Starting From Zero

A guide for readers who want to begin, or begin again, and have no idea how

Starting from zero is hard. You have many questions and many doubts, but you have the desire to make a change in your life…. that’s the first critical step. Maybe you’re here because you see your physical capabilities changing, or the medications piling up in your cabinet, and you want to change that. Maybe you were an athlete in high school and college, but life got busy, and your priorities shifted. I’ve heard countless stories in my 25+ year career as a surgeon. They shape much of what I share here… so let’s meet Rob and Ann. I think their stories will resonate with many of you.

Rob is fifty-two and played basketball in high school. He kept playing pickup into his late twenties, then stopped, like many people do when work, kids, and the rest of life crowd it out.

Twenty-five years later, his 14-year-old son asked him to come shoot around in their driveway. Less than five minutes in, he had to sit down on the curb with his hands on his knees, breathing like he had run a fast mile. He sat there, looking at his son, and felt something he had not felt in years: the gap between the abilities he used to have and those he had now.

Ann is forty-eight. She did not play organized sports as a kid, but she was active in other ways. She kept up with her friends on weekend hikes through her thirties; she could carry her own groceries and chase her kids around the yard without thinking about it. A few months ago, she went on a trip out west with a group of friends. The trip involved more hiking than she had done in fifteen years. The second day was hard. By the third day, she couldn’t go on, so she stayed back at the cabin while the others went up the trail. She told everyone she just needed a quiet day. She spent the day on the porch, but she did not feel quiet. She felt sidelined, and as she sat on that porch, she decided that something needed to change.

This guide is for both of them, and any of you who see your own life narrowing or are worried about your health fading.

Who This Is For, And Who It Isn’t

This is a guide for the reader who has been thinking about (re)starting, maybe for months or years, and has not yet found a starting point that feels right for them.

The fitness conversation online is loud, confusing, and crowded.

Most of what’s written online is not aimed at this audience either. Most of it is aimed at people who already train, who want to optimize, who already have a routine, and want a better one. The reader this guide is written for is somewhere upstream of all of that.

If you are that reader, I want you to know that this guide is not about suffering or challenge. It is not a twelve-week kick your ass program with before-and-after photographs of someone halfway through their journey. It is not a workout per se. It is the platform that comes before all of that, the foundation that makes everything else possible, and building the foundation is not as hard as you think it is.

The hard part is starting. Let’s do this…

Why So Much Starting-Over Content Misses The Point

The cultural conversation around starting a fitness program is structured in a way that is unhelpful for most of you.

The dominant narrative is the dramatic transformation. Before-and-after photographs. Couch to marathon in twelve months. These stories are almost always told from the other side of the gap. Implicitly, the message is that the way back is intense, performative, and visibly difficult, and that those who succeed are those who summon the willpower to endure long enough.

Many look at me and ask how I can comment on what it means to start from zero. Well… I may be in the best shape of my life now, but it wasn’t always like this. My residency found me working 100+ hour weeks. Then, as a sports surgeon by day and trauma surgeon at night, while helping raise 3 children… well, it was hard to find time to exercise. I managed a few walks or runs… but nothing like what I used to do. Eventually, I found time and trained back. But then came a long post-viral syndrome, and then an unplanned surgery. Each time, I had to start from zero. This is my lane.

The first step from sedentary to any movement produces the largest single biological return in the entire fitness journey. The biggest benefits to your health occur on the left side of this curve. I’ll dive into this in detail in a bit.

The people who succeed in the long run are almost never the ones who summoned willpower for a six-week challenging sprint. I’ve seen many people grind out and train for a 5k. Only to stop training after they run it. The people who succeed are those who started with something so small they could not fail at it, and they let their successes accumulate.

I have spent thirty years watching patients (re)start. The ones who get there are not the ones who suffered the most at the beginning. They are the ones who started with something they could actually do, on a random Tuesday afternoon, with no special equipment, and who came back and did it again on Thursday.

A Brief Word On The Narrowing

I have written elsewhere about what I call the narrowing. It is the slow, quiet shrinking of a person’s physical capacity that happens across a decade or two. It happens slowly, so it’s mostly invisible, until it’s not. You stop carrying the heaviest groceries, then you stop carrying any. You stop taking the stairs, then you stop attempting them. You stop the activities you used to do without thinking, and the stopping happens so gradually that you do not notice it. You normalize these changes, and you attribute the changes to age, to busyness, to a hundred reasonable accommodations, and at some point you find yourself, like Rob, on a curb after five minutes of activity, or like Ann, on a cabin porch while your friends are on the trail.

I am not going to fully develop the narrowing narrative here. What I want you to understand is that the narrowing is real, and it is often reversible across a much wider range than you think.

You Need Much Less Than You Think

This is the single most important section in the guide.

The biology of the first step from sedentary to any movement is not linear. It is curved, and the curve is steepest right at the beginning. The first ten minutes of walking per day produce more cardiovascular benefit than the next thirty. The first five repetitions of a basic strength movement produce more neural response than the next twenty will. The first session of any kind of movement, in a body that has been sedentary for years, produces measurable adaptations within the same week.

This matters because it inverts the assumption most starting-from-zero readers carry into the work. The assumption is that meaningful progress requires meaningful effort, and that the effort needed is far beyond where they currently are.

A ten-minute walk three times a week will produce measurable improvements in resting heart rate, blood pressure, and aerobic capacity within four to six weeks in a previously sedentary adult. Five wall push-ups twice a day will produce measurable improvements in upper-body strength within the same window. Standing on one foot while you brush your teeth will produce measurable improvements in balance within weeks. None of these is impressive, but they all count. More than you think.

The implication for you is simple. The first thing you do this week will be the most valuable single thing you have ever done for your body. Not because it will be impressive on paper, but because the slope of the response curve is steepest at the very beginning, and this is where you are at.

You Cannot Fail At This If You Start Small Enough

The other thing I want you to understand before we get to the specific actions is that the people who (re)start successfully are almost always the people who chose a first action they could not fail at.

The first action has to be small enough that on the worst day you can imagine, in the busiest week, with the worst sleep, you can still do it. If your plan for Monday is a forty-five-minute run, you have a plan that will fail on the first hard week, and the failure will compound into a story you tell yourself about how you cannot do this. If your plan for Monday is a ten-minute walk, the worst day produces a five-minute walk, and the five-minute walk is still a success, and then those successes accumulate.

The story you tell yourself is the variable that matters most. Not the workout you completed today. The version of yourself you are becoming through the things you do consistently, at a scale you can sustain. The first “job” is not to get fitter. The first job is to become someone who shows up, on a small scale, for long enough that showing up becomes the thing you do, not the thing you have to convince yourself to do.

That is the whole game, in many ways, and everything else is downstream of it. Once you start, and once you start to build a habit, progression comes far more naturally for most of you.

For Members, I walk you through the platform itself. The four specific actions to take this week, what to add after the platform has been holding for a few weeks. I also dive into the identity framing that determines whether the work holds across years. Members also get a downloadable two-page companion PDF with the platform and the first twelve weeks, designed to stick on your fridge so the actions are in front of you when you need them. I also include links to the “reset” workouts that come next… when you’re ready.