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The Fitness Thread - THE RE-SWOLLENING

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nenjin:

Here we talk about working out, losing fat, gaining muscles, changing our bodies and fulfilling goals! That's right, you can be a complete nerd and still look ripped as hell! I believe in you!

Please note: I'm just an enthusiast who has done a bit of research. I have no schooling in health, fitness or nutrition and it's not my job. Do your own research and evaluate opinions when it comes to health and working out, because there are a lot of them out there.

Working out the last six months has seriously changed my course on so many things, it's hard to not want to inspire others and get them working out as well. (Known as 'recruiting for the cult.')

I wrote a big thing in another thread about how my fitness journey started, which I won't clutter up the thread with here.

The TLDR of it is though I made real changes with what feels like not a whole lot of work, and it's work I've come to love doing. I went with Resistance Training (i.e. weight lifting) as my main path to weight loss and using a couple different techniques along with getting my nutrition in check, I really started seeing changes.

So if you want to start working out, what you need first are ***GOALS***. Goals are what motivate you to work out in the first place. It all starts with the simplest commitment of "I want X and I'm willing to work for it." For some people "being healthier" is a goal and it works, but I think most need something a little more concrete to get them coming back to the gym and sticking to their workout.

Ask yourself, what do you want out of your body? How have you always wanted to be different?

-Lower weight?
-Less fat?
-Flatter stomach?
-4 pack/6 pack/8 pack?
-A sexier butt?
-Bigger shoulders?
-Bigger arms and pecs?
-Broader back?
-Thiccer Legs?
-Better definition?
-More endurance?
-More strength?
-ALL OF THE ABOVE?

There's an aesthetic component to working out that I think a lot of people who have never felt themselves to be aesthetically pleasing are quick to dismiss, because they've reduced its importance in their life feeling it's not an attainable goal. I know I've been like that. But when you start seeing results and changing yourself and reaching some of your goals, it can really change your mind on whether or not those things are worth putting out the effort for.

Ok, so you've got some goals in mind. There's two main kinds of physical exercise you'll use to achieve them.

Steady State Cardio & High Intensity Resistance Training

1. Steady state cardio. Running, generally, in its many forms. Also biking. Jump rope. It raises your heart rate and breathing and then keeps them there for quite a while. 45 minutes of cardio burns around 150 calories from fat at a rate of 50%. SSC is great for weight loss, toning and conditioning. It is NOT good for muscle retention, muscle gain or strength gain.

2. Resistance training. Lifting weights, generally. (Also includes body weight resistance training.) You place your body's muscles under tension using weight, stretching the muscle fibers and in some cases damaging them. This sounds bad and can be if taken too far, but damaging them the "right amount" is what stimulates new fiber growth, and bigger, stronger muscles. 25 minutes of intense resistance training can burn a couple hundred calories from fat at a rate of 35%. It is NOT good for conditioning, unless you're talking about muscle stamina. However IMO it does have many of the other benefits of SSC, including yes, weight loss! Many women avoid resistance training because they want to slim down and look "soft", not get lean and hard. But there can be a lot of fat burning and toning benefits for women in resistance training too. So don't fear the iron ladies, the treadmill and exercise bike aren't your only friends in the gym.

(3. Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, other exercise disciplines. I haven't researched these nor tried them so I won't speak to them, maybe someone else can. I might try Pilates soon.)

There are some exercises that achieve the benefits of both, too. For example rowing machines in your average gym are both a cardio workout and a resistance training workout. Partly why people love them so much.

I personally favor resistance training over SSC because I want to build muscle and I don't want to spend a couple hours a week running to burn fat. I also find SSC boring, personally. But many people enjoy it, get a lot of fat burning out of it and if you're at all serious about fitness you should be doing some SSC and conditioning.

No exercise is without risk of injury or repetitive stress injury though.

1. SSC is hard on your knees primarily, but also on your ankle joints and maybe your hips. Uneven surfaces, fall risks, the weather, ice, traffic, pedestrians, are many of the reasons people choose to run on a treadmill or exercise bike instead of outside.

