MVP: Minimum Viable Physique
Hi, I’m Manu and my entire professional career has been devoted to startups.
I'm also a certified personal trainer, EMT, and competitive men's physique bodybuilder. Throughout my career, I've conducted kinesiology research at a tier 1 research university, led strength and conditioning for NCAA athletes preparing for the Paralympics, and collaborated extensively with special populations with severe mental and physical disabilities.
I view fitness as an anchor to my career. I've leveraged my belief in fitness to coach individuals and organizations on making healthy decisions—which compounds into their personal and professional lives. Optimizing your health is the cheat code for a better life.
I've trained in dance, gymnastics, and martial arts. I've tried countless workout programs and diets. And after digesting so much material, I think there's a simple way to look at health and wellness that will benefit most people.
Everyone knows that a healthy lifestyle is the key to a happier life, a more productive career, and optimizing the overall quality of your life.
Yet too often a common thing gets in the way of this: life.
Work, society, and our culture don't respect health. Every day we are forced into routines that mismanage our wellness. The leading causes of death are actually all preventable — but most people ignore the basics. Worse, there's so much misinformation out there, it's complicated to sift through the noise.
The reality is things are relatively simple. We know that movement, nutrition, and recovery are so important, yet we're always looking for shortcuts. We might nail one part of the puzzle, but get discouraged when our neglect of the other components derails all progress. Fitness needs to sustainable. This is my minimalist framework for getting your health on track, without detracting from your life. It's an 80/20 approach to wellness: 80% of the results probably come from 20% of the inputs.
This is not an in-depth dive into health and wellness. It is a blunt checklist of things to implement. There are tons of highly educated experts with deep knowledge in all things fitness. Please Google them. If you're already super into fitness, this won't help. This is just the base layer of my pyramid with a flexible approach to stay on track regardless of a crazy schedule.
I did this all naturally, I did this without losing my sanity, and I did it while making strides in my professional life.
This is the Minimum Viable Physique™.
Manu Edakara
Section 1: Lifestyle
Set up a health regimen like your quality of life depends on it, because, well, it does.
For too many, the default is no movement. Humans are designed to move — when we don’t, we encounter problems. The easiest way to age is to not take your health seriously. It has to somehow be ingrained in your busy lifestyle.
Habit formation > motivation. Discipline and consistency creates results. Inspiration will wane and fade.
Sitting is the new smoking. Walk 10,000 steps a day. Any wearable can track this for you.
Sign up for a weekly (or daily) group fitness activity that other people will hold you accountable for. Some ideas:
Biking
Bouldering
Dance
Hiking
Jump rope
Martial arts
Yoga
Fix your mindset. Age truly is a number—be the person that doesn't grow up and never stops playing. Be the person that recommends active ideas for social gatherings. It doesn't need to be intensive, but a small committed change with accountability partners will add up over time.
Section 2: Recovery
Sleep is more important than exercise and nutrition combined. Your body recovers and rejuvenates during sleep, which leads to enhanced performance in all aspects of life. However, modern lifestyles (whether it be babies, travel, or working late with artificial light), make it difficult to adhere to a consistent sleep schedule.
Quantity of sleep ≠ quality of sleep.
Quality of sleep is dependent on how well you can dive into deep sleep, rather than simply counting the hours you've laid in bed.
The human sleep cycle is roughly 90 minutes and divided into several stages—with the later ones considered deeper sleep, where the body repairs and rejuvenates. Average adults go through 4-5 cycles a night.
If you're woken up in the later stages of the sleep cycle, you're more likely to be groggy and not feel rested.
Hence, instead of setting arbitrary numbers for your alarm clock in the morning, you should time your wake-up time at the end of a sleep cycle.
Even if you have limited time and irregular hours, you can time your sleep according to sleep cycles.
This app will do exactly that for you: https://sleepyti.me/.
Find out what recovery means to you—yoga, massage, therapy—and do it at least weekly. If you have your recovery down, you'll be in this game for decades. Why would you not live healthy for the rest of your life?
Section 3: Nutrition
Calories in > calories burned = weight gain
Calories in < calories burned = weight loss
Weight gain doesn't necessarily mean muscle gain, and weight loss doesn't necessarily mean fat loss. To ensure that weight gain is mostly muscle and weight loss is mostly fat, you need to watch your macronutrients. You want to change your body composition rather than just watching the number on the scale. The following is the only diet you'll ever need, and great news, no foods are off-limits.
There are three macronutrients in food: protein, carbs, and fats. Manipulating them in specific ratios will help you burn fat and build muscle rapidly, rather than focusing on calories.
There are no good or bad foods. Fat is not bad. Carbs are not bad. Just hit your macros.
Meal timing and meal frequency are not as important as hitting your macros.
This tool will calculate your macros based on your goals.
Next download MyFitnessPal and input in your macros.
Now you can eat anything, as long as you hit your total number of grams for carbs, fat, and protein. You can scan nutrition labels, look up food you ordered outside, and input in home-cooked dishes easily. The point is not to weigh everything meticulously—it's to eyeball your nutrition in a flexible manner that is sustainable and gives you real targets to hit every day.
Some other tips that might help:
Drink a ton of water. Skip all other beverages.
Don't drink alcohol. But if you do, drink plenty of water, skip the cocktails and junk food, and have a protein shake before you go to bed. The following day, make sure you get active.
Bake things. Get an air fryer.
The easiest diet hack is smoothies. It's the easy method to intake a bunch of healthy foods—and with a banana, everything tastes good. Takes 2 minutes to use a blender to whip up an awesome concoction filled with protein, antioxidants, and veggies.
