I’m gonna chime in here 'cause I think it’s relevant. I work lots of overtime in cycles (usually building towards the end of the month with a huge slowdown after the 1st) and it helps to have a couple of backup activities. If your feet are killing you after work, mix in something that doesn’t require as much standing, like maybe yoga or swimming. Keep showin it who’s boss, Wolverines!
Sneaky suggestion: see if any gyms in your area are running a special where you can get a guest pass for a week and then decide to join or not. If more than one gym is doing it, then start now and go to one for week 1 and the other for week 2. If you only find one, skip about half a week, then do it, and then you only have 1-2 more days to wait.
That’s also a good suggestion. I picked up yoga when my foot injury took most cardio activities off the menu. It was great and helped me maintain at least a little bit of fitness while I healed.
Ok my friends, today I went from a kit (baby Wolverine) to an uppercase WOLVERINE.
Finally pulled the trigger. Joined a gym. I no longer have any excuse. It is physically in my building. They provide everything in terms of clothes, all I need to do is show up with sneakers. Did the whole orientation, got a feel for the place and some guidelines from the trainer (good target HR, types of exercises and types of benefits, etc). They took my blood pressure, checked my heart rate and I was off. I am setting moderate goals to make this part of my routine. If I kill myself at the beginning I know this won’t last. Incremental sustainable change for me.
Why? Besides losing some excess weight I realize all the walking I do does not equal cardio. I went and played tennis for the first time in 20 years and almost died. I want to build endurance and keep my heart pumping. I want to sweat at least 3 or 4 times a week from exercise.
Week 1:
Day 1 - 195 pounds. Walking machine for 20 minutes, Grade 1, Speed 4.5… Assisted pullups and dips, 15/15/10. Nice easy start. Worked up a very mild sweat. Don’t feel like death after.
WOLVERFRACKINGINES!
and my first well deserved <<fwump>>
Finally pulled the trigger. Joined a gym. I no longer have any excuse.
Solai
Woo hoo! Wolverines!
Yay Solai!
Thank you everyone for your support. I read somewhere that when you put yourself out there and publically share your progress it helps reinforce and provides personal incentive. I have found this to be true here with the friendliest people not just in sci-fi, but on the planet. :D[b]
Week 1:
[/b]August 18 - 192 pounds. Walking machine for 20 minutes, Grade 1, Speed 4.5. Assisted pullups and dips (90 pounds), 15/15/10. Nice easy start. Worked up a very mild sweat. Don’t feel like death after.
Week 2:
August 22 - Walking maching for 30 minutes. Grade 1, average speed 4.7 (4.5 for 20 minutes, 7 for 5 minutes, cooldown for 5). Assisted pullups and dips (90 pounds) 15/15/5. Still at mild sweat, didn’t feel like death after. Feel like I can push myself further but slowly ratcheting up while increasing time.
Tae Kwon Do/Muay Thai routine is going good, knock on wood. Sweating buckets.
Problem is only getting worse, though: The more I work out, the hungrier I get.
Saturdays, I’ve been stretching 45 minutes, killer hour of cardio/high-impact, two 45 minute ssessions of low-impact drills/sparring, then another 1:15 of cooldown stretching. After than, I am frickin’ famished. And the peanut butter calls me my name, beckoning, beckoning…
My doctor cleared me to start running on the treadmill, so I started last week. He and Hanna both recommended that I start small, doing a 5-10 minute warm up on the arc trainer, followed by no more than 15 minutes (right now) on the treadmill, starting with a jog and working up to a run at pace. So far, so good. After I get that far, I return to the arc trainer for 20-30 more minutes, including a lot of hills and heavy resistance. But after the third such run, on Saturday, the leg attached to my injured foot is unhappy. Foot’s fine, as far as I can tell, but my calf muscle is killing me. Other leg feels fine. Any advice, other than extra stretching beforehand and icing after? My next run is scheduled for Wednesday, but if I’m still not feeling 100% I’ll skip the treadmill.
Hey buddy. I feel your pain. Literally. Today was day 3 of my new world. I am no expert, so take this under advisement. I am curious about two things: using the treadmill at all (impact to knees and foot which is injured) and the third leg of your routine where you are throwing in hill and heavy resistence. I have not scanned the whole thread so I don’t know if you are just kicking off a work regime or if you are returning after a time away because of the foot. Either way I would ask the gym trainer if perhaps doing the arc trainer at a moderate consistent speed and low resistence isn’t your next step to see how you feel. If you are coming out of your workouts with pain, especially when you have a pre-existing injury I would worry that you are going to hurt your injury more and stop working out.
Total non-expert thought is stick with the arc-trainer for the full 55 minutes on the consistent speed and low resistence. Get your heartrate to a good place and keep it there.
