Engineering Your Fitness Journey Like a Road Trip

Think of transforming your body like designing a powerful truck or supercar for an amazing road trip.

There are three key areas where you need to focus your energies.

If these areas are addressed — You’re good.

If you skip them, and many do, you’ll struggle.

You’ll need:

1. A great vehicle.
2. Quality fuel for your ride.
3. A masterful driver behind the wheel.

Prepping the Truck

First, let’s look at the vehicle itself. This is your body and we’re going to be building it for looks AND performance on the trip. To have a great trip, you’ll need a powerful, efficient, and durable engine paired with a strong and responsive suspension.

Your horsepower comes from your strength base.

For most guys, the magic zone is 3–4 strength sessions per week.

I like three whole-body sessions per week for most people. This is the “Goldilocks Zone” of enough work to get great results but not so much that it has to become your life. Much more than this is recreation, which is fine, but understand that’s what it is.

Full body workouts? How do I do that without overtraining? Here’s a simple strength template that will build both performance and aesthetics:

Basic Workout Template:

1. Good warm-up. 5–10 minutes of dynamic movement, calisthenics, and strategic stretching.

2. Heavy Lower Body Lift. This is a squat, deadlift, or loaded lunge variation. Warm-up as needed and get in 5–15 “working” reps spread over a few sets.

3. Superset Upper Body Push and Pull. I like pairing planes of motion here. So if you do horizontal presses, you want some rows. Overhead press? Then you want a pull-up or down variation. Somewhere between 25–50 total reps of each exercise works well.

4. Triset of Accessory Exercises: Bodyweight, isolation, and abs. This is where you can get into your nitty-gritty. Pick three exercises and do them a circuit for 2–4 total rounds. Minimize rest.

5. Cool it down with some easy soft-tissue work.

Now that you’re on your way to a powerful engine, let’s make it more durable and efficient.

This is your cardio (energy system) work.

This is important because with a better cardiovascular system you’ll:

• Recover from training faster.
• Perform more quality lifts without fatigue.
• Stay leaner.

So what do you do? Here’s a simple aerobic protocol:

Note: If you’re lifting hard several times a week, you don’t need to go too hard on the aerobic work. Easier is better. If you weren’t lifting much then you’d want to be at a higher intensity on the power/aerobic scale.

• 2–3x/wk 30+ minutes easy, steady work. Bike, Ruck/hike, Walk or Jog
• 1–2x/wk do 6–10 intervals of 20sec hard/40–60sec recovery

This gets your system in condition and touches on your higher intensity zones, as well.

Finally, you’ve got your engine tuned up. Let’s make sure your suspension is durable and responsive.

This is your mobility work.

There’s all sorts of ways to develop your mobility. The key to remember is that mobility is not flexibility. Mobility involves moving THROUGH ranges of motion, instead of just passively stretching. This is much more useful in an athletic and adaptive sense.

To work on your mobility, you can go to a full Yoga class or do a YT yoga vid. That’s a great option but it is time consuming. For most people, just doing a good dynamic warm-up and 5–10min/day working on some tight areas is a win.

Filling Up the Gas Tank

No matter how good your vehicle is, if you fill it with junk fuel then it won’t run nearly as well as it should.

You’ll lose power.

You’ll lose durability.

Your ride will be rough.

My friend and client Tony describes eating a bunch of junk as “peeing in your gas tank”. Sure, it’ll probably run, but it’s not going to be a great ride.

We don’t run on gas, but our food is fuel. Here’s how to simply break down your nutrition:

First, get your protein in.

Protein is your building blocks, and the more you train, the more you need.

1. Get lean protein in every meal. 3–4x/day.

2. 1–2 palm-sized servings/meal.

3. Want math? 0.8–1.0g/lb of bodyweight.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of how to get enough protein in, here’s an article I wrote on it.

For fitness nutrition, you want to make sure you’re eating enough fat.

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Despite what popular media has said, fat’s not a demon. It’s a necessary building block for your cells, hormones, and brain. The key is getting enough without overeating food in general.

Too low fat intake? You won’t recover well, your sex drive will plummet, and you’ll look and be brittle.

Your best fat sources are going to be from:

• High quality oils like olive, macadamia, and avocado.
• Meats and dairy.
• Eggs.
• Nuts.

You want about 20% (no less) of your daily calories from fat. For most people this is like 60–100g.

And now on to your real fuel:

Carbs are the third macronutrient (with fat and protein) that makes up most of our food. They’re the quickest pure energy source we have. If you’re doing a lot of activity then you’ll want your carbs.

Best sources?

Fruits and vegetables. They have lots of good “extras” like vitamins, minerals, and other phytonutrients. These nutrition powerhouses not only give you energy but also the little stuff you need to make the best use of it.

Sometimes, though, you get pretty full eating a lot of fruits and vegetables. You can kill your appetite before you get enough energy for high-performance training. If you need more energy, then you can go for the starches and sugars.

These would be your:

• Rice
• Oats
• Beans
• Quinoa
• Potatoes
• Sweet Potatoes
• Honey

These are all good for you IF you need the energy. If not, limit them. The starches can really be easy to overdo if you don’t have a use for that energy.

All right, we’ve got a great truck and it’s fueled up to go.

What’s missing?

Oh, yeah. The driver.

That’s you.

Preparing the Driver

A successful road trip and its driver needs three things…

1. A clear destination.
2. The skills to get there.
3. An adaptable plan and GPS.

First, we need a destination in mind. That’ll help us figure out a route.

Imagine you wanted to go “west”.

Well, that’s something, but you could end up in some great places or terrible ones. There’s not much sense in going somewhere different than what we envision. We’re looking for a certain ending place with this journey, so we need to dial it in a little better.

But if you decided you wanted to go to Seattle, we can build a real map to get there.

Building a fit, high-performance body is no different.

Decide what performance metrics matter to you.

What do you want to look like?

How do you want to feel on a daily basis?

The right outcome makes the right plan easier to build. For example, if you want to bodybuild, you know that marathon running is probably not the most efficient way to get there. You’d be narrowed down to bodybuilding programs and save the energy that you could have spent casting around.

Now that you’ve decided what you want to look like, just like a driver deciding where to go, you need the skills to do it.

Driving on a flat road in New Mexico is different from the Colorado Rockies in February.

Lifting for aesthetics is different from Olympic Lifting or Yoga. If you don’t currently have the knowledge or skills to do something, you now know where to look. Get a book, read online, hire a coach, or whatever you need to do to build the skills to put that plan in action.

Remember to keep an eye on your GPS.

You will probably have to make some changes in your journey as you go.

Road construction, traffic jams, and detours are bound to happen.

Your fitness journey is no different. Stuff will come up. You’ll get sick, there’ll be a project at work that means staying late, or you have to go to a wedding and miss some workouts. Remember that you’re in this for the trip, so be willing to deviate a little from the path if you need to.

Keep the end in mind and adapt as needed. Just like in a long road trip, the key is to get back on the route as quickly as possible. If you take a five mile detour to skip some traffic, that’s probably not a big deal. But going 150 miles out of your way could be a huge change.

All right! Now you’re ready for a fitness journey road trip.

The next, and most important move, is to start it up, throw it in gear, and get moving down the road. Adventure awaits and change will only happen once the wheels are turning.

Want to get even deeper? Check out my full Get In Shape — The Ultimate Guide here for free.