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Fitness Weekly Discussion
What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?
I'm trying to regain some of my time for fitness, and I find that the easiest way for me to become interested in something is to spend a lot of time reading or listening to information about it.
Unfortunately, I tend to see a lot of glorification of disordered eating, blatant fatphobia, and generally pretty unsympathetic attitudes in a lot of fitness and "health" content, and I'd rather not take psychic damage every time I try to learn about what the best kind of sitting stretches are. If anyone knows of any YouTube channels, podcasts, or blogs that you've read or listened to that provide useful and interesting fitness information without this kind of toxicity, I'd really love to hear about them!
As a broader topic with flexibility, yoga related content is pretty good. The best part about it is it's all floor exercises, so not strictly sitting and stretching, but many positions will help get you a good stretch, even in less advanced forms in a generally safe way that'll keep you from busting your butt if you should fall. FOr not-yoga stretching AthleanX, despite being slightly controversial in fitness circles, also has solid stretching advice and tends to limit his content simply to the topic of the video.
Al Kavadlo is pretty great. He'll discuss the practical issues of being overweight and doing calisthenics, more weight = more resistance = harder workout, but otherwise is purely focused on the exercises and movements, some stretches, but mostly exercises. He even has a beginner/intermediate workout he posted at the start of the pandemic if you wanted a starting point for both flexibility and strength (modify as needed of course).
Bob and Brad are also a solid source of stretches. They're a pair of physical therapists who use YouTube to try to help people help themselves, at least in ways that don't require physical therapy now.
As someone who doesn’t know you, this reads to me from the outside as an uncharitable description of what “general” fitness is… if you’re cool with being fat then general fitness probably isn’t for you. That’s not “fatphobia”. Excessive sympathy doesn’t get you anywhere; everyone who’s done it knows lifting heavy things and consistently eating well are hard… but they’re also very simple, so there’s not much “strategic” depth that can serve as fodder for a steady stream of YouTube videos.
You don’t have to like general fitness if it’s not your thing - the alternative is to focus on a particular sport or activity. Most sports are open to anyone with a very basic level of fitness, and have a higher level of strategic depth, so you don’t get the same sort of repetitive blogspam content about the minutiae of dieting that seems to turn you off. If your reaction to this is “but I just want to go to the gym”, focusing on a specific gym niche, like powerlifting or Oly will get you away from fluff (and generally speaking, powerlifting is the opposite of fatphobia lol). Pick what you like/what’s available close to you and roll with it.
Fatphobia is a pretty specific term that means, interpersonally, being mean to or negative towards fat people because they are fat, and systemically, building systems that demonize fat people for being fat. I don't mean "if you do this you can lose weight" - that's not any kind of discrimination or shaming. What I mean is, for instance, the kind of motivation that is based entirely around losing weight and not other indicators of health; saying "don't be like one of those lazy fat people, go to the gym" or other things to the effect of demonizing people who don't want to lose weight, etc. I don't really understand how you can say that the fitness industry and online fitness communities don't do this - for many of them, it's part of their stated purpose!
(There's a conversation to be had about how -phobia is a terrible suffix for this kind of thing and -misia is likely a better one, but that's how the terminology has shaken out, so I use it as it is used.)
For context, I suppose, I'm very slightly overweight, but my cardiovascular health is worse that it was in early 2020 because a) I moved from a city where it's summer all year round and there are hiking trails every half mile to a city that has winter and no hills, b) it's been a global pandemic, and c) I've been taking anti-androgens the whole time. Similarly, my upper body strength has declined somewhat, probably more in response to the anti-androgens than other factors as I have been doing low-weight, high-rep-count exercises fairly regularly.
I'm not annoyed about body weight being a primary metric for a lot of the fitness community because I'm fat and I don't like people criticizing me, but because I don't like the extremely negative way that these kind of resources tend to talk about fat people, as though being fat is morally negative in some way, and because a lot of pretty mainstream health advice promotes diets that look awfully similar to the way I used to eat in high school before I was diagnosed with an eating disorder and got therapy. That pretty objectively sucks, and it sucks for me even more because it's triggering to listen to.
That all aside, thanks for the advice; I think it's quite useful.
Everyone has their own canonical definitions 😉 - but I very much take your point and agree that in can be toxic.
To summarize what I hope to convey: general fitness stuff sucks overall, and quickly devolves into fatphobia (as you put it) and repetitive drivel because there are only so many ways to say “exercise regularly and don’t eat processed food”. A niche fitness interest will give you more interesting topics to think about, and avoid judgments on weight, because those niche communities don’t center their identities around weight to the same extent as general fitness types.
That's a very succinct and helpful way to phrase it, thank you! Perhaps I'll get back into archery or fencing or something.
I find myself reading a lot of articles on healthline. Their articles are pretty informative and they usually cite a lot of sources and reference scientific studies.
Thank you, this looks very helpful!
If you find resources that you have success with I would be very appreciative if you could let me know. My wife is having similar struggles getting started with fitness because so much of the advice out there is either (a) really not all that good of advice/is actively damaging or (b) really bad advice for someone recovering from an eating disorder and has all the issues that come along with that, both mental and physical.
A lot of people on the Fediverse have sent me useful resources. Specifically:
I have yet to dive deep into any of these, but superficially they all look great!
