Help me, NF. You're my only hope.

[Secret Agent John Courage]

tl;dr I spent the past three years lifting weights with a personal trainer and have nothing to show for it, so now I'm a big hot nerd mess.

After spending my entire life as a skinny wimp, I decided three years ago to start taking my health seriously. I changed up my diet, stopped drinking on school nights, got a gym membership and a personal trainer. I worked out with him three days a week, every week, and I kept up the program even while on vacation or travelling. I also started coming in one weekend day on my own after the first year.

When I started, I was eating about ~2200-2500 calories per day, all from natural sources, mostly prepared by myself. (Not really paleo because of the brown rice and pastas, but otherwise pretty close.) The trainer encouraged me to eat more, so I bumped that up to ~2800-3000 calories per day.

The workouts were intense. I'd leave each session utterly exhausted, and spend the whole week sore and tired.

A cardinal sin was committed: Neither he nor I wrote down what my initial circumference measurements were. This created an unhealthy working relationship wherein he would insist that the program was working and that I should just ignore the evidence of my senses, because I was obviously getting stronger.

That turned out not to be obvious. After a year of not seeing results in the mirror, I started grilling him on the nature of the training program and how it worked. I then built an app to track my progress.

After another year, the program turned out to be complete bullshit: I was lifting less by volume and power at the end of a program phase than I was at the beginning, so of course I wasn't getting stronger. As far as I can tell, that was by design: the program was tailored to make it impossible to see if you were doing better week-after-week. I fired that trainer and got a new one.

This time, I wrote down my initial circumference measurements (and everything else I could think of) so I'd have a baseline. The new trainer put me on more of a traditional weightlifting program focused soley on hypertrophy, and showed me a lot of the compound lifts praised on these forums (squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, etc.) It was immediately clear to him that I wasn't eating enough, so I bumped the calorie count up to an absolutely disgusting 4,000+ per day.

Again, I'd leave each session exhausted, and spend all day every day sore and tired.

After a year of that, and measuring my circumferences every month, it became clear that his program wasn't working either. In the past three years, I went from wearing 29" waist jeans to wearing 34" waist jeans. My arms, legs and chest have stayed the same puny size, though.

So after all that time, money, effort, food and suffering, all that happened is that I went from skinny wimp to couch potato wimp. I've gone from 150 pounds to 180 pounds. My body fat percentage is around 20%. (Again, I don't have an initial measurement from three years ago to compare it to.)

I fired the second trainer, and cancelled my gym membership.

I have never invested so much time and energy pursuing a goal only to fail so totally. My motivation well has gone completely dry. All the waters of El Nino could not refill that well. My self-confidence has basically evaporated, and that's affected every other area of my life.

Here's where I am now:

I got a new membership at a different gym. I'm back down to ~2500 calories per day. I'm now doing Starting Strength, partly because the Internet thinks really highly of it, but mostly because it's easy. It's easy to manage, easy to know what to do next, easy to track your progress. It's also not a huge time commitment: Three days a week for less than an hour at the gym. This way I can at least maintain what little strength I have.

But my heart just isn't in it. Why the hell am I lifting weights? I didn't see any growth after a year with a decent trainer and 4,000 calories per day. I am never going to be a strong man. I'm never even going to be an average one. What's the point? Better to die fat, happy and early.

I hate not being able to eat the things I like. I hate struggling after years of training to lift even half of what everyone else can. I hate looking in the mirror knowing that I'm never going to improve. I hate that all the jerks throughout the years who called me a wimp were 100% correct.

I hate fitness.

I'm about to give up on it.

HELP PLEASE.

[Chen Wangting]

Hey, welcome on board. Have you thought about trying other sports besides weight lifting? I'm thinking about about swimming or rock climbing. i went bouldering a few years ago. It's fun and also a mean workout.

 

If you want to stay with lifting i would ask around in the warriors section, if they can help you.

 

http://rebellion.nerdfitness.com/index.php?/forum/85-powerlifting-and-weightlifting/

[fitnessgurl]

Nooo, don't give up! Read Steve's posts. Stalk the bodyweight/weightlifting forum. There are answers there; I'm sure.

I'm working on getting stronger. Is it discouraging at times? Yes. But then I just use that frustration and anger to fuel my workouts.

Don't give up. Fight!

Lift, take time for the muscles to recover, lift some more.

You can do this!

[fitnessgurl]

Check out YouTube for motivating videos.

[Secret Agent John Courage]

Hey, welcome on board. Have you thought about trying other sports besides weight lifting? I'm thinking about about swimming or rock climbing. i went bouldering a few years ago. It's fun and also a mean workout.

So I'm 40? And I've tried a lot of things over the years (tennis, surfing, skiing, etc) and nothing really stuck. Between poor hand/eye coordination and an utter lack of strength there wasn't much I could excel at. That's sort of why I decided to work with a trainer at the gym: It was supposed to be the first step, a year or so of that followed by more interesting activities once I was strong enough to actually do them. Alas, things did not work out that way.

But thanks for the suggestion and the warm welcome.

 

If you want to stay with lifting i would ask around in the warriors section, if they can help you.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

  

 

Nooo, don't give up! Read Steve's posts. Stalk the bodyweight/weightlifting forum. There are answers there; I'm sure.

I'm working on getting stronger. Is it discouraging at times? Yes. But then I just use that frustration and anger to fuel my workouts.

Don't give up. Fight!

Lift, take time for the muscles to recover, lift some more.

You can do this!

I don't know that I have the will to fight any more. I'm still going three times a week, out of sheer stubbornness, and I even try to keep a stiff upper lip, try to bring a positive attitude to the workout. But halfway through (after I haven't hit a PR on the first two lifts, again) I start to get discouraged and the whole house of cards tumbles down. I just got back from a squat/press/row/chin-up session and feel miserable about it (and working out in general.)

But thank you for posting this, I will take all the encouragement I can get. (Part of the issue is that I don't really have a support network; I do most things on my own.)

 

 

Check out YouTube for motivating videos.

Hm, YouTube is kind of a crap shoot... Do you have any particular sources you'd recommend?

[fitnessgurl]

Re: ⬆ Check out Charlomechfry's thread. He posts them pretty regularly.

http://rebellion.nerdfitness.com/index.php?/topic/77838-charlomechfry-gets-motivated/

[fitnessgurl]

Oh and FYI: I'm 48. DO NOT let age stop you. It's just a number. I'm determined to be able to do a 5k this year and start practicing Parkour rolls.