Barefoot_Trader

So who saw the mens final on sunday? Frankly the mens semi finals and finals were three of the best tenis matches I have ever seen in my life. All close. all exciting. I literally was on the edge of my seat for the whole of the final. Some of the shots that both players pulled off were ridiculous. Big congratulations to Andy, breaking Britain's 77 year losing streak at the greatest tennis tournament on earrth (IMO)!

I am curious as to why you would want to do this at all... Without the self regard, introspection and more spiritual aspects, it is not yoga. You are merely stretching. Why not just to something like mobility WOD as part of your workouts and be done. I am afraid that without some open mindedness towards the more spiritual aspect you will never really be able to 'get more into yoga'. You do not have to believe in the energy flow or chakra points or any of that. However, a willingness to focus on yourself and an openness to let the practice teach you about yourself is what yoga really is, not the postures themselves. Anyone can do the stretches, but this by itself is not a yoga practice.

Yup, used to do TGU's twice a week as part of my variety days so be ok on that front. Will still start slow though, back to the 16kg kettlebell, 5 mins only etc etc. Getting really excited by this now... Hell yeah!!

Thanks for the response Cline. The club I have joined is K1 rather than Muay Thai (not sure of the difference). I can see what you mean about shoulders / assistance / punching... Maybe I can thow in a Turkish get-up day (best assitance work I know) after a few months geting into the routine... Also I could do Press instead of Bench for the shoulder strength. Ok so, current plan is: 2 days a week: Strength - Squat / Press / Deadlift (5 x 5) 2 days a week: Kickboxing (boom!) 1 day a week: Turkish getups (after ~2 months break in time)

High all, so my story is that I was making great guns on strength / fitness / fatloss with barbells and kettlebells until about 4 months ago when I got a nasty shoulder injury (not a a result of the training I hasten to add). Now my doctor & physio have given me a clean bill of health I am ready to get back into it. Now, wanting a fresh start, I tried some new things, Hot Yoga (most challenging 90 minutes of my life!), Running (Booooooring, no thanks), Swimming (ok, but still quite dull) and Kickboxing (most fun I have had in ages!) I was really only just starting with the barbell lifts (got up to 80kg Squat, 60kg Bench, 45kg Press and 95kg Deadlift) when my injury hit. I Had a quick test yesterday and I have lost a fair amout of strength (managed 50kg Squat, 45kg Bench, 40kg Press and 85kg Deadlift) during my recovery. I have put a little padding back around my belly but mostly I have managed to keep my diet in check and am not to worried about the diet side as I know what I am doing there. Basically I want to work on strength with the barbell and start training in the Kickboxing simultaneously (hopefully allowing the two to assist each other). Note, I am a complete beginner to the kickboxing. How would I program this effectively? I was thinking working on the powerlifts twice a week (basic 5 x 5 program) along with Kickboxing twice a week (or 3 times if I am feeling a bit fruity). Or would It be best to do just one for a few weeks / months, then add the other once I am used to it. Or something completely different? Answers on a postcard please... Stats: Male, 32, 175cm (5'9) and 85kg (190lbs) Main Goals: Strength, kickboxing prowess. Secondary Goals: Some Fat loss

Grab yourself a copy of Enter the Kettlebell by Pavel Tsatsouline Do what is says Come back in 18 months and tell us how it went Seriously thought Enter the Kettlebell is one of the best resources I have come accross for starting kettlebell training. It seems really simple, but is very effective. I love kettlebells, they are really fun to use and a single bell can be made to go a long way so the financial investment is relatively low. There are 2 things to bear in mind: 1/ Start at the correct weight. Too light and you will get very little out, too heavy and you will injure yourself very quickly. A good rule of thumb for an average person who is untrained is 16kg for men and 12 kg for women. These may sound light, but believe me, once do your first set of swings you will understand! 2/ Quality over quantity is king. Make sure your form is good on the exercises. If you can, find an experienced trainer to show you proper form. You could check out www.strongfirst.com to find a qualified trainer in your area to help. Grab a kettlebell, get the book and you are set for a good few months of training. Enjoy!

So, in reality, timing for most people will make at best minimal difference so long as calorie needs and Macro ratios are appropriate to training goals? I know Brad Pilon generally thinks that the impact of post workout protein is vastly overstated for 99% of trainees ( He makes some exceptions to pro bodybuilders on a contest cutting diet.). IIRC, he says that muscles remain anabolic from hours to days after heavy training depending on the individual.

