.
A smart coach can, however, help you understand your current abilities and how to progress from there towards the best possible goal. By involving a good coach in your preparation, you will undoubtedly make the most efficient use of the time you spend training and achieve better results than you would by creating your own plan or working out without one. A coach will also provide extra motivation: if they have prepared a plan for you and you ultimately fail to follow it, how will you look them in the eye?
You can certainly find good personal trainers at every larger recreational sports or fitness club. You can also browse FitQ Trainers, a website that brings together a selection of personal trainers, to see whether any of them might suit you. Working with a personal trainer or joining an adult recreational training group is becoming increasingly popular both in Estonia and around the world.
If you still think that you do not need a trainer and that from now on—after reading this article—you can handle exercising for your health and motivating yourself, your path forward is to expand your knowledge. You do not necessarily need a trainer’s help to do that.
Your friends Google and YouTube are always ready to lend a hand, of course. Unfortunately, their algorithms are not optimised to provide you with the most accurate content possible, but rather the most clickable and widely read content—which may sometimes be the wild fantasy of a confident amateur. Several clubs, including the fitness club at the University of Tartu Academic Sports Club, offer members lectures and useful content about how movement, nutrition, sleep and other activities affect your body and its condition. You can be much more confident in the quality of this information than in the advice of Dr Google and Coach YouTube. Always evaluate your sources critically when educating yourself.
Final words
Did you read this fairly long blog post all the way to the end? We now have one piece of good news and one piece of bad news for you. Let’s start with the good news. You can give yourself a congratulatory pat on the back, because today you have probably read more text than 99.9% of average Instagram scrollers. You have also gained more new knowledge than 99.7% of them, while getting at least as much entertainment as you would from Instagram, because we even included one joke in this article.
The bad news is that you probably did not move while you were reading, so now it is time to start correcting that mistake. If this article made you dream of a beach body but you still do nothing about it, you will remain nothing more than a dreamer. So now: 5-4-3-2-1—go.
