Eatin' sweet potato fries and gettin' buff

[Riot]

been lifting



NOT i'm fat

[ImuyumI]

Anyone buff yet?

[Merk]

Workin' on it!

I've been doing squats without a Smith machine and I can't tell if I'm a huge pussy or not. I was squatting 3x8 reps of 100lb (plus whatever the bar is) yesterday and while I was able to struggle through it, I was having a hell of a time doing so. I was honestly more concerned of dropping the weight or busting a knee/hip during my initial "pick up the weight, waddle away from the bar rack" portion of my reps. Is there something obvious I'm missing? I read that you're supposed to be squatting your body weight but I don't think I could come close to handling any decent amount of reps of 200lb let alone being able to lift that much weight off the rack and being able to carry it from the rack to the little weight catcher side bar thingies.


My gym's squat rack looks like this:

[DAVE101]

I read that you're supposed to be squatting your body weight but...

Who made up that rule? It's all about progression bro. Work your way up to it, then surpass it.


Since there is some diet stuff going on in here, has anyone tried Okinawan sweet potatoes? The ones at my oriental market look like this:

[ImuyumI]

It's been six months since that new years resolutions came back. Where do you all stand? Are you buff yet Merk?

[SoDeepPolaris]

Missed Miguelito's post back in Feb about being able to squat your body weight. I'd highly recommend against trying to start with squatting anywhere near your body weight, especially when you're learning technique and getting started. Squatting is a very natural movement (look at toddlers) but a lot of us lose that flexibility/mobility so you'll need to work back into it. Again, anyone who says proper squatting is fundamentally bad for your knees/joints is dumb. Of course, former injuries can always play a role. Caveat emptor.

Can you get to appropriate depth with good form with no bar?
How about with just the Olympic bar?
65lbs?
85lbs?
etc.

tl;dr PROGRESS INTO IT. Don't go in full steam assuming you know what you're doing or you have to meet some criteria of poundage.

[SoDeepPolaris]

[DAVE101]

That gif is extremely slow to load for some reason.....

[Riot]

I am trying to watch what I eat more and I'm working out pretty much every day.

I don't do a TON, but I do probably 40-80 crunches, 40 pushups, 40 chair lifts (working lats, going up and down between two chairs), and maybe 30-40 minutes of DDR. It's usually a mix of all that, maybe less of one activity per day. I have definitely noticed that I can do more pushups and stuff because when I started a week ago with them I could barely do 5 lol.

HOWEVER, I'm not losing any weight. My goal is to get rid of belly fat and man boobage. Maybe I'm not losing weight because I'm gaining muscle? Or because my diet is counteracting it... I dunno, trying to eat more fruits and less bready stuff.

Any tips? I really want some easy to set up ab workouts. Maybe I'm doing crunches wrong but I feel like I'm pulling with my neck after awhile, especially if I don't have my feet anchored by something.

[DAVE101]

As I mentioned before, weight is not a good indicator of progress. There are too many factors like water retention, blood plasma, bone density, and muscle mass as you've mentioned. Didn't you say it's only been a week? One lb/week is realistic, but body weight can fluctuate daily by a couple pounds, so you really need to look for long term trends in weight. Remember that spot reduction (the idea of eliminating body fat from a certain area by working out that area) is a myth; crunches aren't any better for reducing one's belly than walking up stairs.

My favorite ab exercises are weighted sit ups, ab wheel, and leg raises / reverse sit ups. When doing reverse sit ups, you're lifting your legs instead of your torso, just make sure you are also raising your butt off the ground at some point. Otherwise it's just a hip flexor workout. Those are strength focused though. If you're looking for more of a conditioning circuit to burn the most calories you can cycle crunches, planks, side planks, flutter kicks, supine bicycles, and leg raises.

And you already know that cardio type activities are much more calorically expensive than resistance type training, but Calorie intake rules all. A 300 cal snack cancels out a 300 cal 3 mile jog.

