I agree with the points he makes and have had a similar experience. I have worked desk jobs with minimal movement for the last 10 years and getting into resistance training plus cardio has made a huge difference in the amount of energy I have, mood, posture, etc.<p>One statement I take issue with is this line "I put on 40 pounds of muscle one year alone...". This is essentially impossible barring a malfunctioning thyroid. I don't doubt that he put on 40 pounds of weight in a year but I can guarantee it wasn't all muscle.
If you are 17-20 and finishing up puberty, using anabolic steroids, working out incredibly hard 5-6 days per week, and eating 4000+ calories per day every day _maybe_ you could put on 30 pounds of muscle in a year. If you are in your late 20s early 30s as he was, not using steroids (I assume), and working out hard your max muscle gain in a year might be around 20lbs. For a normal 30 year old working out 3x a week it's closer to 12-15lbs/year after newbie-gains have ended.
I say this not to discourage but rather to give people realistic expectations, I believe the most common reason people fail at exercise is they are overly ambitious and burn out quickly when they don't look like Hulk overnight.<p>If someone was looking for a good starting point for fitness I recommend scooby1961 on youtube, he has been around a long time and has a ton of videos on fitness and nutrition aimed at newbies, and takes the perspective of an engineer looking at the body as a machine.<p>As someone who has been into this for a while my advice would be:<p>1. Start small and ramp up, if you do nothing currently start with walking 20 minutes per day.<p>2. Do not spend a bunch of money on fancy equipment, like all hobbies until you get deeper into the game you won't even know what you should get.<p>3. Avoid injury, esp your lower back and shoulders. The best way to do this is perfect form. Always have perfect form, cheating with bad form to get one extra rep is only cheating yourself, the goal is to work the muscle to failure, not hit some number.<p>4. If you want to do a home gym you can work 95% of your muscle groups with dumbbells, a barbell, and a pullup bar. The only thing you cannot work out well with these is your quads. For that you need a leg press machine or a squat cage (ie: a gym).<p>5. Most suppliments are unproven snake oil that waste your money at best, and at worst destroy your kidneys/liver or give you heavy metal poisoning. The only supplements I consider proven effective with minimal side-effects are caffeine (pre-workout) and creatine. I will not recommend any brands but look for ones that are quality tested by independent labs (like USP).<p>6. Cardio with resistance (weights) is best, but if you only have time for one make it cardio. This is more important for your long term health.<p>7. Sticking to a routine is not about will-power, it's about habits. The first time you work out with weights it's intimidating as hell and you feel like a bumbling idiot, you do that 2 or 3 times a week for a few weeks and it feels like a chore, you do it for a year and it happens on auto pilot, you don't even think about it.