Jump to content

Exercise and Fitness: bro science debunked


Iskaral Pust

Recommended Posts

Back to a good rhythm of exercise.  I was in the gym on Thursday (bench press and cable row), Saturday (leg press, leg curl and dead lifts) and Sunday (shoulder press and pull-ups).  My strength is still good and my stamina/energy is improving but not yet back to where I was before I was hit by that cold virus.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I met a friend at a party yesterday. To everyone‘s surprise, he declined the offer of wine and instead asked for a glass of water. He also looked much fitter than I’d ever seen him. He usually drinks lots of beer (and I do mean a lot), smokes and does some other drugs too, and has a quite fragile mental health. But his new drug is exercise, he explained, and he was to get up early for a training session the next day, hence the water. 

I think this is super cool, that at the age of 36 you can have such an experience. He said he felt great being in good shape, being able to do things he never could do before. 

Just got a little inspired and wanted to share that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/31/2018 at 6:33 PM, Tywin et al. said:

Pictures or it didn't happen!

Speaking of Halloween, it begins the season of overeating, and I can already see my hand wandering with a mind of it's own to the bowl of Reese's. 

Here's the thing I keep in mind to help with that.  As a background - I eat very cleanly 6 days a week and have a blow out on Saturday.  During the week if there is something that I will miss out on because it is a "clean" day, I may try a bit of it.  that would be something special or unique - if it's a pile of kit kats, well, I can do that on Saturday or at any time of the year.

If I'm going to miss outb on an experience, I will let myself indulge a little.  if it's just a "treat" - i can wait for Saturday morning and enjoy it the way I want.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Never been particularly good with cheat days myself.  Fall into a slippery slope too easily.  With that being said, this will be my last week of keto until the new year at least and maybe until Feb.  Between the holidays, wanting to cook for my pregnant wife in her 3rd trimester, and wanting a longer cycle off; I figure 6-10 weeks will probably be ok for my body to reset and indulge with my wife.  Still going to avoid sugar, carbs, and continue IF; just not going to go as crazy to ensure I stay in ketosis at all times during the day.  Plan to finish the year strong working out to hopefully counter the diet switch.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Never been particularly good with cheat days myself.  Fall into a slippery slope too easily.  With that being said, this will be my last week of keto until the new year at least and maybe until Feb.  Between the holidays, wanting to cook for my pregnant wife in her 3rd trimester, and wanting a longer cycle off; I figure 6-10 weeks will probably be ok for my body to reset and indulge with my wife.  Still going to avoid sugar, carbs, and continue IF; just not going to go as crazy to ensure I stay in ketosis at all times during the day.  Plan to finish the year strong working out to hopefully counter the diet switch.

yeah, it took me a bit to get used to.  I had gone 6 weeks with a strict no sugar/wheat plan and then at the end of that the plan added in a blow out day for me.  I think because of the results I saw and how I felt it gave me the reinforcement to stick to the plan.  It's been 2 1/2 years and while I've adjusted things here and there the basic process is still the same.

During the first 6 week period we did test a couple times and I was going to a low level ketogenic state but I've never gone into a full keto diet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Greywolf2375 said:

Here's the thing I keep in mind to help with that.  As a background - I eat very cleanly 6 days a week and have a blow out on Saturday.  During the week if there is something that I will miss out on because it is a "clean" day, I may try a bit of it.  that would be something special or unique - if it's a pile of kit kats, well, I can do that on Saturday or at any time of the year.

If I'm going to miss outb on an experience, I will let myself indulge a little.  if it's just a "treat" - i can wait for Saturday morning and enjoy it the way I want.

This is largely what I do. I just never buy candy and love me some peanut butter cups. 

3 hours ago, aceluby said:

Never been particularly good with cheat days myself.  Fall into a slippery slope too easily.  With that being said, this will be my last week of keto until the new year at least and maybe until Feb.  Between the holidays, wanting to cook for my pregnant wife in her 3rd trimester, and wanting a longer cycle off; I figure 6-10 weeks will probably be ok for my body to reset and indulge with my wife.  Still going to avoid sugar, carbs, and continue IF; just not going to go as crazy to ensure I stay in ketosis at all times during the day.  Plan to finish the year strong working out to hopefully counter the diet switch.

I hate to say it, but I'm guessing it will be hard to properly diet for at least the first few months after the baby is born. All my male friends who've recently had kids said they gained a bit a weight afterwards because there just isn't enough time to properly prepare healthy meals.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

This is largely what I do. I just never buy candy and love me some peanut butter cups. 

