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What got you into fitness? What kind of fitness?
Do you like to lift weights? Run? Play sports? Tell tildes about it and share your story of how you got into fitness and why it's important to you.
Do you like to lift weights? Run? Play sports? Tell tildes about it and share your story of how you got into fitness and why it's important to you.
I've had an interest in weightlifting since I was about 12. I told my mom I wanted to do it, and her response was "that's not for girls."
Once I got out on my own, I started visiting gyms and doing the usual "fitness routine" the trainers gave me - the endless sets of 20+ reps to "tone". It was frustrating, disheartening, and didn't lead to any progress. I remember signing up for some personal training lessons with a competitive powerlifter at our gym, and he sparked my initial interest in the "big weights".
I remember asking him to train me in lifting heavy, and his eyes lit up. He assumed I would only be interested in light weights, toning, and cardio, but this wasn't the case at all. We had some initial assessment sessions, and then I had my first really intense training session.
I remember waking up the next day and EVERYTHING HURT. I had DOMS pulsing through ever muscle of my body, and I was hooked.
It drives me crazy how many women and old men do this, and even more crazy that people who should understand fitness (certified and educated, hopefully) recommend this to anyone.
I'm already familiar with your story, but I'm glad you finally found someone who isn't such a numbskull.
The mindset of "omg if I lift weights I'll wake up looking like Arnold!" makes me crazy. These people have no concept of just how difficult it is to put on muscle, ESPECIALLY for a woman. With the exception of a very small minority, it'd require injecting more drugs than you can ever conceive of along with careful diet and a fuckload of work to "wake up looking like Arnold" as a woman who lifts weights.
I remember being 14 or 15 and being invited to go to the gym by one of my friends. I absolutely hated it. Why would I subject myself to such torture? It was difficult to lift weights, I was sore and hurt afterwards. Why would people do this regularly?
Flash forward to regular sports and I begrudgingly went to the gym as a part of team sports that required gym time. I did the minimum required of me and spent most of my time perfecting technique. I still didn't like it, but after going regularly it didn't really bother me anymore.
It wasn't until part-way through college when I had packed on enough weight to be the heaviest I had ever been (and well into the overweight category) that I realized I needed to do something. I started running regularly and eating less to diet down. This self-torture (I still hate running) made me start to actually like the feeling of being worn down after working out. I got into lifting with one of my college friends, and well, the rest is history. I've been lifting pretty regularly for the last 10 years, more seriously for the last 5 or so.
Lifting is important for me because I have a broken self image of my body. I do it to keep myself from absolutely hating how I look. That's my primary reason, at least, or the biggest driver. Being in health care, however, I know of all it's benefits. I've seen my grandmother slowly progress from walking by herself, to using a cane, to using a walker. I don't ever want to have to rely on an instrument for my own mobility - I'm deathly afraid of losing my ability to be independent so I'm doing everything I can to build my body up and keep it in shape. Finally, for most of my youth I struggled with depression. That went away after a few months of regular exercise. It was night and day - perhaps some of it was my brain finalizing it's development, but I find myself feeling a bit more down whenever I'm injured and can't go to the gym as often or too busy to make it as regular as I'd like.
Fighting depression is a HUGE reason for me. Going to the gym and throwing around heavy weights is the one thing that staves off needing medication.
And as a woman, osteoporosis is a real fear of mine. Weightlifting has a proven effect on staving off diseases like this later in life.
Funny you mention that, all the soda drinking and avoiding dairy products as a child left me with osteopenia in my early 20s. Lifting + daily calcium has helped reversed that.
I always knew I had a weight problem and didn’t do anything until I walked out of my dorm to my car and was winded. That’s when I decided to do something about it.
I did strength training for a few years and really fell in love with it. A few years ago I started grad school and my finances changed a lot. I looked at my budget and thought, ‘I could probably eat less food’ (wow, that was really depressing to type). After a while my ORM’s stopped progressing as fast as expected, and I attribute that to not eating enough. So I’ve inadvertently been on an extended cut and doing endurance training. Hoping I get a job soon that pays me a decent wage so I can start strength training again.
