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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 want to start doing calisthenics and stuff, maybe 15 minutes after work or so -- any tips? I'd like to work on my chest (male). Any tips are appreciated.
Push-ups are going to help your chest and we all know how to do them. A wider stance will put more emphasis on your chest and less on your triceps.
Thanks for the stance suggestion!
No problem. I do agree with @gaywallet: if you really want to see some bodybuilding-esque development, you'll eventually need to move on from calisthenics and into resistance training. But push-ups can still give you a lot of starting strength and central nervous system gains in terms of teaching your body to push like that.
Great point. I figure, I'll get started and see where I end up!
Start with pushups, the only way to really add resistance is going to be to do them at an angle or to wear something heavy while doing them. Unfortunately the reality is you likely will have trouble visibly building your chest up without adding weight, but this can be a great start.
There's definitely ways to make push ups harder that don't involve just simply doing them at a decline or using weights. If you think push ups are too easy, try these.
Training for a full planche is just as good as pressing a bar.
Edit: changed video link to one with better form.
Ah yes, good call, lifting your body off the ground entirely with your chest and arms will absolutely add resistance through gravity.
Other stuff you can try: clapping push ups (good for developing power), one armed push ups, diamond push ups (although I think it’s better to splay your hands out making a ‘W’ instead of actually making a diamond. It takes a lot of the load off of your joints because it’s a lot easier to keep your elbows from fanning out)
Good point... And yes, starting is really the thing I need to do!
Last week I bit the bullet and bought an indoor trainer for my bike and have zero regrets. I hate bicycling in the cold, much preferring the heat. Many neighborhood streets in my area have grades in excess of 10%, some topping out at 15%. If you've never ridden up a grade like that, it is faster to walk. Cycling up them is a special sort of unpleasant grind.
I've found riding indoors to be great. I do not understand the hate that indoor training gets. You mean I can watch a movie and ride my bike? Not worry about getting hit by a car or drag myself up a super steep grade? It's been an awesome way to start getting my fitness back up and exercise while gyms are unsafe.
I ran cross-country, track, and trained with an indoor track team, as well as running on a treadmill. That's the context I'm going in with for inside-vs-outside training. For sake of simplicity, I am not including indoor vs outdoor training in swimming because there are often times a lot of changes that happen other than just "is the pool inside or outside" when going between the two. If desired or if I get some extra time later I'll try to expand my thoughts to include swimming.
First off! I am glad indoor training is working out for you! Exercise is a really personal thing. What exercises you like, confidence/insecurity while working out, and how seriously you are taking it all play really big roles in what kind of training you like. At the end of the day, finding the correct combination of things that works best for you is the most important thing IMO. Fuck what other people think. If you like indoor training then indoor training is great :). That said holy cow do I hate training indoors. Like I said, I only run indoors so I don't think this will all apply to biking but here is why I prefer outdoor training.
(Personal) I like being outside! Yeah this one is really dumb but I think it is important! I've lived in cold places all my life and I still prefer putting on underarmor, a hoodie, and grabbing my inhaler and going for a run in the cold and snow more than I like running on a treadmill. There is just something about being outside that lifts my mood and makes exercising feel better to me.
Technique: Running on a treadmill vs running on a track vs running outside are such different beasts. I mean, even running outside there are different considerations, but we'll gloss over those. I hate running inside because it takes away all the things I like about running. I don't like running in one spot or seeing the same room (be it bedroom or indoor track field), I get bored as hell. I don't like the ways that I have to change my running form because treadmills aren't very good for running with good form (at least I sure can't do it). I love running natural hills. Steep inclines, shallow inclines, doesn't matter. Love em. This probably goes back to cross country roots where I was really good at hill training and so on race days I'd make up a lot of ground just by running hills smarter than people. But yeah, I love hills. Running doesn't feel the same if everything is perfectly flat the whole time. Shit, I lived in flat-as-hell Ohio and there's still a world of difference between indoor and outdoor running.
Elitism/Seriousness. I'm not really sure how to phrase this one and I think it is hit-or-miss on if it is a good or bad thing.
