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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've been [inconsistently] alternating between either an hour of walking or the following each day:
As I said, it's inconsistent. I'm also struggling to reach the end of each set before pausing. I'd appreciate any advice offered here - trying to lose fat from my thighs, stomach and butt while getting a bit more toned all around. Since early in the year I've lost almost 25 pounds doing this, and feel considerable better, but I'm debating whether or not I should scrap the "do x amount" format and instead change to "do as many of x as possible in x seconds".
People are often under the misconception that it's possible to target fat loss with exercise. Unfortunately it is not. You can lose or gain fat, and where that fat is distributed is entirely based on genetics.
One thing you can control, however, is building muscle. If your goal is to make a specific area look smaller, you can build the muscles around the area to make it look smaller in context. For example if you wanted your legs to appear smaller, building more upper body muscles would accomplish a similar look.
There are 3 possible ways to progress:
Each person seems to adapt to and respond to different kinds of exercise differently. My suggestion for you would be to try out each kind of progression and see which works best for you - it may be that one style is just easier for you to accomplish and that's what you're looking for or that one style really leaves you 'feeling' like you had a more difficult workout.
In general you should keep these different methodologies in mind, however, as whenever you hit a point at which you feel progression has stopped it may be time to change your progression method.
Thanks for the advice. I ended up switching back to the old method of trying to do the sets of 20. I managed to complete each set on the first round, I think, then completed the second round in sets of 10-pause a few seconds-5-5. I was sweating, but not dripping with it, and I don't feel tired. But working up to complete sets of 20 is still there as a goal, which is good, and I'm feeling better about doing it and I'm not sore, so hooray!
A couple years ago, I pulled the trigger on purchasing a spin bike online for around $300 CAD. It’s fully analog with a big heavy flywheel that spins. Using that with the peloton app has been a life saver in the winter.
I recommend the combo for anyone looking for a long term at-home solution that is “relatively” cheap.
I bought a pair of rollers, for riding my outside bike indoors, during the winter.
Though it's a lot more engaging than riding a stationary bike, the exercise itself is still mind-numbingly boring, and I hate myself that I can't do it more often than I do. It's good as a cardio session, but I am unable to keep my strength up over the off season months which was my actual goal when buying them.
I guess I could benefit from a little gamification with Peloton, but I can't bring myself investing the time to make it work, and the money for the subscription. I'm glad it helps you, though. :)
Yeah I hear you with the boredom... I definitely struggled with the same thing. But honestly the instructors do a really great job. It changed the workout into something I look forward to.
I have a question just tangentially related to fitness. I've been eating on an intermitent fasting schedule(5/19hrs) for past six months, in the idea that the fasting leads to a ketosis process, similar to the keto diet only without the headache of counting carbohydrates intake.
Yesterday I bought my first ketostix out of curiosity, and the ketone levels after the 19hrs of fast are exactly zero, or close to what the sticks measure as zero.
Anyone has any theory on what I might be doing wrong?
I am a mid thirties male, with relative low body fat content (~22BMI) and an low-intermediate activity level. I don't smoke and I don't drink. I also keep the feeding schedule pretty religiously.
Your body can store quite a bit of glucose in the form of glycogen. A 19 hour break of no carbs is not enough to put someone into ketosis unless they are already quite close to being in that state (typical recommendation is <50g carbs per day, but it varies based on total body weight and genetics).
Why, might I ask, are you so concerned with reaching ketosis?
I guess I don't really have an answer to this question. :)
Mainly curiosity. Secondarily I want to keep my body weight down for the cold months because I can't engage with my favourite exercise (cycling) with the same regularity as the rest of the year. There are some amateur competitions early in spring, and it would help me if I could start more serious training, without having to drag 4-5 extra kilos. :)
I suppose my question for you is why are you under the impression that keto is necessary to lose weight? Or that losing 4-5 kilos will be more beneficial than the amount of performance degradation that comes from having reduced glycogen stores?
If your goal is simply to lose weight, there's no reason that any specific diet will work any better than any other specific diet unless you already have experience with both and know that one just happens to work better for you (your genetics, your style of eating, what makes you hungry, etc.).
If you wish to enter ketosis, unfortunately you're just going to have to count carbs (or simply avoid foods with carbs as much as possible). Since you have ketosis strips, you can verify when you actually enter ketosis, if you're not in ketosis, simply keep reducing carb intake until you are.
I would also like to point out that just because you're peeing out ketones doesn't completely denote ketosis. If I remember correctly, every person's genetics dictate at what level they would be in ketosis. You could very well be peeing out ketones because of your high fat intake.
That's how it was described to me a couple years ago.
Sort of. You very likely won't be peeing out ketone bodies if you are not at least near a state of ketosis. Also, when you are in a state of ketosis, the number of ketone bodies excreted in the urine is going to vary from individual to individual.
So it's not a perfect measure, but it is a measure, and perhaps more importantly a cheap measure by which you can gauge whether you are likely in or not in ketosis.
You won't enter ketosis, but when you become truly fasted, your body (ideally) switches from digestion to autophagy. I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, though.
This is a very basic description of the function: Autophagy is the state where you body will break down the weakest cells and reuse what it can and discard what it can't. So this can be fat cells, which hold fat, but isn't necessarily the case. Fasting + ketosis helps one break down the excess fat at a more accelerated rate, but isn't the be-all-end-all.
Eat when you're hungry, eat at a caloric deficit, reduce your carbohydrate intake based on your activity level (the more active you are, the more that carbs are helpful as they are a quicker source of energy compared to protein and lipids), and increase your activity level. You also don't need to eat carbs when you're active, but you may be less energetic or less inclined to be active, depending on the activity.
Generally, you wouldn't lift weights on keto unless you are specifically supplementing an amount of carbs before your workout to help provide energy. As I understand it, most weightlifters who practice keto are still intaking an overall greater amount of carbs than keto technically allows but they stay in keto because they spent the time understanding their body's requirements for lifting and have adjusted as such. Also many weightlifters that "do keto" don't actually go into ketosis, but instead just lower their carbohydrate intake enough that it puts them under the limit based on energy consumption (i.e. Rich Piana's "keto", RIP big man)
Wait... I'm supposed to be on a digital detox. Pretend the void typed this message out.
Thanx for the comment and sorry I made you break your digital fast. :) I feel like tildes is at most like a celery stick when it comes to that, though.
No worries. I'm still habitually reading stuff on here at work. I work in tech so it's tough to do a 100% detox but I try to avoid it from home (though that's not working well either, with the Arrowverse crossover and the damn vidya gaemz).
What most weightlifters do is called a "protein sparing modified fast" in the literature. They are often not actually in ketosis, because reducing carbs to that level is usually (there are some notable exceptions, but world class athletes tend to have extremely rare genetics) detrimental to performance - the vast majority who identify as keto lifters are only actually in ketosis while training (if they ever even reach it) and will purposefully carb load before a meet. Otherwise you're right in that they specifically try to time their carbs (amount and type) around a workout to reduce the chance that it will drag them out of ketosis (if they are actually in ketosis).