2. You can hurt yourself in pretty much every way imaginable with Resistance Training if you use too much weight, give yourself a hernia trying too hard, practice poor form over a long period of time, straight up do an exercise wrong or drop a weight on yourself. If you're going to do ANY Resistance Exercise, even a pushup I highly encourage you to check out some examples on Youtube if you don't know what proper form is. Lifting weights and doing resistance training correctly is far more technical than most people give it credit for. Just throwing weight around it ain't.

Body Fat % & The Very Overweight

And it's worth stressing: if you want to LOOK athletic and muscular, you have to get your body fat % down. For the average guy, ~15% body fat is where you start looking lean and muscles just kinda show on their own without needing to flex. For women, it's closer to ~19%. Women, because of their breasts and the need for body fat for child bearing, will always have a higher healthy body fat % than guys. Where a guy might get down to 9% body fat and look incredibly shredded and still be considered "healthy", a woman at 9% body fat starts facing a lot of hormonal problems because many of her bodily systems don't function right at that body fat %. Those are the extremes though. What most should take away is: you won't see shit if you don't get your body fat % lower. And let's just be realistic here for a moment: the media perpetuates a body image for men and women that take insane levels of commitment, air brushing, lighting and touch ups, unhealthy eating and dieting tricks and possibly illegal drugs, just to achieve a single photo shoot. (Seriously, go read Hugh Jackman talk about all the crazy shit he's done to play Wolverine in the later X-Men movies, to look like he did.) That is not reality for 99% of humanity, so don't make that your goal. The amount of work it takes to have a visible 6 pack 24 hours a day is like a full time job. Fitness models and the uber fit generally make working out both their job and their life style. You won't look like them unless you commit like them and that's not realistic for most people. So don't hold yourself to that standard. Create your own standard and redefine it as you go.

Lastly, for those who are very overweight you pretty much have to start with cardio. Even if it's just walking. Your high body weight means calisthenics will be very difficult to impossible for you (you know much upper body strength it takes to do a pushup when you weigh 300 pounds? A fuck load.) And you may lack strength or mobility in many critical areas to do many kinds of resistance training. So you pretty much have to start with cardio to get your body weight and body fat down, so other workouts become easier for you to do, to the point they can start contributing to your weight loss. The good news is, with the right effort and what I'm about to talk about below, you can shed that weight very quickly in large amounts.

So you've got some goals, you kind of know the two main kinds of exercise you want to engage in, you know the risks involved, and you know what's realistic. There's one last thing you'll have to address though.

Nutrition

Dun dun dun. The thing no one wants to talk about but probably has the most to do with how they look and feel today!

Whether you're trying to lose fat or trying to put on muscle, you have to think about your nutrition. Especially it come to fat loss.

The principle is pretty simple. If you want to drop fat you have to spend more calories working out and take in fewer calories than you are now. In practice though, it's a bitch.

-We love eating things that are calorie dense AND do not contain any real nutrients.
-We eat too much of the stuff our bodies like to turn in to fat (carbs), and too little of the stuff it doesn't and is good for us. (Vegetables.)
-We're busy and what we want to eat vs. what's available leads us to make poor choices.
-We are not physically active enough, as gamers, as people who spend a lot of time on a computer, to even begin to burn off this excess.

The US Daily Nutritional Value for calories is 2000 for most people at an assumed activity level of something (versus "next to nothing.") Most people know that. Now consider that you can easily eat 1400 calories in a single meal at most restaurants. Before snacking, before unforeseen calories and sugars, you can easily eat 75% of what you need in one meal, and still be ready to eat more later. Consider that you can get 1/3rd of your daily calories from just a couple sodas despite them not containing practically anything else you need. Consider that your body is hard wired to store sugar as fat, it is literally psychologically addictive so you continue to consume more and more, and there is no daily recommended dose of sugar.

The average caloric intake of Americans is around 2400 to 2500 calories a day. Or basically 25% more than most people need. Multiply that by a life time, with little to no physical exercise to burn off those extra calories, and is it any surprise our waistlines have just grown over the years? (For reference, for my age and my current level of activity, I need about 2400 calories to maintain my weight, because I'm burning off half of what I eat in a week through exercise and muscle growth.)