To me, this isn't a pro. I take working out pretty seriously. If I am doing a cardio-based workout I don't listen to music or do anything because I want to focus on my breathing and how my lungs and muscles feel and adjust my form or my pace accordingly, or make mental notes for what stretches I should do when I'm done because my left hamstring is feeling a bit tight today. If I'm lifting weights its a bit more "what is more important, music getting me hyped or listening to my body" and I just go by what feels right on the day. And yeah, avoiding getting hit by a car is a great idea and definitely a concern 10/10 would suggest not getting hit by a car. And again, I'm going to try to add this in as many times as I can to make sure I am not misinterpreted: If you like watching a movie while you bike, or reading a book while you bike, or playing video games while you bike, go for it. It isn't my place to tell you how much attention you need to be spending on biking. I don't think I am better than you because I take working out seriously and you like to watch movies while you bike. I might not understand it, but I'm not going to pretend like I'm better because I find joy in pushing my body to failure. Getting in any exercise is better than none so if watching movies is what it takes to get you on the bike then I'll dig out my DVD collection for ya. This is not a strict definition. I am not saying you cannot take exercise seriously and work out indoors. I am not saying only hard-core people exercise outdoors. I am saying I have noticed a trend across my friends of people who work out in their own homes are usually more chill about their workouts and the people who do lots of outdoor training are the ex-athletes who still derive a lot of their self-worth to their athleticism and are passionate about athletics.<- Going along with that, I'm sure there's a lot of elitism. I know I sure have preconceived notions, you can see them very clearly on display in the last sentence. I have expectations on the types of people who do indoor vs outdoor workouts. I try really hard to be open-minded and not let stereotypes overly-influence my thought process and yet here I am still with these assumptions. There are many people who have grown up similar environments as me and so have the same assumptions as me, but haven't reflected or examined them. I'm sure that also is where some hate indoor training gets.
(x) I don't remember what number I'm on and scrolling up to check is a lot of work. The last assumption I have is "time". There was a long stretch of time where it was significantly harder to get a good and safe workout at home. Treadmills, running machines, mechanical bikes, etc, have all come a long way and are now much better ways to exercise. They can now easily account for hills and slopes, you can more fine-tune the resistence. Bikes will come with built-in exercise routines. This makes indoor workouts WAY more effective. I wonder how much of the hate is just holdovers from the before times when home equipment sucked ass and now that people are seeing what is out there they'll be more open to it.
Lots of great points here! I have never cared for running, but especially hate running on a treadmill, so I feel you there. Cycling is a bit different, I think, since my form is effectively locked in whether I'm inside or outside. As long as I'm on my bike, I'm reproducing my efforts.
I think what I value about this trainer is that I'm using my road bike, which I've ridden for years and love dearly. The convenience afforded by being able to ride safely after dark, not need to drive to an area/trail that's suitable, and being able to push and push without having to worry about getting back to my starting point is so nice. Figuring out you aren't well recovered but are already 20 minutes away from home is a sad realization.
Also, I don't feel like I'm defending myself here, more-so just clarifying. I've been an avid cyclist for years. But living someplace new means a lot of prep on my part to go out for a ride. I am blessed to have a bike computer that can handle GPS routes. That has made me feel a lot better in routing and exploring. In my hometown, though, I knew every road like the back of my hand and could travel the whole town safely. It was also hot all the time, and made for good riding weather. The summers were particularly punishing, with feels-like temps well over 100F. So even going outside was a punishment, but I loved that part of it. Here, it's different and foreign. The temps are a different punishment and were well into the 20s yesterday, and I just don't have the clothes, know-how, or desire to hit the road in the cold and dark. And so the trainer gives me back that freedom to exercise however and whenever I want. I'd way rather feel the wind in my face, but watching TV with my partner makes it a surprisingly engaging activity.
That said, I do love riding out of doors, seeing the scenery, the wildlife, the fresh air. I just don't think indoor cycling is as awful as other riders purport it to be. I'd been under the impression for years that riding indoors was almost less enjoyable than not riding at all. You're definitely right about the equipment improving in the last few years, especially with Zwift craze and the pandemic.
Trying a whole bunch of new stuff this year so we'll see how it goes.
Daily: Yoga in the morning. I found 2 mindfulness yoga routines I am going to try and then a more athletic one I'll try after that. This is me trying to kill 2 birds with one stone. I'm not very good at meditation or mindfulness (yaaaaaay inattentive ADHD) so I'm hoping mindfulness in the form of yoga might yield more successful results. Also, my flexibility is ass and I don't want to hurt myself, and I need to keep working my core muscles because my back has been KILLING me lately from all the sitting and my terrible posture (something I'm working on).
M/Th: Right now, twice a week I am doing a kettlebell workout that is a mix and mash of a couple different routines so that I ensure I'm hitting all the muscle groups I am trying to hit, I'm getting a good amount of lifts, stability, and composite exercises, and adding in a couple extras to try and give that little bit of extra focus to my weakest muscle groups (anterior shoulder muscles and calves). Started super light with an 8kg (5lb) steel bell, hopefully in 2-3 months I'll either be up to 3-4 days a week or up to 15lbs kettle bell, depending on how things shake out.
T/Fr: As I mentioned in an old one of these posts, I have a quiet punch which I use for some very simplistic boxing training while the gyms are closed. Hoping to sneak in a cardio and a technique day into the week.
W: Core. Just a half hour core workout. Because everything hurts and my core is weak as hell.
