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Erkki

Idle Workouts

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I've always tried to get into working out, but my body literally won't let me. My body tends to itch whenever it's hot or if I'm nervous, so whenever I sweat is usually when my workout ends. However, I'm still not sure if being nervous is a cause or an effect of me itching a lot during workouts.

 

When I did exercise, I didn't pace myself well during workouts and ended up maxing out at around 30 minutes per day. I never felt any stronger when I did exercise, though, and I only did it to wake up; if caffeine worked for me, I'd be a coffee junkie.

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pabosher the lunge/curl combo sounds like hellish death. I looked up the TRX rows, and they seem cool but so hard. You know what I've never been able to do in my life? A pull up. I look like I should be able to build good upper body strength, but I just have never managed it. I'm currently doing about what you're doing for the dumbell press, but I have to cut it basically in half for biceps. It's crazy.

 

Yeah, the lunge is particularly difficult for me as I have weak knees, and recently damaged my left knee even further - I basically tripped and fell and cut it open about two months ago, which is still healing - so it's a very slow process that one. As soon as there's a rhythm going tho, it's easier. And yeah, the actual bicep curl with those weights is pretty hard; by the end, it gets very hard to even lift it halfway :P

 

The TRX rows are great! I think it's because I'm a swimmer and thus just generally have good upper body strength all round, and I enjoy doing something a little more zany. Pull ups are difficult too, man. I still struggle with the pullups where your hands are facing away from you. I can maybe do 10 before I fall. My advice is to just do one. Just one. Then try another. If you can't, try again tomorrow. You've got to keep pushing yourself.

 

Rxanadu, I'd recommend really trying to stick to it - you will find yourself feeling stronger, and you'll learn your body's rhythm. The whole 3x reps thing is a really good way of doing it. Do it til it hurts on the first, take a short rest, and try and hit that number again, and again.

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It's amazing how a bad day can ruin your workout, which can completely demotivate you. I'm sure some of you know I'm in the midst of dissertation season right now, and yesterday was a bad day with very little work done. Going to the gym in the evening was hell, and I managed maybe 2 out of the regular 12 exercise sets I normally do. It demoralised me so badly that I couldn't even go for a swim this morning.

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Nice timing. I've been thinking of getting back into running. Elbow surgery in the next month or so, so I'm busy postponing all exercise. I like couch to 5k programs. Also considering jumping directly into half-marathon.

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I got on my cross trainer for about 2 minutes this evening :tup:

My girlfriend goes to the gym 3-4 times a week, does body pump and all sorts. Lately she's been flexing her little anchovy biceps at every opportunity and earlier had the nerve to call me puny! Well. I'll fucking show her! This summer I'm gonna get fucking hench

All you need is some unhealthy rivalry

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I've been off from proper gymming for some time now. It's so much easier when you have a gym buddy who has a gym in his garage. There's like this vicious loop of ignorance going on too, if it's raining/cold, I don't want to go to gym, but I don't want to use my weights either because I'm paying to go to the gym god damn it.

 

Anyway, what I've found super helpful for keeping healthy is that Fitness something app that lets you keep a journal of everything you eat. Thanks to that, I found that I was consuming like 3% of the RDA of iron, which was the reason for the sores on the side of my mouth and probably a few ulcers too. Ironically what cut out my iron was switching from wheat to oatabix, because my mate listened to a podcast that says wheat makes you impotent with all cancer. Switching back helped loads. I was a bit stuck, because I picked up a cashew nut habit to sate my iron hungers, but it was about a million calories per bag, and only a fraction of what I needed in iron.

 

I thought eating would become an anxiety burden, but I actually find myself enjoying food more, now that I know I actually need it. When I was 15 or so, I was my own age in stone, pancakes for dinner, chicken nuggets for tea. It sorta fucked up my food life, constantly stuffing my face with the worst shit, from crisps soaked in coke to chocolate covered salted potato sticks. Now I feel like the logical part of my brain has more control over what I put in my face than that weird part that tells me to never stop putting chocolate bars in the deep fat fryer.