I hate to say it, but I'm guessing it will be hard to properly diet for at least the first few months after the baby is born. All my male friends who've recently had kids said they gained a bit a weight afterwards because there just isn't enough time to properly prepare healthy meals.

Its pretty much a guarantee.  Granted I 'could' keep keto with relative ease since most of what I eat is really easy to prepare and fast.  But as a means of tag teaming this with my wife I know I'll need to be sure she is fed as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

This is largely what I do. I just never buy candy and love me some peanut butter cups. 

I hate to say it, but I'm guessing it will be hard to properly diet for at least the first few months after the baby is born. All my male friends who've recently had kids said they gained a bit a weight afterwards because there just isn't enough time to properly prepare healthy meals.

My daughter is three and a half months old now and I've actually lost weight (5kgs to be precise) after she was born. It lasted for a month and a half or so, then I started putting the weight back on. Thankfully, I went back to training soon after.

You may not have the time to prepare healthy meals but you'll be pretty active throughout the day (and maybe night, too), especially while your wife is recovering from childbirth. It's a never endings stream of smaller things that need doing so you're likely to be on your feet more than usually.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The DOMS are real!

Back home for a month and went back to crossfit on Monday. 15 months since my last workout. The only muscles that aren't causing aching discomfort are the ones controlling my eyeballs and my mouth. One good thing I learnt this week though, is that the couple years spent hammering in my Olympic lifting technique was well spent. Even though I had dialled back the weight on the bar, my technique for the clean & jerk, front squat, shoulder press and squat was still intact.. yipppee. That was for the strength component for Monday's workout. The conditioning component however, jeepers! What would have been a 12 minute workout a couple years ago ended up taking 22 minutes to complete. Just hit a wall sooner than I expected. Now I know where I am and what work is to come. I'll ask my coach if he can re-schedule that same workout in a month's time to see how I've progressed. 

One can't out train a bad diet so the other side of the ledger needs to be accounted for. An 80/20 approach I think. Time restricted feeding Mon-Fri and then ease up during social gatherings over the weekend. The macro-nutrient make up will probably tend towards nutritional keto Mon-Fri. In thinking about nutrition, Bob Lustig once said, 

'The liver doesn't get sick after one fructose meal, it gets sick after a thousand fructose meals.' 

I like to rephrase that as, 'You don't get lifestyle disease after one meal, you get lifestyle disease after a thousand meals.' So I'm thinking of beginning a photo catalogue for my next 1000 meals. Easy to do in this era of smartphones. A thousand meals could be consumed within a year - with a traditional rate of 3 meals a day. But with Time Restricted Feeding (1-2 meals a day) and water-fasting days included, it might actually stretch out to a couple years or longer. It would be interesting to find out. 
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ate pizza for the first time in months yesterday and I've been sick to my stomach all day long.  Definitely cleared me out, but the way I feel makes me think that I need to more or less stay on the low carb diet.  Maybe not keto, but keep bread out completely, limit rice and sugar, and stick to high fat whenever possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@aceluby the gut microbiome really seems to adapt to a sustained change in diet, which makes it uncomfortable to revert.  Which can be viewed as a good or bad thing.  If I eat a lot of generic pizza now it will give me stomach cramps (and I still eat pasta or bread at least once a week), only a medium sized thin crust pizza of very high quality (none of the delivery chains) is digestible now. 

My workouts are still going well, although I had some heavy DOMS after squats.  I’m not yet back to the number of sets I was doing before the illness but my heaviest weights are back there and the set count is improving. 

For the last few months I have been feeling bad that my weight was at 183-185lbs compared to 178lbs a year and a half ago.  But I need to just accept it.  I’m pretty damn lean at 183lbs this morning.  I could possibly cut back a little further toward 180lbs, but realistically I just have more lean mass (especially in the lats, delts) than when I weighed 178lbs.  I even wear the same belt notch as then, although it does feel slightly tighter than I recall so I want that to return to where it was. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yesterday I weighed myself for the first time in 7 months. I had expected to weigh a few kilos more now than I was then - frumpier around the midrift for sure. But to my surprise I'm practically the same weight (+/-100g).