Bottomline: you can work yourself to death in the gym and see little to no change because you don't change your nutrition. At best you will see small changes overtime until you hit equilibrium with your calorie expenditure vs. your calorie intake. At worst you might be staving off further weight gain.

The second part to nutrition is much more enjoyable to talk about. And that's Feeding Your Body What It Wants. Let's say you've committed to making some nutrition changes. You're working out, feeling the burn and wondering "Ok, what should I be eating?"

If you're doing resistance training and trying to build muscle, you want as much protein as you can get. The average person gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 60 grams of protein a day, which is fine for daily metabolic needs and health. But if you're trying to build muscle, the going rate people talk about today is 1 gram per pound of body weight. So if you're 200 pounds, you want to shoot for 200g of protein a day. Which is a lot. But your body will convert that protein in to new muscle growth, and it will also burn calories while doing it. This is why I like Resistance Training over SSC. Not only is your body working hard in your workout and burning calories, it's working hard hours later. I go to sleep and can feel the actual heat in the muscle groups I worked on that day radiating as my body churns away turning good nutrients into muscle, and burning away my fat while I sleep.

It's not all about protein though. You'll want carbohydrates for energy to fuel your workout. People shit all over carbohydrates today because it essentially makes up 80% of junk food. But completely hating on carbs as a nutrient is pretty misguided from what I've read and researched. The problem isn't carbohydrates. The problem is we eat too damn much of it then do nothing with that stored energy it provides. (Carbohydrates get turned in to glycogen which is fuel stored in the muscles so they can exert force, and the liver contains a small amount to release in to the body too.) Carbohydrates are a vital source of energy that our bodies have evolved to prefer, and shouldn't be skipped. BUT! You should get them from good sources. Just eating white bread counts but there are more efficient sources that aren't as calorie heavy or full of other things you don't want. Bottomline on carbs is: don't skip them. Eat them but keep it in proportion.

You'll also want a couple good sources of fiber to keep you regular (I'm in to Kiwis right now), and find sources for your micronutrients like vitamins, potassium, the metals, etc...You can get most of that from a balanced take of vegetables high in the stuff you need. Daily multi-vitamins can help with that. Despite wanting to burn fat, you want to incorporate some in to your diet too. Just, again, get them from good sources like nuts or beans. Fats from oils like fried foods are too much and generally not of the good type. Sodium, again, is something your body needs. The issue isn't whether or not to get it, the issue is getting too damn much of it in everything we don't prepare for ourselves.

If you're doing SSC nutrition is still important too. Depending on how long or hard you run you'll definitely want to replenish your salts. (Gatorade may seem great because it's got THE ELECTROLYTES but consider there is almost as much sugar in a bottle of Gatorade as a bottle of Coca-cola.) You'll also want to NOT AVOID CARBS. You certainly may want to eat fewer of them, but you'll want some none the less. Without carbs, when your body is done burning from fat, it will go after your muscles instead, and when there's no stored energy in the muscle because you don't eat any carbs your body will start cannibalizing muscle tissue instead. Depending on your *GOALS* maybe this is ok. But the trap a lot of SSC people fall in to is they give up everything to fat loss, especially as they start doing longer and longer runs, and end up as really good at running long distances but are skinny, strung out, lacking any real muscle and are starved of nutrients. So don't do that. SSC doesn't mean give up everything besides water and vegetables.

Bottomline: Eat whole, real food! Things that are a single ingredient as often as you can! Vegetables are a single ingredient. Raw meat is a single ingredient (usually.) Rice is a single ingredient (usually.) You don't have to eat 1000% natural, but you need to shoot for making as much of your own food as you can from real food! Because that way you can control what goes in your body rather than be at the mercy of what's convenient (and likely not good for you.)

Getting Started & High Intensity Training

And finally the last bit that will always come up: But I don't have a gym membership, where will I get stuff to work out with!

To start with, if you're a fitness newbie there is SO MUCH you can do in your home, that you should do! before you start tackling weights anyways. If you're in to SSC, this is not an issue for you. If you really want to run, there's nothing stopping you.