On top of all that, I'm pushing my diet from vegetarian 3 days a week and making best-effort to be vegatarian the rest of the week, to "vegan" 2 days a week, and best effort vegetarian the rest of the week. I say "vegan" because at first I'll be slowly building out my pantry, but for example I'm not throwing away $300 worth of preworkout and protein powder because it isn't vegan. That's so wasteful. I'll just buy vegan versions when I run out of what I currently have. I'm hoping to slowly increase the number of vegan days
I ran my first 5k virtual race on Sunday! Not under 30 minutes, but it was a solid effort, and I’m happy with my running progress. I now need to figure out how to fit exercise into my schedule now that I’ve taken on a puppy. She requires a lot of time and watching. I may have to sucker my partner into watching her when he’s done working out.
Finished my time with Pavel Tsatsouline's Russian Kettlebell Challenge Rite of Passage. I didn't make the 200 snatches in 10 minutes with a 53 lb bell (142 was my best effort), but I think I'm getting some repetitive stress soreness from all the clean and press action from doing it for 14 weeks.
Still absolutely loved the program. It was a great introduction to kettlebells and I can't wait to do more kettlebell work in the future. Wrote up a whole look at the program on my blog here: https://erikcieslewicz.medium.com/program-review-the-russian-kettlebell-challenge-rite-of-passage-a26df88ac45d
But, I'll copy/paste some thoughts directly here. Click through if you want the whole spiel:
Pavel has a pull quote on the back of the book that kettlebell training is “the closest thing to you can get to fighting without throwing a punch” and I’d say that’s pretty accurate. This feels like you are doing martial arts with 20+ kilograms of iron strapped to your fist. The movements take a little while to master, and once you do it feels very satisfying.
I found myself a few times deciding to do some more work even after my “required” (by my own definition, I always got a half an hour of work in at minimum) time was done on variety days. Why? Because it felt good. I’ve written in the past that getting a fifth day a week has been difficult for me, but I mostly managed to with this one. I think part of that is just kettlebells are fun. Rest days felt out of sorts for me. I honestly couldn’t wait to get back out and push myself against the iron. Another nice thing is that I am doing all this from home, in the ally behind my place. I get out, breath in the crisp autumn/winter air, listen to the ol’ gym playlist and swing around a bell. It’s really nice with no commute.
Snatches and high pulls are the real show stopper movements, in my opinion. Snatches for the extreme satisfaction of learning how to navigate your arm around the bell (rather than flopping the bell around your arm) is near impossible to describe. You just gotta do it. The high pull, closely related, feels satisfying as well. You swing this weight from all the way behind you, in front, up to next to your skull, it hangs in defiance of gravity for a brief moment before you drive it back down and do it again.
It’s very metal.
Speaking of aesthetics, I’ll quickly address this, but I don’t want to dwell on it: if you pick up the book be ready to read some insecurity around masculinity. Pavel knows his shit about a kettlebell and has a fun persona with all his cool Soviet era tough guy stuff. But he goes out of his way to trash on aerobics (despite kettlebell training keeping the heart rate in the aerobic range), the HIIT trend (despite having a whole page dedicated to Dr. Sears’ research on the benefits of INTERVAL TRAINING) and super oddly, Jane Fonda. If you read a lot of fitness books you know that these occasional digressions into machismo are common, but fair warning if you’re not up for that.
On to the program itself. Pavel has recommendations for kettlebell weight in his book. I went with 44 lb/20 kg for my regular bell and 53 lb/24 kg for my next level one to start. This is his recommendation for “a stronger than average gentleman.” I guess I should have had more confidence in myself and went with “a very strong gentleman,” as I blew right through the 20 kg bell in the first week. Pavel tells you to graduate to a heavier kettlebell if you can 5 (1,2,3,4,5) clean and press a bell on the heavy day.
I guess doing five years of program lifting gets you into “very strong” in Pavel’s book. If you need a comparison to power lifting numbers for your own consideration buying some kettlebells: when I last tested myself 9 months before starting, my 1 rep maxes were 435 lbs squat, 280 lbs bench and 175 lbs overhead.
It’s not a bad idea to learn some form with lower weight, so it wasn’t hugely problematic for me to start underbelled. It definitely helps you get the proper form on your wrist and forearms for cleans and snatches. But having a heavy bell really made sure I was doing a proper pull at the beginning of swings, cleans and snatches. When you have a lighter bell, it’s very easy to just let your arms and shoulders do the work of pulling the bell from the start position. A heavy bell forces you to employ your full posterior chain and really feel the power from there flowing up. So, don’t go light too long, push yourself early.
For me, the jump from using the 53 lb/24kg bell for regular work to the 62 lb/28 kg bell was when I really felt I was pushing myself. The 28 kg bell tore my palms quite a bit and gave me a pretty good back strain that took a couple days to stop hurting. And well, it just generally felt heavy. It was good though, I made the switch up to the 28 kg bell seven weeks into the program and I was jonesing for something to make it feel more challenging at that point anyway, so good design from Pavel on when to go up a bell.