I think people often downplay the emotional aspect of 'food addiction'. There is a reason we call things 'comfort food'. Often when people are craving 'junk food' it is for emotional reasons and it is really easy for others to label those struggling with weight as weak willed (I am not suggesting anyone here is doing this, just a general observation). In my case, 5 years ago, I was 6 stone overweight and craved takeout every single day. I could not control it at all. Long stroy short, I came to learn that I was craving foods as a substitute for the fact that I was quite lonely and felt isolated, so I got heavier, which made me more isolated / self consious, which made me crave food more.... vicious circle. Anyway, once I recognised those feelings I could take steps to counter them and my cravings dissappeared in a matter of weeks. Then the weight slowly came off as I made the diet / exercise changes. I still get cravings. Now, my particular nemeses are bisuits and cake. If I am feeling bored or stressed or otherwise slightly down for some reason I always crave chocolate biscuits or some other kind of confectionary. I even give in sometimes (who wants to live their whole life devoid of cake!), but I never binge anymore. I guess the point I am trying to make is, if you are craving something 'unhealthy' (does anyone really ever crave vegetables?) then there is probably an emotional trigger behind it somewhere. The key to controlling those cravings is learning to spot those triggers and acting to mitigate the effects.

So why are my muscles not growing!!!!! I mean I am definitely resting enough.... 5-6 days a week most weeks.... but still not building muscle!! Grrrrrr! [/sarcasm]

So would a good first step for aspiring to pullups be to do some static holds in the above position? Or is it something to aspire to once you can pull yourself up 'anyhow' for a couple of reps? Currently I only have a doorway pullup bar and am using a band under my knees (feet tucked back). Are you saying that this position (almost verical / feet tucked) is a harder variation of the pullup / chinup? I guess working on keeping my body both straight and feet off the floor (hollow position) while in the doorway would certainly help core and lat engagement...

This is a brave thing to admit to yourself. Bravo to you! Often, the first and most difficult step on the road to recovery / change is admitting that you have a problem. I think there are two things that you need to tackle: First is to change food habits, you know what to do here and people have already given you excellent advice. Make small steps to change over number of weeks and you will be on the way to building some much more positive eating habits. Secondly I think you should also make some steps to think about why you have this attachment to fast food. I am not a doctor so I will not even attempt to suggest any reasons why you have this relationship but understanding these feelings may make the diet changes much easier. I know it sounds a bit hokey, but think a really good exercise is to keep a food and mood diary for a few weeks. Write down what you eat and how you feel before you eat it and after you have eaten it. The food log is great for tracking food intake and is a great practical step regardless. The mood aspect will help you to identify any emotional triggers which are driving the unhealthy eating.

Nothing wrong with pictures as a comparison. Actually picture comparisons are one of my favourite ways to track myself as I find weight loss to be a little misleading (doesn't discriminate lean / fat loss / gain) and BF% is notoriously difficult to measure.Unfortunately, both fat loss and muscle gain at the same time is unlikely (but not impossible for a beginner lifter). Fat loss requires a deficit in calories. Muscle gain requires an excess. I find it is much easier to focus on one at a time. If to want to try and lose more fat, cut your calories by 500 a day and keep lifting what you can to maintain your muscle (you will still be able to make some strength gains and raise the weight as you are a beginner). However, you may struggle to put on significant extra physical muscle while in a deficit. To build muscle you will need to eat a caloric excess and lift heavy (again though don't sacrifice form for more weight, patience and consistency is king). You will also need to be prepared for some fat gain if you take the build muscle route. It is inevitable unfortunately. Just remember that you lost 50lbs! If you put 5lbs of fat back on (along with 5lbs of muscle) then dieting them off will be a piece of cake (pun intended). Sounds me like a good plan for you would be to stay at maintenance calories for a few months while you increase the weight in your lifts (particularly the squats). You MAY find that you get some fat loss as you increase the weight in the lifts. As the lifts get harder and you start to miss reps in the final sets, bump your daily calories up by 500 a day. Keep protein up at about 1g per lb of body weight, keep lifting and you will be properly bootylicious in no time! Other than that, keep tracking your weight, keep taking pictures and (most importantly) enjoy the ride! Hope this helps.