I just had my 30 minute treadmill, keeping it at 1.0 grade and 4.5 mph for 30 minutes. I sweat but didn’t die so will take it up another 5 minutes tomorrow.
Ferris - awesome with the Muay Thai!
Starbucc’ keep up up, and thanks for the encouragement via twitter too 
Thought I would post today’s leg and core workout - it felt great! If you have a chance to give it a try and improve on it, definitely post it up!
Warmup
30 min stationary bike, higher RPM (get some blood flowing into the legs and get them limber)
Core Routine x 4 circuits
35 sec back extensions
35 sec Lt. side extensions (on the back extension ‘bench’)
35 sec Rt. side extensions
35 sec plank
35 sec side plank Rt.
35 sec side plank Lt.
35 sec bicycle crunches
35 sec mason twists
35 sec v-ups or v-leg lifts
35 sec rest
Legs
Set 1 x 3 sets
Standing Dumbbell lunges (x20, x10 each leg alternating)
Super-set with
Box jumps (x20)
Set 2 x 3 sets
One-leg hamstring curl (cable) machine (x10 one leg, then x10 the other)
Super-set with
30 ‘shadow boxing’ knee strikes (x15 each leg, get the knee right up)
Set 3 x 5 sets
Smith-machine squats (first and last set should be lighter weight but higher reps to warm up/cool down)
Super-set with
50 Mountain climbers
Set 4 x 5 sets, pyramiding up and down
Incline leg press
Super-set with
One leg calm press (one leg then the other)
Super-set with
30 jumping lunges (unweighted)
Set 5 x 3
One-leg leg extension (cable) machine (x10 one leg, then x10 the other)
Super-set with
1 min jump rope
Make sure you stay hydrated and try to remember to stretch!
Okay, admittedly, I am just a runner. Nothing else, though I’ve tried, the only thing I seem to be able to stick to with any diligence is plodding one foot in front of the other, and repeating for a varying three to six miles. I’m working (with the help of PodRunner’s Intervals programs) to work up to a half marathon in the next year or so.
I can’t really complain about anything, because doing this nonsense over the past ten years has shed about 80 pounds off my frame. And I’m kinda happy about that, truth be told.
But I’ll be the first to admit that, as a result of having hopeless luck in gyms and workout megaplexes, I have, as a friend once quipped, “chicken arms” when taken into perspective with the rest of me (6’4"). Can’t seem to do a thing about it, either, because focusing on arms workouts only seems to add definition, not mass. (“You’re DOING it wrong!”)
I’m almost at the point of really not giving a frak anymore, but hey – if I can push myself to run 10k, why can’t I find the right routine to add two inches to my biceps/triceps? sigh
I should preface this by saying what you’re about to hear from meis all second-hand, meaning that it’s me interpreting things I learned from my trainer, things which were presented in terms of my needs (not others’). Anything I say you should run through a certified trainer and/or nutritionist to figure out what works best for you.
That said, a couple of thoughts, Keir:
It’s been my experience that building muscle and losing weight are extremely different tasks. And for me, losing weight is much, much easier. Let’s start with definitions.
When most people say “I want to lose weight,” what they really mean is “I want to lose fat.” They’re generally far less concerned with their actual weight (at least in the end run) than they are with how they look and how they perform various tasks. I’m certainly this way. Take me as an example. When I first set a fitness goal, it was weight related. I was 270 lbs, and I wanted to weigh around 190 or 200. Though my trainer collected lots of data – weight, fat %, caliper measurements in lots of places, body measurements in lots of places – I really thought most about weight, and maybe a little about waist circumference. As I dropped under 200 lbs, I realized that the actual weight number didn’t mean much to me. What I really wanted was a leaner body composition, so my focus switched a bit to fat %. Now that I’m around 185 (for the second time, see below) I realize that even fat % doesn’t tell the whole story. I look significantly different than the last time I weighed around 185, even though my fat % is similar, because the location of muscle and fat has changed.
Bottom line: There’s a lot to this whole fitness thing beyond not being “fat” – as you’ve discovered, too.
When I first slowed down my weight loss (around July of 2010) I bottomed out at about 185, and I realized that I looked a bit “skinny.” I wanted a more solid build, so I talked to my trainer about it. He explained that in real measurement terms what I wanted was a lower-fat composition at a higher weight. But getting there would be a challenge. You know how you can’t really target fat loss? Well building muscle is a little (though not completely) like that. To build muscle, you’ve got to both work the muscles, tearing them so they’ll rebuild larger and stronger, AND eat at a surplus, providing the excess fuel to allow your body to make itself bigger. It’s essentially the antithesis of everything you’ve done to lose weight. When losing, you eat at a deficit. So starting around August 2010, we move to hypertrophic exercises (heavier weights, lower reps, lots of pain) and I started eating at a 300-500 calorie surplus.