[SoDeepPolaris]

Snip

Diet is the single most important thing to tackle first. If you're gonna make progress, you have to track your calories. Period. Significant weight loss over a week doesn't really happen. Changing habits takes more time and you shouldn't expect to shed the weight off. Not to be a jerk but even someone with Thor-like genetics will not be gaining an equivalent amount of muscle to the body fat they'd be losing. It just doesn't happen, especially over a week's time, especially with the exercises you're doing and non-specific diet. Substituting fruits for breads might be more nutritious, but you probably aren't reducing your calories significantly.

When you say chair lift, do you mean chair dips?

Proper form will work mostly triceps and deltoids with some pec and lat activation. Unless your triceps are somehow significantly stronger than your lats, your arms will tire before your back does.

Regular flat ground crunches are a pretty bad exercise. Some of the variations Dave listed are much better floor workouts for your abs. Dave mentioned this somewhat but spot reduction is a myth. You can't target fat loss on your abs, thus crunches to try and "cause" beer belly reduction is just gonna leave you frustrated.

I'm not that good with body weight exercise advice as the majority of my workouts involve squats, deadlifts and the like. If you're not opposed to a gym membership, I could probably provide a ton more advice. I will say pull ups are probably the best body weight exercise you can do, though. I can't remember if Ft. Wayne has any non-playground type pullup bars at a park but you might look into that.

[Riot]

Thanks. I mean it's been more than a week. I've been making a concerted effort to lose some weight for 2 months now really. I just recently started to try more pushups and crunches this last two weeks, whereas before it was just playing DDR as much as I could.

And yeah I meant chair dips, two chairs on each side, dipping down. I just started that today to see if it'll do anything for the ol' moobs. Didn't know about the targeted weight loss being a myth. I'll try leg lifts I suppose... just really wanna get rid of the belly fat. For what it's worth, I do think I feel a bit tighter from the last couple weeks, but it might be in my head.

I doubt I'll go as far as to join a gym or anything. If anything, the workout room in my school is pretty great, I just haven't taken advantage of much in it besides the treadmill. They have some nice weight machines and stuff, and probably a pull up bar. I suck at pull ups =/ but then again I sucked at push ups and at least now I can do sets of 10 in a row (which may not sound like a lot, but it's an improvement).

I think one of the main issues it still diet... I eat healthier foods I would say, but I still probably eat too much. I need healthy foods that fill you up (and being tasty wouldn't hurt).

[Riot]

Still going (relatively) strong with my working out. I work out about an hour every morning and try to eat healthy all day. I've lost 3-4 pounds, but realistically more off the problem areas since I'm building a bit of muscle. My belly is still a little flabbier and undefined than I'd like it, but you can see some reluctant little abs poking up.

I've been doing an hour of DDR (which is about 21 songs, 7 sets), with pushups between sets most of the time. I kinda hurt my shoulder doing chair dips a few days ago so I've tried to shy away from pushups and stuff for the last couple days, but I started doing some 8 pound weights. Granted they're not heavy, but after my hour of DDR the last few days I've done at least 100-200 reps of them in different styles for different muscles. I want to focus on laying down and bringing them up like hugging a beach ball to help kill off the man boobs (it's getting there, they're definitely a lot tighter now), but it still hurts my shoulder since I think I pulled it or something so I'll wait another few days for that. My arms are still sore from doing the weights yesterday which I suppose is good, and this morning instead of DDR I went out for a run for about an hour.

I am also starting to eat a little protein powder mixed into a fruit smoothie for the last three days immediately after lifting the weights. Hopefully that does anything *shrug*

My lower belly is still the main area I'd like to target. I'm a lot slimmer, but I'd like it to be more defined. I guess I will try to work in more crunches.

[Merk]

Play Oni courses like Dancemania Oni and World Tour!


DDR yayyyyyyyyy

[Riot]

Meh. If I build Stepmania cab sometime in the next few months, there are a couple 36 minute cool-sounding songs that might make for good endurance stretches. It'd breathe new life into the game too since I'm getting to the point where a lot of the songs are getting old. I've probably played at least 300-400 songs so far on the machine, been around the full listing multiple times.