For people wanting to do resistance training, you can start at home doing what's called calisthenics. Which is a fancy word for body weight training. It involves things like:

-Pushups (works chest)
-Pull ups (works shoulders and back)
-Body weight bicep curls (works the bicep. Grab on to a bar or pole or pillar or doorframe and pull your body toward it using one arm.)
-Crunches (Abs)
-Sit ups (Abs)
-Planks (Abs)
-Leg raises (Abs/Butt)
-Lunges (Butt, Hamstrings, Quads)
-Chair/Box Squats (Butt, Quads, Hamstrings)

And many more. To get started, do any of these exercises until failure. (I.e. to the point you can't do another.) Give yourself 60 seconds to rest. Then do as many as you can do until failure. Give yourself 60 seconds of rest. Then do as many as you can do to failure. Then rest. Congrats! You got through 3 sets. You should be feeling the burn now. Move on to another exercise immediately. This is called High Intensity Training, and for me it's proven very effective at burning fat while getting good toning/strengthening workouts in. You even get some conditioning in as doing your exercises back to back will leave you out of breath very quickly. The goal is to put the muscles you're working under as much constant stress (safely) that it can handle, for as long as it can handle. When you take 3 or 4 minutes to rest between sets, to when you're "fully rested" several things happen:

-Your muscles go out of a state of tension for longer.
-Your heart rate falls.
-Your breathing normalizes.
-Your workout ends up taking 45 minutes to an hour.

Not allowing your body to leave its elevated state of tension puts maximum stress on your body as you continue to do your workouts. That's how you achieve maximum calorie and fat burning in the shortest amount of time. With the required effort and intensity, high intensity resistance training can burn far more calories than SSC in a shorter period of time, even though fewer of those calories are coming from fat. And remember, it's about the keeping the intensity of your workout high. It is NOT about doing the exercises themselves fast. The exercises should be done in a slow, controlled manner maximizing the amount of time your muscles are under tension. The "high intensity" comes from that, and the fact you give your body little time to rest between states of high tension.

I generally try to get in 4 to 5 exercises at least of 2 to 3 sets each per workout. If you do that, with 30 to 60 seconds of rest in between all of them, I guarantee you within 20 to 25 minutes you will be pooped and unable to do much else. And that's the goal! Reach that level of physical exhaustion by going to failure and giving it your all, and I promise you will start seeing changes in yourself within a couple weeks. I started with just one 30 minute session a week and now am up to 3, planning on a 4th! How tired you feel after your first couple times working out becomes your first benchmark you can measure. As the weeks go by, how much easier is it getting? Are you doing more reps? Less winded? Losing weight?

Once you're comfortable with your home workouts, go to a used sporting goods store and pick yourself up a pair of dumbbell free weights or a kettle bell, and maybe some resistance bands. Plenty of different exercises you can do with each of those. There are variations on all these exercises too that make them tougher once you've become adapted to the basic versions. In Resistance Training that's called progression. And when you do find a gym or collect enough weights, that's where the real muscle building begins.

Maxims

Just a few other points to make about workouts.

1. Consistency matters. Your body gets used to things the more it does them repeatedly. If you've never worked out or haven't worked out in long time, your body has gotten very used to being sedentary. It fights being changed from that state. If you skip workouts, or put in half as much effort as you should be, your body is winning that fight to not change. Remember, once you've gotten comfortable with an exercise it's time to find a way to make it more difficult, raise the weight or graduate to a harder exercise altogether. Your body doesn't grow and change if it's not being challenged. You have to struggle against your body to get it to change its state, and to do that....

2. You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Working out is not easy. It's labor intensive. You strain. It can "hurt". You sweat. You stink. You're out of breath. You grunt. Your muscles burn because they are LITERALLY filled with acid and your body, if it could speak, would be shouting AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. The day after can almost be worse! Most people spend their day avoiding being like any of those things. You, on the other hand, have to want it. Not just the discomfort during your work out, but the exhaustion and soreness you'll feel the day, two days, maybe even three days later as well. You have to make a friend of pain and discomfort, because only when you're feeling them are you changing, are you actually burning lots of calories and fat. You have to learn to look forward to that burn, to relish the feeling of sore muscles. Sounds weird, right? Well what makes that change for you is when you actually start to see results. The results make you want to come back and do it again, make you seek that feeling of pain. You'll start equating that feeling of exhaustion with a job being well done. Which leads me to....

