The 5/3/1 Method

Hey friends,

2 quick things before we start:

1 – Content Warning ⚠️ – This email contains discussions about my body composition, DEXA scan results, workout and macro tracking etc. If you don’t like reading about that stuff, please feel free to skip this issue.

2 – If you’re a current or aspiring YouTuber / creator, you might like to join a free online workshop I’m hosting next week. It’s titled The 5 Secrets to YouTube Success – we’ll be exploring the 5 Cs of YouTube success which helped me grow my channel, and which we share with our YouTuber Academy students. I’m going to cover the most important YouTube growth fundamentals so that you have everything you need to help your channel take off. Joining the event means you get access to the workshop and can replay it whenever you want, plus you’ll get all my notes, slides, and graphs to go back over.

The workshop is totally free – but you do need to RSVP as spots will go fast. It’s at 3PM BST on Monday August 5th. You can sign up here – looking forward to seeing you there.

Anyway, I started the week off with some disappointment 😢 Why? Thanks to a DEXA scan.

If you didn’t know, a DEXA scan is basically an X-ray that shows your body fat percentage and muscle mass (amongst other things). I’ve been doing these every 3-6 months for the past 2+ years, mostly because my friend Cliff (founder of Speechify) recommended it, and Peter Attia (author of Outlive) says we should do them at least yearly.

Anyway, I got the results, and… they weren’t good.

The good news was that, in the last 3 months, I’ve lost 1.5kg overall. Yay! That was sort-of my goal – to get more lean… But here’s the bad news – I actually (apparently) lost 2kg of muscle, and gained 500g of fat 😅

The best word to describe my feeling at seeing that result is “crestfallen”. For the last 3 months, I thought I was doing everything right – hitting the gym 2-3 times a week with a personal trainer, eating reasonably well, and aiming for 15,000 steps a day. Turns out, not so much.

This sent me down a rabbit hole of fitness research. I also chatted with my fitness coach, Dan Go, and realised a few things:

1. I was probably in a calorie deficit (as per the laws of thermodynamics) – ie: I burned more calories than I took in.
2. My protein intake was probably too low, hence why I lost muscle mass.
3. 2-3 gym sessions a week was probably not enough gym-time to maintain muscle mass.

But tbh, my main realisation was that I’d been putting too much faith in personal trainers and not taking enough control of my own fitness journey.

Don’t get me wrong, personal trainers are great. But I travel a lot, and every time I’d get a new one, I’d just say, “Hey, I wanna gain muscle and lose fat. Let’s do whatever you want.” So each trainer had a different plan, and I had no consistency with it.

My coach Dan’s been telling me for ages: “Have a workout plan, stick to it wherever you are, and if you hire a personal trainer, just ask them to help you stick to the plan.” I’d been resisting this because I thought it’d be awkward to have the conversation with personal trainers saying “hey I just need you to help me follow the plan I’ve already got”. But after these atrocious DEXA results, I decided to take my health into my own hands.

I did some research (thanks, Reddit r/fitness) and found the 5/3/1 method. I read the book over a few hours, and it resonated with me. So now, I’m following this plan, even with my personal trainer sessions. And you know what? It’s actually way more fun following a plan I’ve chosen for myself, rather than blindly following whatever the personal trainer asks me to do.

Relatedly, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “fast forward test”. It’s this concept where researchers ask people if they’d choose to fast forward through their current experience. If you would, it’s a sign you’re not satisfied with that part of your life (the movie Click starring Adam Sandler explores a similar idea).

I’ve always applied this test to most areas of my life, but for some reason, I never really applied it to the gym. I just told myself, “Meh, it’s okay if I don’t enjoy going to the gym. I don’t have to enjoy every moment of my life.”

But here’s the thing – since I’ve taken control of my workout plan, I’ve done 4 sessions, and I wouldn’t have chosen to fast forward any of them. That’s pretty cool, and novel for me.

It reminds me of how I learned to play piano. I picked it up later in life and only played songs I wanted to play. I chose my own adventure, and I enjoyed it way more than my friends who had strict teachers when they were young telling them what repertoire to practise and play.

So, I think one of the mistakes I’ve been making with fitness (other than general lack of consistency) is not taking autonomy over it. This is ironically something I talk about in the second chapter of my book, Feel-Good Productivity – when we approach a situation with a feeling of power, with ownership and responsibility, it becomes more intrinsically motivating.

Other than following a workout plan I’ve chosen, I’ve also started actively tracking my protein intake using the app “ProteinPal“. I’m aiming for 180g a day, and hitting that goal’s way harder than I thought it would be. But just tracking the number makes me way more conscious of my goal.

I’ve dabbled with full-on calorie and macro tracking in the past, but I’ve always found that too much of a nightmare. One of my principles for productivity is that we want “minimum viable systems” to get the result. Hopefully, just tracking my protein (rather than bothering with tracking all the macros and calories) will be way better than nothing.

I’m going traveling in about 2 weeks, so it’ll be interesting to see how I can keep this up on the road. If you’ve read this far, and you’re jacked and/or have any tips for maintaining fitness while traveling, I’d love to hear them 🙂

Have a great week!

Ali xx