The Deep Work and Slow Productivity of Health and Fitness

Mar 24, 2025

a book on a table next to a cup of coffee — Photo by Elin Melaas on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, I read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which is, in my view, requisite reading for everyone. In the book, Clear explains how to set up and establish systems that will help us achieve the things we want to.

After reading Atomic Habits, I started getting into the productivity space, which already overlaps a good deal with the health and fitness space because systems are important for achieving health and fitness.

One of the productivity guys I follow is Cal Newport (who I first heard on a health podcast). Check out this impressive triple career that he maintains: Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, author and contributing writer for The New Yorker, and productivity expert and communicator through podcast (Deep Questions with Cal Newport). Plus, he’s married with children. Anyone one of these would be enough to keep us mere mortals busy, yet, he can manage it all, so he must know a thing or two about productivity and systems.

One of his books is called Slow Productivity and another is Deep Work. The subtitles best describe each: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

The premise of the first is to help the reader figure out how to achieve and accomplish the big goals in life by first distinguishing and defining all the busy work we have, like responding to emails. (He has another book: A World Without Email.) Busy work, though necessary at times, drains us of energy and interferes with our ability to work on the bigger projects. So, as Newport explains, we have to take the long road on the important stuff and thus offers three tenets of slow productivity: do fewer things; work at a natural pace; and obsess over quality.

We do these things consistently, and like drops in the proverbial bucket, before long, we have something substantial to show for it.

Deep Work is more about how to get yourself to the place where you will be able to concentrate and deeply focus on your intellectually rigorous work. Newport offers four rules to help get us there: work deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media, drain the shallows.

To work deeply, he suggests creating a routine, a schedule for our deep work, and a time and place with minimal or zero distractions. Embracing boredom is kind of vehicle for staying focused and on-task with deep work. Don’t allow yourself to go to social media for some entertainment, which leads to the next rule of quitting social media. If that’s not a consideration for you, at least consider reducing the superfluous usage and leaning more towards things that are tools for your work, as well as removing the truly unnecessary platforms. “Drain the Shallows” is about batching shallow tasks into groups—like going through postal mail—as well as setting boundaries for what other tasks can enter your domains.

Newport’s audience largely consists of knowledge workers who are trying to manage their rigorous work with the small interruptions and busy work that they’re inundated with. There are also people who are trying to figure out how to find time to work on their passion projects. Even though these tenets and rules are aimed at accomplishing cognitively demanding work, like academic projects, there are so many parallels here with health and fitness that we might as well be talking about how to lose fat, gain muscle and strength, increase our deadlift one-rep max, and improve our one-mile run time.

In his podcast, Newport often describes how constantly engaging in work email chains and threads and other “shallow” work is performative. It gives the appearance of work, but nothing significant, substantial, or really meaningful is actually being done. It’s simply information passing back and forth between parties.

I will often see this shallow work and performative work at the gym. People “appear” to be doing something significant, but if they knew the principles of resistance training and cardio training, they’d realize it’s not.

An example of shallow and performative work: someone sets camp somewhere and does three or four exercises in a little circuit. Example (I saw this last week): a guy on the bench press does very submaximal weight and submaximal reps as seen through his demonstrable level of effort. He maintains the same speed and velocity throughout the entire set and does not touch the bar to his chest or lock out completely at the top.

(If you’re getting close to muscular failure—the most muscle-growth inducing/stimulating and the most effortful—the last couple of repetitions will slow down significantly. You will likely grimace and groan and breathe louder, and you’ll need a moment to catch your breath afterwards.)

Immediately after completing the bench press, he assumes a pushup position but puts his feet on the bench and proceeds to do a set with a similar range of motion as the bench press. Upon completion of the pushups, he grabs a dumbbell and does a set of goblet squats (where you hold the dumbbell in front of you and basically do a bodyweight squat).

He rests for a couple of minutes, jumping on his phone for a bit, and repeats. He does this a few times and sets up another circuit of exercise and repeats that cycle.

First, I don’t want you to think I’m judging this person. What I’m trying to illustrate here is that this circuit is shallow and performative and not nearly as effective as he might think.

If you’re short on time, and you’re simply trying to work your muscle to maintain it, this would be fine. You don’t need to do much to maintain muscle and strength, but if you want to grow and progress, you need something that you can push the envelope, progress, overload.

The problem with the first two exercises—the bench press followed by the pushups done immediately after one another—is that each one is interfering with the other. They are essentially the exact same movement pattern. Doing these two in succession like this might be considered a “drop set”, but a drop set is something you want to do at the end of the session or in the beginning if you’re trying to cram in a lot of work in the shortest amount of time possible. Regarding the interference, by doing the two exercises back-to-back, this guy is not focused on doing either one close to his limit, not trying to push either maximally or near maximally. If he were to have gone close to muscular failure on the bench, he would not immediately be ready to do a long set of pushups, even with limited range of motion.