Now this actually pissed me off. Why? Because it hit me that the lean muscle I had spent a good few years building has ebbed away, through lack of use, and in its place emerged a vest of flab (probably visceral as well) - it's not even hard suet, it flab! And as muscle is denser than fat, the fat is showing more than the muscle ever did - for the same exchange of weight. Fuck. I want my muscle back!

Fortunately, the DOMs have abated and I'm settling into the gym work. The fat will ebb away with better adherence to nutrition. And I hope to rebuild some strength & muscle mass before the festive season kicks in.   
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Have been trying to stick to the schedule of crossfit three times a week before work and mostly succeeding. It seems I've gained back some weight but I also got back to my fitness levels from before the two months "paternal" leave I had from working out.

Have been trying to add another session of running or swimming but had no success at all with that. :lol: The long "summer" in Belgrade has ended and now the colder weather has finally arrived and it's kind of putting me off running and swimming requires a bit of logistics I can't be bothered with at the moment. Work in progress, I guess...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We’re in Atlanta for several days to visit my wife’s parents for Thanksgiving.  Fortunately the local LA Fitness gives us a week-long guest pass each time we’re here. 

Wednesday was shoulder press and pull-ups, today was leg press (I didn’t bring my squat collar with me) and dead lifts, and tomorrow will be bench press and some sort of rowing, TBD.

It’s strange to be in a big commercial gym instead of the small private gym in our condo building.  There are a couple of dozen other guys in the free weights section each time I go, which requires more attention to etiquette and more basis for comparison: it seems like most guys are spending most of their time on bench press and arm curls, and it seems like most guys use short, bouncy reps for everything. 

Of the ~50 guys around me in two sessions so far, only two bench more than me (and not much more), no-one squats (250lbs) or leg presses (700lbs today) or deadlifts (300lbs) as much as me — although a couple were only 10-15% less — and no-one shoulder presses (2x60lbs) or pull-ups (6x10 of slow reps to full depth) as much as me.  I realize LA Fitness is not a heavyweight gym for serious powerlifters or bodybuilders (and I am neither), but I’m still surprised that so many guys who outweigh me don’t actually lift that much, and really don’t lift it well. 

Back to my own workouts: my strength was good both days but then declined noticeably after about an hour.  I think that’s because I was there in the morning — with just a light breakfast in me — rather than my preferred late afternoon or early evening timeframe.  I definitely noticed that after all the leg-press sets today (700lbs was a really good challenge) that I just didn’t have much left in the tank for deadlifts.  I’ll take it.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anyone have weightlifting advice for a 40 year old with arthritis in the knees, hips and shoulders?

I had to stop my weightlifting routine back in February because I was noticing some moderate pain in my right knee doing squats. Fast forward to September I get a diagnosis of the arthritis and a partially torn rotator cuff and have been taking immunosuppressants. The doctor has cleared me for weightlifting, so I've slowly been adding weight. Overhead press, squats, deadlift and rows all seem okay so far, but start getting pain in my shoulder once I hit about 150 or so pounds on the bench press. Will I just need to have surgery to repair my shoulder? 

It's been good getting back in shape, but I'm still not anywhere near the weight I was lifting at the beginning of the year and worry that I'll be limited because of the arthritis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/23/2018 at 9:41 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

@baxus it’s pretty incredible that you’re still getting three sessions of CrossFit each week with a young baby at home.  You’re doing better than 99%+ of new parents, and your disrupted sleep will mess with your outcomes even if you are exercising.  You’re doing fine. 

I don't know how well I'm doing, but it's as well as I can at the moment so I guess I have to be happy with that.

My kid is really not messing with my sleep patterns that much, to be honest. She sleeps through the night every once in a while and even when she doesn't she wakes up only once a night.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I sprained my ankle yesterday after twisting it badly as I ran on a wet, uneven slab of sidewalk.  I tried to just shake it off and continued to hobble around on it for a few hours of errands, then after an hour of rest and icing I went to the gym and hobbled around for a good* session of bench press and rows; endorphins and adrenaline helped mask the ankle pain for a while too.  

*Although bench press is still below my pre-illness PB from September; I can lift the same max weight but I need to drop it slightly after just one set, instead of three full sets at that max weight. 

Anyway, the ankle stiffened up and got a lot worse in the evening.  Now I’m on crutches and need to keep off it for a while and keep it elevated and iced.  So I won’t be doing squats and deadlifts today.  I can probably still do another upper body session in a few days, just using crutches to get around.  Seated shoulder press and pull-ups should not bother it too much.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...