I should note that eating this way is harder than it sounds. Not only was I already at a pretty high metabolic rate from all the workouts, we just ramped up the workouts. This meant that I was eating 3000 to 4000 calories a day. Since that still has to be a good 20/60/20 (or maybe 10/60/30) balance, you can’t just have two double Whoppers and call it good. It ends up being an Emperial (you know, like Vader) crapton of food. Yeah, it’s fun for a month or so. Then it gets old fast.
And it’s worse than that. Muscle requires maintenance. To keep the damn muscle, you’ve got to work it just as hard and keep eating. So if you screw up and eat short a few days, you lose the muscle much faster than you build it. It’s a big setback.
And it’s even worse than that. While you can (to some extent) control how your body adds mass, you generally end up adding some fat along with the muscle. So those huge bodybuilders you see around work this process by getting big (and chubby), then “cutting,” losing both fat and some muscle, alternating the cycles to narrow in on the big weight/low fat composition they want for competition. While I’m by no means a bodybuilder, I still have to follow that cycle a bit, though much, much more slowly (and sanely, IMO) than they do. So over the course of a year I put on around 20 lbs, about half of it muscle. Three months ago I switched back to eating at a deficit, and I’m back to about the same weight, though with slightly higher body mass. (And that mass is positioned much better for my taste. My shoulders are larger and more defined, as are my arms.) Though I’m not sure yet, I’ll probably continue down this path for another three months or so, then likely switch back to hypertrophy and surplus.
Nutrition plays a big role as well. My results over the last year were pretty much tanked (compared to what they could’ve been) by the fact that I ate too much processed food. To kickstart results I had to switch to almost entirely “real food,” which is a real pain in the ass.
Ok, so what’s all this mean (maybe – see intro above) to you?
First of all, if you’re eating at a deficit, running, and losing weight, your arms aren’t likely to get any bigger no matter how hard you work them. There’s just no fuel to supply additional muscle mass. Even if you did work them, that’ll just help you slow the loss a bit. (This is why strength/resistance training should be a part of any weight loss program.) My guess is that a trainer would likely put you on a mixed strength/cardio program, and would adjust your diet periodically to help you zero in on the body you want.
Hope this isn’t just TLDR. The whole thing is complex as hell – far too complex for me to figure out on my own. I had to go get some help. Last thought: Often people look at personal trainers as “people who help rich people work out.” They do indeed just serve as workout partners for rich people, and I’m glad they make the income from that. But they can also do a lot for normal people like us. I see my trainer once every two weeks, during which he works out with me, discusses and evaluates my progress, adjusts my daily workout plans, instructs me in any new exercises we’ve added, and addresses problems I bring up. This costs me about $110/month. Yeah, that’s a lot of money. But it’s no more than many of us pay for cable. It’s about the same price as eating out once a week. It’s achievable, even if it means giving something else up. And seriously, I could never have made the progress I have without his help.
Chuck, epic post, and I mean that in the best possible way. Right on the mark and consistent with what I’ve experienced. I dropped from around 270 to 175lbs at my lowest, then put mass back on up to 185. I’ve been creeping up to 195, but have found that I can cut back down to 185 pretty quick, albeit sacrificing some muscle. And yeah, eating a metric crapa-ton of food gets old really quick, and I still struggle at moving from a deficit to a surplus.
OK, Ferris, re: your Peanut butter comments. It’s totally normal for your body to be craving nutrients after a kick ass workout, esp as the endorphins start to wear off. The “optimal” window for eating is actually within 30 min of working out, if your stomach can handle it. To keep it simple, most gym monkeys turn to protein powder in that window, and try to eat real food the rest of the day. The best protein to get in you following a workout is whey isolate, which is quickly digested and absorbed. Here’s the kicker - eating makes you feel full two ways. One is the physical discomfort of a full tummy, the other is through the release of hormones that are triggered by digestion (studies have shown that a quick absorbing proteinlike whey makes people feel more full than a slower digesting protein like cassein). Here’s the link to PB:
Option one is to add a bit to a protein shake, which still lets you enjoy PB, but added to protein will probably address the hunger issue better. Lots of folks do this and in moderation, and as part of your daily fat intake it’s a pretty decent source. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/proteinshakes.htm has lots of recipies. I would suggest an all natural PB to cut down on processed sugars, or switching to almond butter (or Sun-butter - #Yummo!) for better omega fatty acids. Option two, if you’re trying to stick within a calorie deficit, is to get a peanut butter flavoured whey protein. For example, Allmax Isoflex http://www.allmaxnutrition.com/products-type/isoflex/ is a really low carb and low calorie whey, that comes in chocolate peanut-butter flavor. The extra water you’ll add to your daily intake because of the shake will also help with feeling full, but if you want it to be more like peanut butter, you can just add a bit of water and make it into pudding (kinda like a smooth PB).