First of all, congratulations on the weight loss. 50lbs lost is an excellent achievement. On the squats front, slow and consistent is much better than heavy. IMO, you are better to be cautious with the form than adding weight too quickly. That being said if you have been using the bar for squats for 5 weeks, adding some more weight is probably a good idea. Go by how the sets feel, if they feel easy, add 5lbs. I find that there is a sweet spot of difficulty where the correct form is easier to find. But that maybe just me. If you feel flexibilty is an issue, then some shoulder and hip mobility drills before your workouts (after your warmup) will probably help here. As you are just starting out, I would not worry about depth overly much as long as you are breaking parallel. As the weight goes up and your mobility improves, the depth will come. Just strive to get deeper over time. Posting a video really will be great if you have other from concerns. People here are ace for helping out. Now to business... I have a couple of questions on this. Firstly how did you measure your BF%? 25% seems slightly high if you are starting to show some ab definition (but it can vary so you may not be far off). Soundls like you have got to the 'stubborn last 10lbs stage' which can be a real pain to shift. Secondly, your stated aim is to 'tone up' your butt and thighs. What do you really mean by this? Do you want further fat loss? Or more muscle in these areas? Both of these can lead to better muscle definition but will require different approaches ultimately. For example, if you want to add muscle you need to eat more (and lift heavy), to lose more fat, you need to eat less. For now, I would suggest not changing your diet and start adding some weight to your squats (again, consistent beats heavy every time while you are learning). It sounds like you are currently at maintenace calorie wise and your macros seem to be at reasonable levels, See how this goes for the next month or two while focussing on your lifting. Once your weight on the bar starts to feel heavy and your are happy with your form. You can decide which route you want to take. (i.e. more muscle = more calories + more weight on the bar OR Fat loss = cut calories + maintain weight on the bar) Just my opinion of course, feel free to listen to others with more experience.

I think this is a little disingenuous. If you did not read the article, then you have no real right to claim it is ridiculous. The article makes some very good points about human evolution and points out some very common misunderstandings. Not once does the article claim that a diet without grains / processed food is unhealthy. Nor does it refute that some members of the population cannot tolerate either grains or dairy. The main point the article makes is that the claim that there was some sort of ideal diet for mankind at any time pre civilization that we were perfectly evolved to eat misunderstands the continual nature of the evolution of the species. I agree that the article (and the book) is badly named. It seems designed to be deliberately provocative to sell more books. I have come full circle on the paleo diet idea. I was a skeptic, then a full convert and now feel that it is not really the whole story as far as diet and nutrition goes. Specific (i.e. personal) intolerances aside I see no problems having either grains / dairy in the diet of most people. More protein and more veggies is obviously good for you, but having some pasta or bread as well is not going cause issues for most people. If you are intolerant to something, or it makes you sick, don't eat it. If not, enjoy your pizza.

I guess the way to think about it is to start mesuring something. If weight is your concern, weigh yourself If Strength is your focus, test your deadlift If BF% is your concert, meaasure it (somehow). Be consistent with how and when you measure and adjust based on what you see. If you feel fine, have good energy levels, can do your workouts progessively and your Weight / Strength / BF% goals are being met... Then you are doing it right.

Have you come accross Original Strength or Becoming Bulletproof by TIm Anderson? Alot of the stuff in there is geared toward better movement and improved posture and could be included in a SMART goal. Basically it is a set of movements / exercises that you do three times a day, everyday (takes about 3 minutes each time so only 10 minutes a day) to help with movement patterns. So you goal could be: Do the exercises, 3 times a day, everyday for the next 6 weeks. Maybe something to check out / consider.

Hi Esteel, Be very careful with the comparison of these two studies. The Starvation experiment was carried out on young, fit men with maintenance calories on the 3.5k range. Yudkin's experiment was on a wide range of ages of both sexes with average maintenance calories in the 2k range. So the Stravation expeiment had the participants more than halving their daily calorie intake. Whereas Yudkins restriction was only ~500kcal (on average). This discrepency more than accounts for the difference in behavior observed, I think. I came accross Dr Eades' blog myself not too long ago and also found it to be compelling reading, then I found Anthony Colpo's blog and he very neatly and comprehensively changed my view. Google Anthony Colpo and check his site out, has loads of very scientific and no nonsence advice for weight management and fat loss. I don't quite agree with everything and he can come accross as slightly self aggrandizing, but it did clear up alot of my own questions.

This seems to be a popular topic at the moment as I posted something similar for discussion in one of the threads pointed out by 80's Medium. I came accross an interesting Blog Post by Brad Pilon (of eat stop eat fame) which basically said that people always want to make fitness / diet programs too complicated. The point was that for Less BF and more muscle / strength (which is the goal of over 90% of people who start training / dieting) a simple mindset was best. Diet for Fat loss + Train for Strength While being a massive oversimplification of the true physiological picture, for 90% of people, this approach will help to make significant progress towards their goals. In my case this has hepled me stop worrying about weather I can lift while not eating enough, or weather I need to add long or more cardio into my workouts to burn more fat etc etc... Forget ALL that - Diet for Fat loss, Train for strength. I have made more progress thinking like this for the last 3 weeks than I did in the 2 months prior. Hope this helps.

Check out Dan John's 40 day program or Get yourelf a copy of Easy Strength by Pavel & Dan John. The programs are built around traning everyday at ~8 RPE on the main lifts and going heavier naturally (i.e. when the weight feels light) I guess the point is that you can train every day, you just can't train Maxes every day.