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I'm actually cooling down after a 20-mile bike ride. I'm weighing in somewhere around 161 these days, down from 289 at my (known) zenith. (I was too afraid to get on a scale before I started exercising.)

 

I don't have much to add other than being healthy makes everything else better and allows us to over-indulge on occasion. When I get the cravings for barbecue or pizza, I am confident that I can gorge myself on a single occasion as long as I keep my diet in check and maintain an active exercise regimen. Hopefully my complex's pool starts getting cleaned for the season so I can switch to swimming when it becomes too unbearable to bike any longer.

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My sis and I have signed up for a 5k on Sunday week. She has done one before, I haven't. Oh me, oh my.

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Time for day one of week three. AHHHH.

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Time for day one of week three. AHHHH.

 

Stop counting weeks. This is your life now.

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There are weeks of specific progress in C25K, and I won't stop counting them until I'm done with the program! Besides, keeping track of my progress like that is a much bigger motivation than not keeping track of my progress.

 

On the down-side, the ball of my left foot is really torn up. An old blister's huge dead skin flap was driving me nuts last night and in a just-woke-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, half-asleep delirium I sort pulled it off and it didn't go well. It's pretty messed up. Hopefully it'll feel/be better by tomorrow's run.

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I definitely recommend covering that in some fashion. Gauze, big patch bandage, something. The worst thing I do is let something that is not an excuse become an excuse and then I quit moving forward. A big blister is a legitimate factor to not run or to modify running for example, but you have to balance stopping-and-then-never-starting-again syndrome, or pushing through it and making it worse or compensating and injuring yourself in some other fashion.

 

Speaking of which, I strained my quad yesterday while softballing. It's bad enough that I don't want to push through it to make it worse or take longer to heal, and I'm considering how to exercise around it. I want to take it easy on jogging and biking for obvious reasons, but stuff like squats and burpees are probably out, too. I'm thinking maybe just work on pushups and situps for a week or so.

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I went indoor climbing last night! I got up three climbs!

 

I can't lift my arms or open bottles!

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I went running for the first time in over a year today, up some hills on moors that look a lot like Sir You Are Being Hunted. It feels like I exercised my quads, and loads of little small, neglected muscles I don't use for walking or cycling.

 

It was only five miles and I feel kind of dead now, but there was a total of a thousand feet up and a thousand down. I looked on strava after and found people doing crazy steep ascents in a stupidly low number of minutes. Nice to have ridiculous goals already set for me…

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I went indoor climbing last night! I got up three climbs!

 

I can't lift my arms or open bottles!

 

That got me to laugh.  I both love and hate the feeling of soreness/weakness.

 

Ugh, haven't worked out in a week.  My wife tore something in her bicep, and she was the real big motivator behind us working out most nights.  Since she can't do kettlebell swings for awhile, we've ended up in a cycle of mutual demotivation. 

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I got a rowing machine last month. It's great, I can watch TV and work out at the same time.

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I went on an obstacle course, accompanying a friend. We ran for the first 4k or so until another friend's knee gave out. We still tried to run, though, thanks to:

  • Night-time!
  • People dressed as zombies!
  • The water obstacles!
  • The cool breeze!
  • Boredom!

Anyway, I pulled myself across a river on my belly and I don't intend to do that again. They started half-assing the obstacles towards the end, too.

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I was reading up on Crossfit after talking about fitness-y things with someone recently. Crossfit appears to be insane things for crazy people. No, Crossfit, my tiny gym does not have Olympic rings nor do I have the capacity to make them for my home. I cannot do pushups upside-down. If anyone here does Crossfit, please confirm you are crazy.