3. Be patient / Be observant. Change takes time. We live in a era of instant gratification where we don't have to work for many of the things that make us happy. Sure we may do a 9 to 5 and that's our work, but have we really had to struggle for some of the things we want that fulfill us? Well for changes in your body, there are no shortcuts that are healthy and safe. All you have is the work in front of you, and depending on how far you have to go to reach your goals, it may take a lot of time under tension to get there. You have to fight your well developed instinct to be disappointed and give up. So be patient. And while you're being patient, putting in the work, pay attention to your body. While you're working out, immediately after you work out, the day after you work out. Look for change. Evaluate. Watch your muscles ripple. Get to know your body and what it's doing instead of avoiding looking at it because it's a reminder you're out of shape. Always be alert for pain that isn't "the right pain." You will quickly learn the difference. Take measurements, weigh yourself. Watch for the signs of progress, and let those discoveries fuel your motivation to work even harder the next time. There's an element of narcissism in it, I won't lie. But some narcissism isn't necessarily a bad thing! Many people have probably been too hard on themselves for the way they look and there's nothing wrong with learning how to like yourself in the mirror again, especially when it was a product of your own damn hard work! Just....you know, don't become a total self-centered statuesque god or goddess, kay?

4) GET YOUR FUCKING SLEEP! This is one of the hardest things for me as a night owl to do. If you're going to be working hard though, your body MUST have rest. It's when muscle building happens. It's when healing happens. It's when bad stuff like stress hormones are flushed from your body. You need 8 hours sleep under normal working conditions. If you're going to be working out and putting your body under that additional stress it's EVEN MORE IMPORTANT to get that sleep. Otherwise you will feel like shit, become the "not good" kind of sore and worst of all, have less energy for your next workout, perform like shit while you do workout and your gains and/or weight loss will be lower and slower than if you had slept. Related that to that, if you've been injured or are sick, REST. Take the time off! Once you start enjoying working out this gets harder and harder to do, because you just want to get in there. But injury and illness represent additional stress on your body and working out in that state can lead you into feeling worse and recovering slower. So don't do it. Work hard, rest hard. And that means taking rest days.

5) Forget everyone else. This isn't about them, how they look, what they think, what anyone thinks.  I remember I used to drive around and see overweight people jogging and sweating and would sneer with contempt like a jerk. Now, now I see people who are incredibly out of shape trying something, anything, and all I can think is "You go girl."

This is about you, what you want, your struggle and no one else's. Let go of feeling judged when you workout, of being embarrassed about it. Anyone, of any fitness level, who commits to working out and getting in better shape should be commended. You have been and will continue to be your harshest critic.

So work hard, exhaust yourself, eat right, get your rest.....then try to tell me you don't feel all around better. If you don't feel stronger, more energetic, more vital, more capable, more confident. For me, personally, after having treated myself like shit for so long, the physiological benefits alone have been worth it. The weight loss and musculature growth is just the icing on the cake.

For me the fitness journey has been about momentum. The hardest part was starting, was committing in my mind to the hard work I knew was coming. Once I started doing the work it got easier, and easier, and easier to want to go back until working out has literally started pushing out other concerns like gaming, work and even stress. I would have never pegged myself as this kind of person and yet here I am, making long-winded threads on the internet about it. If you're thinking about starting, trust me....you are at the hardest point in the whole process because you're not sure you want to make the sacrifices and do it. Believe me on the other side of making that decision, you will see how much greener the grass on the other side is. And what you're sacrificing won't seem like much sacrifice at all. The human body and physiology was not designed to sit in a chair, burning minimal calories all day. It was built and evolved to move, quickly, with grace and power and speed! Start working out and remember what it's like to be in touch with that again and see if you don't recover a vital spark of being alive that you've let grow dim with the passing of time.

Think that's about it for now. Happy to answer questions, give specifics. If you're in to resistance training, I really found the Athlean-X channel on Youtube very straight forward, very honest and very useful.

