Fitness
Notes
- Exercise helps make better use of the foods you are eating and produces the hormones you need to think clearly.
- It's been shown that the timing of your meals and more specifically your protein intake, doesn't make any difference to the growth of your muscles. Just get adequate protein and calories throughout the day, though you might want to eat something post workout anyway for energy.
- Massive calorie surplus isn't making you put on muscle any faster and is just being turned into fat. And that makes sense. There is only so much muscle you can actually build naturally every week/month/year. Extra calories beyond what will be used for that muscle growth aren't going to increase that limit.
- If you want a correlation between sitting at a desk and building strength to offset that, look at squats in all it's forms, and hamstring and quad dominant exercises. Your lower body is in much more trouble than your lower back from sitting at a computer. Hipflexer stretches with resistance bands will also do you wonders.
- Exercise is good for you, and what that exercise looks like is almost completely unimportant. Do what you enjoy and can sustain. If you have ten minutes in the morning, do HIIT. If you have an hour after work and want to get out of the house, go jogging or ride a bike. Anything is better than nothing.
- Your muscles do not distinguish resistance from external weights or from your own bodyweight.
- Try to walk outdoors every day. This is safe for almost every body and has been proven to help with depression. To give yourself those daily small wins, you gotta set the bar really low. I mean REALLY low, and then bask in pride when you hit your target.
- Cardio and body weight exercise train different qualities. Doing both would be better. I think endorphin release is higher with aerobic, same for increase in energy. Cardio is also better for anxiety. 2-3 sessions a week full body is better when starting. Bulking usually depend on your food intake. At maintenance, you wouldn't gain any weight. Fatigue from running is either because you do too much volume, or don't eat enough. You could bulk with 2-3 sessions/week, then drop to 1 session once you reach a weight/aesthetic you like. Cardio can help you lose or maintain weight, as it seems not to make you hungry.
- Most people are failing at the basics of training and diet but will then overwhelm themselves with these types of articles. Train close to failure(1-3 reps within), progressively overload, train a muscle 2-3x a week, do 6-12 reps, and do a decent amount of volume. There’s really no need to make it more complicated then that for beginners and intermediates. Sure you can do less reps, higher reps, periodisation etc. But those are good guidelines for a beginner.
- Volume is usually determined as reps x sets. But you only count the actual working/challenging sets not the warmups. General consensus is 10-20 sets per muscle group per week. If you look at the recommended routine it’s 6 sets per workout per upper body muscle group x 3 days = 18 sets per week. So that fits in nicely. If you’d only train a muscle once per week you’d probably do 4 exercises. At the end of the day it all works, higher frequency is slightly better though.
- Underestimated benefit of working out is increased mental resiliency. Make the hardest part of your day in the gym and everything else is easier in comparison.
Links