I told myself if I ever started to get bigger I would work out. I get a lot of exercise working on my property, but I need to start jumping rope every morning or running. A lot of it is what I eat. I tend to not eat breakfast or lunch so I eat big dinners then go to bed and don't burn off those calories. I also am uncomfortable a good deal of the time. I am still young enough and not to far gone. I am in pretty good shape, I just am getting a stomach and I think you call them love handles? I don't like it. So I have to work out. Just getting back into it. Don't want to be ripped. Just want to be thin and more flexible.
Has increasing exercise in the past been enough to slim down? I find that most people have an easier time cutting back on eating than they do increasing exercise, often because an increase in exercise is accompanied by an increase in hunger.
I am eating better too. Counting calories. I am already in decent shape. Only thing is my stomach is getting bigger, love handles forming ,and man boobs just about to come in. Can't let that get any worse. The bad thing about me is I am not gaining weight. Stomach is noticeably bigger but I weigh the same. So muscle atrophy. Which isn't good.
So it's a balance. Exercise and eating better. My problem was taking in more calories than I burned. I can eat better, but I have to burn off this residual fat now too anyway. Just eating better won't fix the damage alone.
Depends on what you mean by "eating better". There's a saying in the fitness community, "abs are made in the kitchen". The general idea is that reducing overall intake is vastly superior to increasing exercise when it comes to reducing body fat.
I'm not trying to prescribe anything to you, as I don't know what works best for you, but generally speaking most people find this adage to be true. Diets are significantly more effective than exercise alone, when examined in populations.
That being said, building up muscle will be good to do as well (reverse the atrophy) for general health and you certainly can (and perhaps should) both diet and exercise.
That is what I am doing in combination with exercise. And changing my diet to where I eat better in general / have a routine eating wise.
I got into fitness when I realized that I wanted to be a better version of myself. I distinctly remember one evening when it really hit me. I accepted those things I couldn't change about myself, and started working towards bettering what I could/wanted to improve in myself. For both my physical and mental health's sake.
I had always danced a variety of disciplines (ballet was my favorite), and that was definitely where my passion was, but it was around that time that I started to feel like dancing wasn't enough to get me where I wanted to be. So I started to experiment with a variety of activities: swimming, running, weight lifting...a bit of everything.
Nowadays you're much more likely to find me in the gym or rockclimbing than in the dance studio I considered my second home for 16 years of my life. However, I give credit to dance for shaping me into a fitness minded individual, and helping me pursue other activities through the body awareness it fostered in me.
Do you prefer to boulder or do a full wall? It's been a while since I've been to a climbing gym, but I'm hoping to get back into it soon.
Ah yeah if you have a dedicated partner I can see how it would allow ease in choosing either. Most of my old climbing buddies would boulder, much like myself, simply because it was faster to jump into, just as difficult, and doesn't require you to know someone there to belay for you.
I played sports from elementary school through high school, mainly baseball and soccer. In high school I played varsity and travel soccer, and was a referee my senior year.
I took a weightlifting class in high school and my first semester of college.
I don't play sports anymore, but I run and lift weights regularly.
My biggest interest is barefoot/minimalist running. I wear the dorky vibram fivefingers shoes to run. The sole is about 6mm of rubber, but I like being able to feel the ground, and it forces me to be mindful of my stride.
I don't do running minimalist (I don't do running, period), but I changed to minimalist shoes for everyday use, and let me tell you it really helped out my knees. I got nerdy about it and read a bunch of journals, and it's surprising how much damage a padded sole can do to your hips, ankles, knees, and general health.
I was athletic as a teen and always kinda of maintained in interest in being in shape, but could never get the discipline to keep up. I'd get bursts of motivation and then I'd see the gym or do some running for a couple weeks, but never had the discipline to make it a priority in my life.
The convenience factor of moving to an apartment building that had a fitness room helped move me closer to where I wanted to be, but it was a lot of fuckarounditis mixed with lack of equipment. During this time, my brother got a full out gym membership. I went with him to the gym and they had a scale there. I hadn't used a scale in like, no joke, a decade. I weighed myself and fuck, I was 220 lbs. At only 5'9", that really woke me up to how bad I was doing. That got my diet under control a bit.
I started tracking calories a few years later and that was so eye-opening. You start to realize where you get in a lot of "dumb" calories. Stuff like sandwich or burritos are so bad when you could just have a salad with all same ingredients but skip the literal hundreds of calories in the bun or tortilla.