In a similar vein, the goblet squat is more of a cardio movement at this point. It can’t be loaded heavy enough to make an iota of stimulus on the legs, unless, of course, he was a newbie to all of this, but the fact that he had this particular circuit in mind would indicate that he’s not. In this way, taxing the cardio system like this is also going to interfere with the most important movement here, which is the one that is loaded the most—the bench press. The goblet squat may also be adding some nervous system fatigue just before he’s going to return to the bench press, likely adding to a further performance detriment.

Here's how it should have gone if he wanted to do each of these exercises (and he had sufficient time because he was there almost as long as I was): each exercise done on its own OR at the very least, the bench press done on its own and then the pushups and the goblet squat could have been super-setted (done back to back).

Irrespective of the repetition target, the bench press should have been taken close to muscular failure, say between one and three reps. He would have needed a couple of minutes to rest and recover before doing it again. After three or four sets, he’d be done, and he’d go on to the next exercise. Given that the pushups are bodyweight (that is, not loaded very much) and that the chest has already been sufficiently stimulated with the bench work, we might even argue that the pushups are unnecessary at this point (called junk volume)—not adding any additional growth stimulus.

And that’s what a lot of shallow gym work is: junk volume. It’s the exercises being done after a growth or strength stimulus has already been achieved. At that point, it’s a series of diminishing returns, which really fall off a cliff after a few hard work sets. Most likely, junk volume is just increasing muscular damage, which siphons resources for repair and actually interferes with the growth adaptation. Your body is more concerned with repairing the damage than trying to adapt to doing more work for the next bout.

When I do bench press, I do that one exercise without doing anything else before it or between sets, so I’m doing fewer things; it’s not performative or shallow; it’s deep work and slow productivity. I start with very light weight for my warmups, like embarrassingly light, and aim for submaximal reps. This is not growth-stimulating. It’s to prime my muscles and CNS for the upcoming work. Then, I do a couple more sets, add some weight, and continue doing submaximal reps.

For my work sets—the heaviest ones—I keep my rep speed as homogenous as possible until they slow down when I start approaching failure. “Obsess” is probably too strong a word here, but I almost obsess over the quality of the repetitions. Between sets, I rest as long as I need to. Rest periods sometimes are three minutes, five minutes, or even near eight minutes near the end, so I work at a natural pace.

This is just me, but during my rests, I do not touch social media, YouTube, or anything else that might engage my attention (apart from some messages I may get from my wife). I may look at a playlist of music that I might switch to. Between sets, I’m largely thinking about how I just performed, what went well, what didn’t, and how I can do well on the next set.

I don’t divert my attention between sets because I’m trying to concentrate on the task at hand. In fact, in training studies where researchers try to induce mental fatigue in order to see how it affects performance, they will often have study participants scroll through social media on their phones before working out and between sets (like this one1 and this one2), and the result is often lower performance and greater ratings of perceived exertion compared to controls. Additionally, getting distracted on the phone is a great way to lose sense of time and increase the length of a workout.

If you were to look at my workouts, they would probably look uninteresting or even boring, but this is what an effective workout looks like, one that elicits a muscle growth stimulus. It’s slow, deep, and focused on a single task at a time, and the shallow and performative work might be more visually interesting, but it’s not going to achieve what I want. In fact, sometimes, it does get a little boring between sets, but like Newport advises, I’m embracing boredom so that I’m keeping my general attention on the job that’s most important to me.

So, consider your workouts, your exercises, and even your repetitions and your rest periods through a productivity lens and as Cal Newport encourages: you should aim for slow productivity and deep work; aim to do fewer things absolutely, as well as fewer things at a time; work at pace that is natural to you, doing as much as you can at a time and resting and waiting as long as you need to; obsess over the quality of your work: good form, using loads that are challenging. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect, but you generally know how, where, and when you can improve a movement, and you’ll certainly know how, where, and when you’re shortchanging something. Above all, eliminate the shallow and performative work. Your goal is to achieve that adaptation stimulus, which is progressively doing more work over time.

Bill Gates, who’s kind of a productivity guy by proxy, said something that has been come to be known as Gates’ Law, (which he may have been borrowed from someone else): that people overestimate what they can do in a year but underestimate what they can do in ten years.

With health and fitness, it takes time to see the effects of our hard work, but we just need consistently deep and slow work to get there. And when the results are apparent, there’s no mistaking it.

The Flexitorium by Joseph Anthony

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