Thanks everyone for the responses... lots to think about. So far I have had 2 weeks of fasting for 2 x 24 hour periods and eating 'normally' the rest of the time (that is I have not really been thinking about what I eat, just what I was eating before I started fasting really). On the lifting front I have not tried to increase the weight over the last 2 weeks and I have coped fine. The lifts seem to me to the same level of dificulty each time. I have also lost almost 1kg (on average, once weight fluctiations are taken into account). So far so good. I think I will keep going as long as I can like this and will only increasse the weight when / if my first work set feels 'easy' on the day. That way I hope to stay on top of things. If the weihts start getting really heavy or I start having recovery issues then I can always reduce the volume / weight or reconsider my eating. Thanks again for the responses, will update more as my experiment continues.

OK, so following on from the christmas excess my focus for the next 10 - 12 weeks is fat loss. My reasons for this are purely vanity, since my Wedding day is in 30 weeks and want to make sure I look awesome for the photos. As such I am doing intermittant fasting Eat Stop Eat style (that is 2 x 24 hr fasts a week) with an eye on protein and EFA's in my eating. My calculations are that over the course of a week I will have on average a 500 - 750 kcal a day deficit so that should work just fine. ((Note: I know Paleo / primal is the generally advocated nutrition advice and my meal plans do turn out to be ~75% in line with this but I do not plan to be too rigid. I prefer to let my fasts do the hard work.)) Now to my question, which is about my workouts. I like barbell lifting and have a barbell / rack / weights at home which I invested in about 3 months ago and have been using since, following the Stronglift 5x5 program for most of that time. I have also been eating quite a bit and am starting to get a podge even though I am definitely much stronger. So, will this approach still be best for me while my focus is on Fat Loss? My focus for strength / muscle is to maintain what I have while I fight the flab. I may have some 'novice gains' available to exploit so I think some progression would still be in order. But any extra strength I get in this time would be added bonus and is not my aim. So, I guess I am wondering if continuing the 5x5 structure with much slower progression (say ~2.5kg a week on my squat, which is my current plan) is the way to go or if another programme would serve me better. Anyone else have any experience with this or any advice?

Thanks for the reply, I probably should have mentioned that I do a full body warmup before my warmup sets which consists of 2 rounds of: 100 jumping jacks 10 prisoner squats 10 pressups 10 lunges 5 shoulder dislocations Then I start with the specific warmups as described above. I definitely would never start the above routine from cold as I agree that would be a route strait to injury town. Your warmup sounds alot like I used to do before I switched (about 3 weeks ago). Will definitely go back to it if I start to struggle. ** Edited OP to include this**

Hi all and I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. Sadly santa didn't give me my wish and magically make strong as an ox coupled with single digit body fat %... oh well.. back to the iron... Anywaaaaay, I have been experimenting a bit with with warming up to my squats (I do strong lifts) and want to get more experienced guys opinion as to weather I should stop this when the weights get heavier, or if this is likely to lead to my getting injured. Basically I do about 10 minute full body warmup, then rather than doing 3-4 warmup sets with increasing weight. I do this: 1 x 5 at 20kg (bar only) 1 x 5 at 50% work weight 5 x 1 walkouts at work weight +20kg (By walkout I mean, unrack, step back, one breath, step in, re-rack.) 5 x 5 at work weight I find this has been really good for waking up my midsection / core for the work sets. Also I am able to concentrate on my form in the work sets as the work weight feels relatively light on my shoulders. However, my squat is currently at 80kg so I can imagine that this approach may lead to dropping reps due to fatigue as the weight gets into 100kg+ area. Has anyone else experimented with this approach or have any comments? Have a great new year everyone!

I am not a Physio and am still just starting so do not want to give any advice. But I have just had a similar experience with my lower back, Two weeks ago, bottom of work set 4 of squats I heard a loud 'POP' in my lower back and had to stop my workout there. Had pain lifitng my legs / bending / moveing for the rest of the week. I have not worked out at all for two weeks until last night. I rested for a week solid, lots of lying down, ice etc. Then once I could stand and walk pain free, I tested myself each day getting into the squat bottom position (just BW). On Sunday just gone that was pain free as well, so I did some Bar only squats on Sunday night (3 x 10). I was still pain free for that so I went back to lifting proper last night at 10kg lower than my previous Max. Have some soreness this morning but it is fading quickly. Should be fine now I think. Maybe a routine like this would help with you too? But I would definiytely echo jpryan here, I would take no chances with an injury. If it persists while you are not training, see a doctor. Do you know why the pain developed? Is it a form issue? Muscle imbalance? Finding this out may be key to avoiding similar issues in the future.

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