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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 lost all of the muscle I had built in the past year when I was sick a few weeks ago. All of it. It’ll take months to build back up. I’ll get there though, I did last time.
Unless you were totally immobilized for weeks so your muscles started to atrophy, and/or you were starving to the point where your body started to cannibalize your muscle tissue to keep you alive, that's seems highly, highly unlikely. Muscle built up over a year of working out isn't going to totally vanish due to a singular bout of sickness preventing your from working out for a few weeks, unless it was an extremely, extremely severe sickness.
You can gradually lose some of your strength and endurance gains due to the effects of detraining, but even that usually takes weeks of inactivity, and it's not actually caused by losing any muscle tissue, it's caused by your body reversing some of its training-induced adaptations. But thankfully those adaptation generally don't take very long to reestablish themselves in full once you start training regularly again.
I hope so, cause I’m literally back down to 3 fully body pushups from 7 and it took so long to get there I feel so defeated :(
My running stamina is fine, it seems to just be only my upper body strength
Strength is about so much more than just muscle mass, although that is a major factor. But even with almost everything being the exact same from one workout to the next, simply having a crappy sleep the night before or being slightly dehydrated can cause a significant strength performance decrease. And psychological motivation is a huge factor as well. So it's not surprising that you being sick has had a big effect.
But I can pretty much guarantee you that you haven't lost all (or likely any) of your actual muscle gains just from being a bit sick for a relatively short period. That's simply not how our bodies work, AFAIK. Our bodies don't tend to shed much muscle mass unless put under extreme circumstances, or we experience extremely prolonged periods of inactivity. So keep working at your pushups consistently again for a while longer, and you'll very likely get back to your peak performance pretty quickly. And if not, then I would start trying to figure out if there is something else in your life that's changed that could be effecting your performance (e.g. your sleep, hydration, nutrition, motivation, etc), so that you can correct it.
I'll agree with cfabbro here - I used to do bodyweight exercises 3x a week and could do 60+ weighted feet elevated pushups with rings at my peak.
After a two week vacation, some illness, and a bout of depression, I didn't exercise for probably six to eight weeks. When I started back up finally, I couldn't even do one pushup on the rings as my arms were shaking so badly. I thought I'd lost all my muscle too but read up on it some more and decided to reduce the workload and go back down the progression ladder.
So instead of elevated ring pushups, I just did plain pushups until I felt stronger, then worked my way back up through progression to where I was. It really only took 2-3 weeks to get back to where I was. Your time to recovery will likely be different, but as long as you persist, you'll get back there!
I just got back to the gym today after a 10-day chest cold, and performed dismally, especially upper body strength. Even after that short a time, I had to drop 5 kg off my chest press just to move the bar, and reps were down for everything but back extensions and leg press.
I'm suspecting extra time in bed, sore ribs, low muscle glycogen storage from fever and chills, greater central perception of fatigue from immune responses, etc. are at fault. But I've bounced back from much worse than this before, and more quickly than you'd think (e.g. back to regular routine within a month, after 6 weeks off for a hip replacement).
Give yourself some time, and persist with your workouts. My hopes that you'll see a rapid return to your usual progress!
I injured my knee in February during seasonal sports.
It’s been a slow (… to me) process, but the important part is that it could’ve been much worse. With what I turned out to have had happen, it took me pretty much a month on the dot to be able to walk and put regular pressure on that knee again (and angle it up to 90 degrees again).
I’ll be starting physical therapy in probably about two weeks, which will be a first for me and something I’m looking forward to – I’m definitely still noticing the injury in my everyday life, sometimes it “just” feels funny/unstable, other times it’s plain ol’ sharp pain. And I haven’t really had the courage to be active, or agile, again for extended durations apart from taking an increased number of simple walks outside, coinciding with (mostly) warmer weather again, which was nice.
(For the curious: I collided with another player and as a result fell while moving on ice, and bruised my lower femur bone (wasn’t aware that was an option prior to this) by having my kneecap snap out of its designated location, and back in place swiftly thereafter, which, ahem, greatly decreased its stability. But thankfully it was neither ACL tear nor bone fracture, and I’m young, and after the first three or so days the pain had gotten really manageable and disappeared a lot every day, too.)
Then I was supposed to go to my I believe my third or maybe fourth check-up yesterday… but developed a fever at the start of the week.
There was another, better timing though prior to all of this: With some help, I installed a proper pull-up bar in my place and have been using it pretty religiously, that is to say, every time I walk underneath it. I’m pretty heavy, but used to be able to do about 10 pull-ups at a time, which is gone now, but it helped me get started without bands. And I have to say, it reminded me that you do get a noticeable and motivating effect pretty quickly! I’m back to ≈five now with acceptable form, up from just one or barely two when I took it up again.
Edit: And even though I’ve been able to walk without crutches for about three weeks now, you really do notice every single thing that you’re taking for granted once it’s gone… More specifically, being able to angle my knee further than 90° would be nice just for some variety while sitting and laying down (and eventually, bicycling); I’m sure I’ll be able to again at some point but it does take its time.
today was a lot of upper body work, pike pushups, blah blah blah
This is unfortunately less fitness related... I'm getting the beginnings of iffy vibes about the gym I've been going to. Not going into details because I have no idea if they're true, but it's already weird enough that stuff like this was being casually discussed by one of the owners to another regular (not even in secrecy, I wasn't part of the conversation but we were all just chilling waiting for class to start). We'll see I guess!
3 weeks of holiday done.
in the last full week, I've averaged 2h sports a week. In these 3 weeks, I have done:
Wingfoiling, Gym sessions, a 5k race, running, snorkeling, Muay Thai, Slacklining and Calisthenics Skill days.
Wow. I can tell amazing progress, and I feel so much better.
Yesterday I hit one of my short term goals - a bodyweight benchpress -75kg
Now I am sore. Wanted to do muay thai tomorrow, and either I'll do that, or a rest day and then muay thai.
I think my main issue is resting. There's nothing I enjoy more than doing sports first thing in the morning
After weeks of what felt like zero progress, I'm finally hitting some new PRs again! 165x10 bench for a new 1RM and I hit 295 for 6 reps on RDLs last week. That's not a new calculated 1RM but I've been having a really hard time getting back up to the 11 reps I did at 275 so I decided to just up the weight and see how long I can stay in the 6+ rep range.
Anyway, it feels really good to feel like I'm making progress again!
Probably related, but I have such a hard time finding the time to focus on anything other than my "typical" bodybuilding-esque routine. I need to be training for Kilimanjaro, and I want to be working on calisthenics, but those always feel like I'm taking away from my "core" workouts. Bleh!