One word of warning: I was not prepared for how much my forearms wouldn’t care for having the weight sit on them. Pavel mentions that you should not bang the bells against your forearm, you learn to move your forearm around the bell rather than the bell around your forearm. And indeed, back when I first started doing kettlebell training in September I did find myself banging against my forearm until I got the form down. But even after taking a month off to just do swings, heal up my forearms and then coming back with good form, I still found my forearms tender after work outs. No bruises, nothing I couldn’t work through, but still sore.
I put on some powerlifting wrist wraps to help with it and that was super useful. And, after a while, my forearms just weren’t tender anymore. I think it was kind of a calluses from knurling on barbells or a toughing your finger tips to play guitar situation; you kind of just have to develop a bit of toughness that you didn’t have before because nothing you’ve done to this point involved 53 lbs of iron resting on your forearm.
And speaking of calluses, my hands also developed some new ones from kettlebell training. Get ready for that too. Pavel does have a whole section in the book about hand care though, if you really find yourself roughing up your hands. I started moisturizing more regularly around week 7 (the 28 kg week) and had to even remove some callused skin with some scissors to keep it from scratching up my palms.
Making a separate comment for a short comment that I didn't want to get lost in the sea of my other posts: Your comment and blog post were very insightful and well-written. Once I get a few months of my plan under my belts so my stability and secondary muscles are a bit stronger, I'm going to very very excitedly sink my teeth into the RKC RoP
Thank you very much for the compliment. I've really enjoyed writing about programs because I'm a very opinionated guy and lifting gives you time to think and form opinions! It's actually gone really well for me, my Medium gets about 10,000 reads a month. That's not a lot for the pros, but for a person like me that does it on the side, I've been really pleased with the reaction.
Hope you enjoy RKC RoP as much as I did!
I have a small theory but before I dive into it, were you an athlete in school and/or were you very athletic in school? It sounds like yes based on you saying you did powerlifting for 5 years but I just want to confirm.
lol, well this is certainly a cliff hanger of a comment. But yeah, I was kind of athletic as a high school student. That was over two decades ago though.
Edit: To be clear, I am specifically focusing and discussing this part of your OP
Fair! Sorry, sometimes I forget I'm posting on a forum and not on discord or slack :/ but something I have been realizing as of late is how much sports have really warped how I view "athletic". So I am very much like you where even in the stretches where I'd go 8-9+ months without workout out, I would come back and immediately be able to jump back into "advanced" level workouts. What I've come to learn from my friends is that I fundamentally view and define exercise very differently than people who never played sports. The level of muscle fatigue/cardio exhaustion is about what I would call 60% effort for me. Not saying I am 60% stronger than them, but that their definition of "how tired should I be after a workout" is 60% as tired as I think I should feel when I am done. Same goes for frequency with which I work out, same with what I consider my baseline. I can, without any real issues, go out and run a sub 10-minute mile today if I was asked to even though I haven't ran in over a year. That's... not beginner level. Its very beginner for me, who is use to 7-minute mile paces for 5k races now barely being able to get 9:30 for a single mile then being done, but that's still so far above what most people would be able to do as their beginner level. And I don't know that time away from hs would necessarily change that. I've been out of college athletics for a while, but my mindset about exercise hadn't changed because the people I talked to at the gym were also the people showing up 1-2 hours a day 6 days a week.
For an example, I just bought a 5 and 15 lb kettle bell because I hadn't worked out much since August and even back then it was spotty at best. I figured I'd start low weight good technique and not jump in the deep end and hurt myself. I figured I'd start as a beginner since I felt like a beginner and then go from there. I was not a beginner. On no rest after finishing the beginner workout I started the advanced workout. I was barely sore the next day. I'm still going to keep doing the workouts with 5lbs for a couple weeks to make sure I have good form and don't hurt myself, but from a purely athletic standpoint, I'm still not a beginner even after nearly 2 years of very sparse working out.
Anyway, that's my really long rant about how I think being a high school and college athlete heavily warped my perception of exercise and athleticism and how I believe it is a very generalizable thing. To be clear, I don't think it is strictly a negative thing (it can be, but almost any view has the potential to be negative), but realizing it has shifted the way I think and talk about working out over the last few weeks when I first had this conversation/realization with my partner.
I can't find it right now, but there was a study that "muscle memory" was real. That is if you did work out in the past, you get your gains back much faster than the first time around. The authors were unclear on if this was due to the central nervous system retaining how to do proper form and what not or if the muscle strength actually did come back faster. So, I think you're definitely on to something.
I was never a good enough athlete to do anything at the college level, but my high school coaches knew a lot about olympic and power lifting, so I ended up getting more into lifting than into football. Probably why I still like lifting now, and perhaps why I take to it quickly.