What really kicked my strength training up a notch and kept truly motivated was deciding to have a child. Flabby and undisciplined is not something I wanted my future child to think of me as. And there are a fair amount of studies about how parental health directly ties to child health. So, both me and my partner got much healthier together. She has fallen off a bit on the gym, but I have stuck with it. My son motivates me so much to be strong, I like being able to carry him whenever he needs me, throw him and do horseplay safely because I'm strong enough to keep control.
And I'm an old dad too. By the time my son is in his teens, I'll be in my 50s. I want to be able to keep up with him. So, I've no shortage of motivation and add in a healthy level of discipline I've developed and I'm now almost three years into program lifting and definitely the strongest I've ever been in my life. My son makes me want to be the best version of me in a lot of ways (I'm reading more, cooking more, etc) and fitness is just another realm where I want to be a good example for him.
I would say there's no shortage to things that will motivate you to start, but you ned to find the discipline to continue to really see results. And that's something you kinda have to find within yourself, it's tough to rely on anything outside of you to make that happen when everything is temporary in life.
As a regularly active but not particularly high activity kid (playing outside regularly, biking, running, jumping climbing trees) and just having a suburban run around with friends in the neighborhood lifestyle mixed with helping on the farm and playing sports regularly and having decent genes it didn't take much for me to stay fit through my twenties even when transitioning to sit down office jobs.
Hit 30s though and things weren't quite so easy (picked up a number of pounds) so I had to start watching what I ate a bit more; cut out soda, quit smoking - eventually, and started trying to have balanced meals not just microwave chicken patties. That worked for the most part - but I wasn't very active anymore.
Hit mid 30s and jumping off just a couple stairs felt wobbly and urt (I used to jump off the top step!)... getting pudgy now - there's still muscle there mostly but it's soft and got a layer of stuff. My physique is such that I look stocky rather than pudgy with my clothes on... and I'm not trying to impress anybody... but I had a hard time keeping up with my parents when hiking in Utah. That was the last straw. It just creeps up on you and suddenly you realize you aren't quite as healthy as you used to be and it's not just "getting older".
I watch what I eat a lot better now and cut back on alcohol quite a bit - more about the volume than the regularity. It took some effort to get into exercising (harder than changing eating habits) but I don't do anything crazy as I'm trying to just stay healthy.
My workout changes went from never working out, to some frequent work outs, to now I just do regular workouts and keep activity up. Started with adding a simple exercise routine at home - I tried the gym for awhile but I'm too lazy to go to a whole different building to work out:
Once I lost the weight I wanted to lose and got back to "feeling healthy" I cut back on the jogging frequency and switched to short 10 minute workouts every morning (variations on situps, pushups, pull ups and squats mostly - core and major muscle groups). I focused on my shoulders for part of the initial intensive workouts because I have a bad shoulder and couldn't do pushups for awhile so there was some of that consideration first.
If I slack off too much - lost my job for awhile and another time moved in with my girlfriend and both things messed with my routines and\or motivations - I go back to the more intensive workout for awhile.
I definitely learned I can't outrun my food so cutting back definitely is required for losing weight but maintaining weight isn't so hard once you've already done the cutting back.
Basically, I learned that you can't just reach a goal and stop. It really is a change in life habits and it's annoying but I'm lazy and luckily found that maintaining is easier in the long run so now I just make sure to keep some exercising and outdoor activity as part of my regular routine.
I've been trying to find a way to mesh running with strength training (531 or similar) but just after I finished a couch to 5k program hashimotos thyroiditis struck and kicked my ass for a while.
I'm still trying to figure out how to fit it all together now that my energy levels are stabilizing. If I want to run 3x/week and lift 3x/week, how do I fit leg and core days in with running? Shorter duration rubs after leg/core? Currently I'm working back up to working out 3-4x/week but I've got another 25lb do re-lose and need to basically restart my strength training. The only thing that I've kept is my upper body strength at 85% of PR.
That might help. Honestly the more you use your legs the less they'll stay sore after exercising. Your best bet is probably just to power through it until it doesn't really bug you to do legs the day before.
Started off just trying to get "jacked". Then tried to lose weight. Now, in my 30's, I've focused on more functional working out and also emphasizing mobility/yoga stuff