Try to include no-cook transportable foods: Greek yogurt, energy bars, nuts.
Intermittent fasting. Breakfast is overrated. Skip it, get on with your day, burn fat, and eat later. I usually focus all of my meals around my workouts. Doing this actually frees up your time throughout the day and you have one less decision to make, allowing you to cruise through work.
If you are interested in supplements, read more here. If you want more diet ideas, check out this and this.
I only structure my diet around my workout:
Pre-workout
0.5g/lb of bodyweight of carbs (mostly fruit)
0.2g/lb of bodyweight of protein
1 bottle of water (25oz)
Intra-workout
1 bottle of a sports drink (like Gatorade)
1 bottle of water (25oz)
Post-workout shake:
2 scoops whey protein
0.7g/lb of bodyweight of carbs
2 bottles of water (50oz)
For reference, my grocery list:
Luxury items I keep an eye out for sales or look for when I go out to eat.
Proteins
Seafood
Ahi tuna, canned bluefin tuna, crab, lobster, oyster, shrimp, wild salmon, sushi
Dairy
Butter, cheese, eggs, Greek yogurt, kefir, liquid egg whites
Poultry
Chicken breast, ostrich, quail, turkey, turkey bacon
Red meat
Buffalo, eye of the round, flank, goat, jerky, lamb, New York strip, top sirloin, venison
Other
Alligator, crocodile, kangaroo, mixed nuts, peanut butter, protein bars, rabbit
Fruits (I love fruit, and definitely overindulge here than in vegetables)
Apple, avocado, banana, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, coconut, honeydew melon, kiwi, lime, mango, papaya, pomegranate, pineapple, strawberries, tangerines
Vegetables (I don't get enough of these in. I usually blend in a smoothie or eat as a salad with vinaigrette, croutons, & goat cheese)
Bell peppers, broccoli, cucumber, eggplant, kale, lettuce, mushrooms, spinach, sweet potato
Spices
Black pepper, cinnamon, garlic, ginger, green tea, salt, turmeric
Other
Black beans, honey, oatmeal
Section 4: Training
If your lifestyle, sleep, and nutrition are regulated, there's one more piece—the stimulus to change your body.
The human body has seven major movement patterns: push, pull, squat, lunge, hinge, rotation, and gait. These movements occur in 3 different planes (forward and backward, right and left, and top and bottom). The following exercises will cover all of those, hit every major muscle in your body, and if done correctly, will greatly enhance prior imbalances and issues in your kinetic chain.
These are the exercises listed by movement pattern. Whenever I do not progress on an exercise, I'll just move onto the next one. For example, in the squat movement pattern, if I plateau at goblet squats, I'll start low-bar squatting. This is an easy way to keep making progress in the main movement patterns and keeps things fresh.
Squat (Goblet squat, low-bar squat, high-bar squat, front-squat)
Horizontal push (Incline bench press, dumbbell bench press, incline dumbbell bench press, push-ups)
Horizontal pull (Barbell bent-over row, Pendlay row, humble dumbbell row, inverted row)
Hinge (Sumo deadlift, Romanian deadlift, conventional deadlift, rack pull, kettlebell swings, barbell hip thrust, trap bar deadlift)
Vertical pull (Pull-ups, neutral-grip lat pull-downs)
Vertical push (Standing barbell shoulder press, standing dumbbell shoulder press, seated dumbbell shoulder press, Arnold press)
Gait (Farmer's walk)
Lunge (Dumbbell lunges)
Rotation (Russian twist, lateral medicine ball throw)
The workouts are performed in superset fashion (each one grouped together performed immediately one after another, with no rest). You get double the work done in half the time.
Workout 1
Squat
Superset:
Horizontal push
Horizontal pull
Rotation, lunge, gait, or abs
Workout 2
Hinge
Superset:
Vertical push
Vertical pull
Rotation, lunge, gait, or abs
Start of with 3 sets of 5 for each exercise. Once you stop progressing with your exercises take a break for a week. Then 5 sets of 5. Then 3 sets of 8. Then 3 sets of 12. Then 1 set of 20. Then repeat. That's it. It's brutally simple. You only need to do it twice a week, and add in anything your heart desires. Want more arms? Add more arms.
Every rep counts < every quality rep counts
Don't sacrifice form for weight
Progressive overload is key. Each time you go to the gym, try one more rep, one more pound, one more set.
Throw in your favorite ab exercises in between training days.
When you come in, train hard. You have 4 days off.
Learn your favorite exercises in each movement pattern and add more as needed
Every workout routine will have these as its bread and butter. Boring? Yes. Effective. Yes. And all you need is a power rack. You'll save money and time over a gym membership. Muscle grows when you're recovering, not when you're tearing it down in the gym. And on this routine, with minimal time spent working out—every single time it's time for you to hit the weight, you should be fully recovered and itching to attack them. It's simple to remember and will keep you in good shape.
If you want more, there's tons of fantastic routines out there. This is aimed at people who want to get in, get out, and maintain a good physique.
Conclusion
Health can be a cornerstone of your life without overtaking your life. Keep things flexible. A brief recap of what you need to do:
Do something active everyday
Resistance train
Keep it stupid simple. Stop chasing gimmicks and stick to the foundations of the pyramid. It sounds too simple—but ironing out these pillars will permeate to all aspects of your health: dental, sexual, skincare, mood, and more. Once you have the basics tweaked, you can add in specifics.
This is just what I do. What works for me, might not work for you. Tweak it to fit whatever you want. Don't want to sleep? Don't sleep. Yoga doesn't feel good? Don't do yoga.
Move it.