Hope it helps buddy!
Wow! Great info. Thanks for the thoughtful & detailed response!
Solai, it is awesome that you’re sticking with it. I’ve posted a ton here over the past 6 months about injury recovery. Bottom line: I’m getting back to real running (well, treadmill) after years away. That’s one of my big goals. Since my doctor and trainer have cleared me, I’m all in. That said, I really don’t want to hurt myself again or in a new, different way. That means being careful! Yesterday, I had another run with treadmill time. I really wasn’t feeling it, though. I had stretched my calves really well and done a good warm up, but I’ve had a long week and I was tired. So when it was hard for me to run longer than 10 minutes straight on the treadmill, I slowed down, dialed up the incline, and walked the rest of my 15 minutes. I’m trying to be very aware of what my body is telling me and learn the difference between when it needs to be pushed to stretch its limits and when it needs to be pampered. That’s hard to master!
The hill work is because I’m trying to build strength in my leg muscles and because I’ve gotten a little vain about having developed a very nice ass since I started injury recovery 
It also helps me consistently keep my heart rate up. Actually, Hanna, my trainer, recommended it as a good complement to the straight running.
Keir, first of all, how effing awesome are to that you’re running 12.3 miles?! That’s way beyond the distance that I think I’ll ever be able to go. For me, that’s ok, but I admire distance runners. That takes a whole different kind of determination. Second, it sounds like your desire not to have “chicken arms” is more about what other people say than about your actual desire to have a more muscular build. I think if you don’t especially want to add inches to your arms, don’t worry about it. The long lean look works for some people.
But if you do decide you want to try really going for it in terms of building upper body strength and size, take Chuck’s advice. He may credit his trainer for a lot of his success, but the dude has learned his stuff. And he’s willing to share (as evidence by above epic post).
Also, I have to add, this thread and the Twitter support/encouragement have been really, really helpful for me. I work a LOT and it’s a job where people don’t always understand, “I have to leave “early” today for the gym,” when I am heading out the door at 6:30. But since I started checking in here regularly and tweeting on my way to the gym and right after, I have missed fewer than 5 workouts. That’s out of about 100 over 6 months. When I’m doing well, I have people celebrating with me. When I need help, I’ve got wise people who can help me. And the GWC Wolverines have great ideas for new workouts or things to challenge myself just a little more. This is an amazing resource, and unlike my equally amazing trainer Hanna, it doesn’t cost me $140/month.
You know what feels good? The right kind of back pain. Like, sore from working out is better than just plain ol’ sore for no apparent reason.
I knew I missed you lot for a reason. On topic or off, y’all are good eggs. (Mmmmm…eggs.)
I think you’re spot-on with the low-cal-high-cardio just perpetuating a lean body result, Chuck. I just have the sort of body chem that will see a change (read: increase) in caloric intake, and go right for storage. I’m pretty sure it’s a bloodline/genealogy thing. Anywho. I’m going to see how things fare as the summer wraps up, since I’m working steadily on increased cardio stamina, and the bollocks with the public opinion about “the gun show”. I’m in better shape now, at 37 (shudder) than I think I’ve been since…uhm…ever?..and pretty frakkin’ happy about that.
So on that note, if anybody wants to join me remotely in the Stairway-to-10k, and onward from there, PM me! I’ve been a big fan over the past month or so of Nike+ GPS on the iPhone (for tracking and encouragement), combined with the Podrunner Intervals program for actual pace control. It works better than I could have predicted – from 1.5 miles to 6.1 miles in 4 months!
For the last few months, I’ve been using sparkpeople to track my diet. I failed at it. I’m don’t have a smartphone and I’m not near a computer enough to make it work well for me. Since I put 10 lbs back on, I decided I’d go back to what worked for me, counting points, a la WW.
Now, if my knee would hurry up and finish getting better, I could start walking again.
The start of classes has been terrible for keeping up an exercise schedule, but I’m super excited because I’ve found a yoga class to try out! tomorrow’s the first class and I’m optimistic.
sigh
I meditate but cannot, for the life of me, manage yoga. I am the most inflexible person on the planet…my tendons and ligaments may as well be steel cable, for all their “give”. Can’t even sit in lotus, or half-lotus, for that matter. Makes me feel like a bad, bad neo-Buddhist.