I'd recommend Iron Culture podcast with the caveat that a lot of it gets into the nitty-gritty "scientific" aspects of fitness. However, they often address the psychological aspects and get downright philosophical at times and they definitely have little-to-no patience for the toxic aspects of the fitness industry and generally take a pragmatic approach to fitness. They even admit their own past bad attitudes towards fitness and how they've grown in maturity. Often with a bit of dry sarcasm, if you can get with that.
Here's a particular episode that touches on disordered eating/fatphobia topics that you may find interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfAbKeiAuII
Awesome, thank you so much!
Weight update
My weight is bouncing a lot between 233 and 235 the last few weeks. Just slowing working my way back to a pattern of weight loss again.
Diet
Hasn't changes from previous updates: more take out than cooking.
Fitness
I missed working out last week due to nausea on Monday, and then just not going (no excuses lol) for the other days. Back at it this week both Monday and Wednesday, and I should be good to get back tomorrow (Friday) as well. I expect I'm going to adjust my workout plan now again though, as I've changed my progression marker for myself.
My plan going forward is that if I successfully achieve 4 working sets on a specific weight, I move on to the next increment (2.5 or 5 lb increase starting at the next workout) until such a time that I can achieve a fourth complete working set of 12 reps. I also enjoy the four sets because some of the exercise, I'm able to get a decent pump out of it. However, with four working sets, and two warm up sets for each exercise, my current plan takes me to 1.75 hours and by the time I'm doing my last workout I'm mentally fried and just don't want to be there anymore. So I suspect I'll be adjusting it to have three workouts (A, B, and C) instead of two (A and B), and then it's an even split across three days every week. I just don't know how that will look yet.
Any comments or suggestions are welcome. I'm still only a beginner in terms of programming my routine.
Assuming you’re AMRAPing the last set, this is (generally) a yellow flag in terms of programming. Fine as a beginner, but at some point you’ll overtax yourself doing that and need to start implementing periodization in order to continue progress.
*Also gonna add on that you should look to diversify rep schemes a bit down the road, but you’re probably aware of that.
I'm not following AMRAP (as far as I know). I still treat it like a standard working set of 12 reps. If I don't successfully complete the final set, I'll go to the next weight down to finish the set, or pyramid my weight down so that I can complete 12 reps.
I still consider myself a beginner. I didn't learn enough as a teenager, and I'm still fixing mistakes for myself now, as well as working through disorders haha.
The biggest thing that I'm realizing I need to focus on right now is form and flexing the muscle during the exercise. And doing so I've dropped the working weight considerably to do that. I realized that I should have focused on that more in the beginning but that's my fault. This is most prevalent in my bench press, pec flyes, and my lat pulldowns.
I'm sort of half-following periodization, I just don't usually reach the end of it before I realize what I'm doing can be improved upon.
Yup. Once I have my form down and I get to my nigh-final goal weight, I'll be starting a 5x5 strength plan again, at least assuming that I've also been able to figure out some medical issues with my knees.
I got an adjustable kettle bell handle since I've got an abundance of 1-inch plates. I sort of overdid it trying to figure the thing out, but it works well enough for everything from swings to snatches, even if the plates dig into my forearm a bit on the snatch. The bruising isn't too much worse than I've gotten from a normal kettlebell, so I can't complain.
I seem to have lost 8kg to no fault of my own, I'm taking a medication which interferes with my appetite. So I'm a bit closer to my ideal weight. After many months as basically a couch potato, I look kinda healthy but I'm in reality quite weak. This is, no doubt, partially still a consequence of covid, I should go to the doctor to check on that. I gasp for air after climbing a flight of stairs. Today my arm got tired from brushing the dog, not at all a strenuous effort. Gotta hit the weights.
Many COVID recoverees report worsening exhaustion with exertion, which is consistent with the mainstream medical hypothesis that many “long-haul” symptoms are caused by microthrombi in various parts of the body. In short, it’s a double-edged sword, in that the systemic effects of exercise are beneficial for recovery, but the acute cardiovascular exertion can potentiate any ongoing ischemia.
Slowly reintroducing exercise is a great move - but your body likely feels the way it does for a reason, so be patient, take it very easy, and don’t judge yourself if you have trouble keeping up with your prior standards.
Thanks, you're a well informed person. I'll keep that in mind.
I got another three runs in last week, which felt great. Sadly, my lower back pain has been getting worse and is probably the worst it's been in months. I put two and two together and I think the running is causing the worsening back pain. It sucks. I was really being cautious and taking it slow, but I guess my body just isn't ready yet.
This setback made me finally book an appointment with a physiotherapist. I go for my initial assessment in two weeks and I'm really hoping it can help.
I just feel kind of stuck though. I lost ~45 pounds and am at or close to my ideal weight. Other than my back, I look and feel better than I have in 10+ years. And yet I'm so fragile. Anytime I try to progress, my body says "Nope!"
My compound lifts are looking something like this (max-ish... I don't really check my 1 rep max):
I've also added a buncha accessory work on top of that.
More importantly, though, I've been doing boxing lessons for the past few months and it's been fun as hell! Albeit quite tiring... Anyhow, I really enjoy working on proper boxing technique, footwork, crisp combos, etc.. A new skill to develop, for sure.