The Marginal Utility of Health and Fitness
This is probably the most important blog/essay/rambling that you’ll ever read and that I’ll ever write. It’s the meat and potatoes of everything in the industry I feel is right, wrong and undeniably frustrating. It’s why I despise the health and fitness industry. It’s why I LOVE the fact that a local trainer referred to us as a ‘filter for the bullshit’ in the fitness world. Deep breath...
There’s a thing in economics called marginal utility. It measures the ‘utility’ of a thing and follows the laws of reduced return. It’s measured in a fun thing called a ‘util’. I was completely hammered during that lecture in university and while I still managed to get my minor in Economics, I could be getting the terms a little mixed up. Here’s the example that I’ll never forget:
You have $50 and you love sushi. If you spend $5 on sushi you get 10 utils of happiness. If you spend another $5 on sushi, you get 8 utils. At some point the money you put into sushi is no longer worth the utils of happiness that you get out of it. It’s similar to the law of diminishing returns. This law of marginal utility applies just about everywhere and, most importantly because this is a health and fitness blog, in the world of health and fitness.
The crux of this one is to identify what aspects of the health and fitness world are worth it, and which ones just give you bragging rights, or are just… I don’t know, stupid. So let’s dig into it and start from the top before we get into the reeds. At what point does your health and fitness regime stop being beneficial and just becomes cumbersome?
Part One
Let’s start with the actual amount of time you spend in the gym (read: time spent actively improving your health and fitness).
Unless it’s your hobby and you don’t have anything else that you like doing, working out every day of the week is stupid. From the point of view of changing your body composition, gaining strength, getting ripped or building physical size or whatever--you need rest. This is the biggest thing that drives me crazy because it makes people think that they have to work out everyday to see change or that if they miss a workout they’re going to lose everything, get fat and die.
Not hardly! If you’re a trainer and you tell your client that they need to train every day, you’re hurting them. You’re hurting the entire industry of health and fitness. It simply isn’t the case, unless you’re actively training for a competition but even then, the continued training has diminishing returns and after so many continuous days, you’re no longer gaining anything other than soreness, opportunity for injury and a lack of a life outside the gym.
So how do you maximize the utility of working out? To be honest, it’s all about the individual and how much you’re willing to give up. Personally, I like to workout 4-5 times a week but that’s if I have the time for it. I like to run with my dogs and my wife, I like to lift weights and I like to play soccer. Running is something that I like to do and it benefits my overall level of health and fitness. It’s a 25 minute ordeal to get a couple of kilometers in and I always feel good afterward. That’s kind of where I draw the line with running because I really don’t enjoy running; I get bored and it becomes a chore. The marginal utility of running, for me, is anywhere between 2.5km and 5km. After that I’ve checked out and my time is better spent elsewhere.
When it comes to good ol’ fashioned clangin’ and bangin’, it’s a little different. My focus lately has been hitting a number of sets per week, per muscle group. This is typically somewhere between 12-20 sets and it depends on what I’m doing. What this translates to can look really different for lots of people. Let’s take a chest and shoulder routine as an example and pretend it looks like this:
Barbell bench press: 4 sets, 12 reps
Overhead dumbbell shoulder press: 4 sets, 12 reps
Incline cable pec (chest) flye: 4 sets, 10 reps
45 degree bent over delt flye: 4 sets, 10 reps
Above, you have eight total sets of chest exercises and eight total sets of delt/shoulder exercises; these count against my weekly goal, which coincides with my overall goal for my health and fitness. If I were to complete the four exercises above, I’m looking at roughly 30 minutes, start to finish. Now, I have to look at what the rest of my week needs to look like to meet my goal to determine if this is going to cut it or not. I have legs, back, arms and core to fit into this schedule so I likely need to increase the length of each workout a little to get it all complete within four days, and not spend much more than 45 minutes in the gym working out.
The plan here is to do as much as I can without losing out on my free time, and not getting so sore that I can’t enjoy life. I like to be able to tie my shoes and don’t much care for not being able to lift my arms for three days. More reps, more sets, but gaining the utils without getting so sore that the return on my fitness investment is not giving me that negative result. Not only do I despise being sore, it’s not really a true meter of progress. When someone tells you that they wear their gym-soreness as a badge of progress I’m going to argue that they’re a little off the mark. My badge of progress is navigating the stairs in the house and being able to sit on the toilet without inadvertently imitating a cripple. You don’t want to waste the next day or two being sore--you want to go out and run with your dogs, ride your bike with your partner or putter about the yard comfortably.
And the secret is that you’re still making progress toward your overall goal for your health and fitness. You’re putting in the optimal amount of training time to get the most utility and return from that effort. This whole idea of marginal utility is absent across so many fitness platforms and it’s a major hindrance for people getting into a health and fitness regime.
The long and short here is that taking on a program to better your overall health and fitness profile shouldn’t interfere with the rest of your life and, truly, it should be paying dividends for you. You shouldn’t expect to have the body of Superman or Wonderwoman inside of a week, but you should also enjoy what you’re doing and see results and progress toward your goal.
I just realized that I wrote an entire blog and didn’t make a single Star Wars reference, so… May the Force be with you.
-v