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Take the criticisms you read about Crossfit with a grain of salt.  Much of the traditional workout industry hates and is terrified of movements like it.  Yes, there are risks to doing CF.  But the critics of it tend to take these risks, and magnify them way out of proportion to the number of people doing CF, while rarely or never talking about the really good parts. 

 

That said, CF does have risk associated with it and it has some problems that need to be addressed (just like any other gym, really).  I think one of its biggest problems is that the quality and expertise can vary wildly from one gym to another.  I think the one I went to is fantastic.  Trainers would talk with you about your personal strengths and weaknesses, and have you do different exercises if there were areas you were more likely to injure self on.  I don't know if that attitude is typical of the organization at large though. 

 

As for being crazy...eh, not really.  You decide how hard to push yourself.  The workouts are typically timed, it's do as many reps of a variety of exercises as possible in X minutes.  Someone in professional athlete level shape might knock out 500 total reps in one workout, whereas I might only get 100.  The theory being that everyone, regardless of fitness level, gets the same quality of workout because it scales to how fit you are.  And most beginners can't do advanced exercises.  Like I am no where near being able to do anything on Olympic rings.  But just like scaling reps, there are scaling difficulties of similar exercises.  Can't do rings?  You can do dips on a fixed machine.  Can't do dips?  You can do banded dips. 

 

As much as I like it though, I dropped my membership last summer.   The workouts are really tough and challenging.  Some weeks I was in the mood for that, other weeks it was really intimidating to think about going in and I would flake out.  CF memberships are on the expensive side for a gym, and if I wasn't going to go in at least twice a week, I really couldn't justify the cost.

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I totally get non-isolated resistance training. Bodyweight workouts or free weight workouts make tons of sense. I read the link, and then the related link about quitting crossfit, and I don't get the "laugh at people doing curls" thing. Free weights are not isolated. They are targeting specific body areas sure, but so are pushups, situps, squats, etc. The thing about doing either too much weight and needing to be spotted or working completely on machines is that part of the free weight workout is using other muscle groups to stabilize you while you do the exercise and machines DO remove that. Doing bicep curls or bar curls still uses all the muscle groups any other exercise that targets upper arms would use, though.

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My friend was talking to me about that last night. Not the risks, just thinking about doing Crossfit.

 

I've more than got my plate full just trying to not give up on running, for now. I've finished week four of C25K, and it was by far the hardest. Next week I've got to run five minutes at a time THREE TIMES for each day. That sounds hard. U: Also I'll be leaving town in the middle of the week, so I'll have to run in a new environment, probably outside, for a week and a half after that. Which is fine, as long as I actually do it.

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41 mins for my first 5k this morning. Didn't run the whole thing and I'm a bit sore, but really glad I did it. Lots to work I for the next one!

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That said, CF does have risk associated with it and it has some problems that need to be addressed (just like any other gym, really).  I think one of its biggest problems is that the quality and expertise can vary wildly from one gym to another.

 

This. I've seen a few videos (and heard of a ton more) where crossfit participants perform exercises completely incorrectly in such a fashion that there certainly is a risk of injury. However, that's the same with any type of work out regimen. As long as the instructors know what they're doing and make sure that all participants are performing their exercises with correct form CF is just fine.

 

Sure, the fact that CF is based around group training introduces a certain risk for peer pressure that solitary training might not have, but that's also something that the instructors should keep in mind.

 

I've previously done some p90X which was quite nice (Yoga ftw), but ultimately proved too reliant on me owning certain pieces of equipment for me to make any progress at all.

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Decided to attempt C25K again as my cardio workout to supplement resistance exercises. Got about halfway through the first session and could feel my shins dying. I didn't feel over exerted cardio-wise, just knew it would be a bad legs idea to keep going so I switched to a bike for the rest of the clock. I don't think this is going to work on a treadmill for me. Same thing happens to me on any sort of elliptical. I end up not out of breath but my quads are killing me, and that's not why I'm trying to use the machine.

 

There's no real substitute for running, is there? :(

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