How to Supercharge Your Exercise Routine

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! It’s been a while, and there’s a good reason for that: I was busy writing things for money.

Or at least trying to. It’s a lot harder than it used to be. I started my career in an era when movie studios routinely showered writers with mid-six-figure paychecks for things like a buddy-cop movie starring an orangutan and a guy who’s allergic to animals.

Sadly, that era is over. Which is only part of the reason why my action movie about Jesus hasn’t sold yet.1

The future’s less uncertain for the novels I’ve been working on. One’s for adults, one’s for kids, and you’ll be able to read them both (at an affordable price) in the not-too-distant future. More on those later.

In the meantime, the Bad Advice hiatus is over. And not a moment too soon, because have you been reading the news lately? Doesn’t it seem like the world’s gotten a whole lot more confusing in my absence? Like modern life is an endlessly proliferating stew of vexing questions with no clear answers?

Not to brag, but I’m pretty sure that whatever problem you’re facing, I can make it worse. Come to me with your questions, and I promise I’ll give you the wrong answers.

To kick off the Bad Advice Renaissance, here’s a question from the last time I begged all of you for raw material. G. wants to know:

First of all, G.: you’re absolutely right about pickleball. Stay away from those people. They’re fanatics.

You’re also right that most exercise is pretty tedious. Some people solve this by listening to podcasts. But in 2026, any solution that increases the time you spend consuming content on your phone is just going to exacerbate the primary disease of our era.

Instead, I think you should change your incentive structure.

For most of human existence, people didn’t need encouragement or abstract goals to work out. Back when we were all hunter-gatherers, if you didn’t maintain a step count of at least 25K a day, you’d probably starve.

Even after the Agricultural Revolution, there was a strong correlation between physical fitness and survival. No matter what pastoral village or fortified city-state you were living in, the odds were good that at some point in your life, a murderous horde of pillaging rapists would appear on the horizon to kill or enslave anybody with a Strava score below the ninety-fifth percentile.

This was problematic for human flourishing. And modernity has fixed it for most of us, at the modest expense of creating predicaments like yours.

But viewed in its proper historical context, the biggest obstacle between you and a sustainable fitness routine isn’t boredom. It’s a lack of predators.

What you need to do is to recreate the primary condition that allowed your ancestors to maintain their enviable cardiovascular health: running for your life.

This is easier than you might think. Search your neighborhood until you find a dog that’s been bred for lethality, like a pitbull, German shepherd, or if you’re really lucky, a Doberman. Dogs like these are pretty easy to locate, because you’re not just on the lookout for them, they’re on the lookout for you. If you get anywhere near their territory, they’ll let you know.

When you find a dog like this, it’ll inevitably be behind a fence. Find the gate. Piss off the dog. Then open the gate. At this point, both your and the dog’s natural instincts will kick in, and you’ll get a phenomenal workout.

I know you said your knees can’t handle running anymore, but trust me: if you do this right, you’re not even going to register what’s going on with your knees. Your only worry, at least at the beginning, will be maintaining your speed for the full AMA-recommended 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity.

But that’s per week, and it’s cumulative, not consecutive. So running for your life three times a week for 25 minutes is just as good as once a week for 75.

The benefits of this approach aren’t just physical, but psychological. The sense of accomplishment you’ll feel is nothing short of exhilarating. You didn’t just get your heart rate up—you survived a brush with death!

You can also modify the workout to fit your situation. If you can’t find a dog, use a cop. Or a security guard. Or an angry homeowner. It’s all the same principle.

Thanks for your interest in my bad advice, G.! And for anybody else who’s read this far: please send me a question! I can’t do this without you.