Anyways, good luck, have fun and feel your power!

MetalSlimeHunt:
So I had the worst wipeout of my eight or so year-old cardio career last week. I tripped on a pavement crack at full speed, and I'm pretty sure I rolled multiple times, but I don't remember because I was focused on tearing the shit out of my palms and leg before coming to a stop in someone's decorative plants. It must have looked pretty serious, because a UPS driver stopped in the middle of the street and asked me if I was alright. My water bottle seriously flew a good twenty feet (and sprung a leak, fortunately I had another).

I'm back in commission now, but god, that was awful.

nenjin:
I think I can top that for embarrassing.

In Europe a couple years back, following my cousin around Frankfurt. Haven't been on a bike in years and yet here I am, following her around European metropolitan areas at speed like I know what I'm doing.

Turn a corner, try to follow her down a narrow side walk with a set of cafe chairs and tables along one side, and a full steel dumpster occupying the other side. I lose my balance trying to steer between them, and opt to topple into the tables instead of the steel. Knock down a few chairs and a table, waiter outside looks at me like I'm an idiot, I pick myself up off the ground sheepishly with the bike and apologize and try to make my getaway....

Only to not realize the chain had fallen off the sprocket. Try to remount in the middle of the street, push off and......go straight down into the pavement with the sprocket impaling my ankle.

I constantly amaze myself with how much of a klutz I am.

Loud Whispers:
swim more

t. your joints

Reelya:
Circuit training can give a pretty intense workout too, since you're constantly changing the muscle groups that are worked out, thus the intensity stays high. With that, you basically do multiple sets of a number of exercises back to back in a loop before taking a break (at e.g. the point of exhaustion).

I have a bunch of adjustable dumbbell bars with plenty of plates, I had a good routine going however then college happened and i got too busy and tired to care, need to get back into it now. I'll take a look at the OP and see if I can integrate some of that advice with my own routines as I try and ramp it up again.

~~~

And I'll add another key bit of advice to the OP: Make sure to drink enough water no matter what your goals. Also, "enough" depends on what you're doing.

Water with meals fills you up and slows digestion, both of which add to satiation and even out the flow of nutrients into the blood stream, avoiding things such as spikes in blood sugar and insulin response. Also, drink water when you feel like a snack, as it will delay or avoid the need to snack and do the same digestion-slowing thing even if you do end up having the snack. Also, you will feel more stuffed when you do snack, reducing the temptation to get an "extra" snack. Also if you take a protein drink before bed, as some do to avoid ketosis - muscles being broken down for energy - some extra water will in fact slow down digestion meaning it's being absorbed more evenly overnight.

Muscles are made of more than protein and carbs: most of the mass is in fact ... water. 79% of muscle-mass is water in fact. Some guides also say you need about twice the weight in carbs as you do protein for optimal muscle growth, which suggests that of the 20% of muscle mass that's not water, proteins only make up ~7% of you muscle mass. Which, really, sounds about right since e.g. steak is ~20% protein by weight, and animals have much tougher muscles than a human does. It should be pretty clear that if muscles are 80% a certain substance then loading up on the 20% and ignoring the 80% is a complete waste of money and effort. If you're eating extra food to grow muscles then you probably want to work out how much water that growth would need and make sure you're consuming at least that amount of extra water too. Don't let water be your bottleneck, of all things, since it's so cheap. You need the basic amount of water, plus water needed to replace that lost in exercise, plus water needed for muscle growth.

 e.g. if you ate 100g tuna (25g protein) and 100g wholemeal bread (say 50g carbs) to get protein and carbs for muscles, there's clearly not enough water in that meal alone to add up to the profile that's in real muscle tissue. Assuming that most of the stuff in tuna and bread that's not prot+carb is water, that's 75g prot+carb, which should be against 300ml water, but the food only contains about 100g water. 2/3rds of the needed water is missing from a muscle-building tuna sandwich alone. You'd need to add ~200g of water-filled vegetables or 200ml water to that to get enough water for muscle synthesis. And that's not counting the water needed for everyday stuff.

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