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Kiko_Roca -> RE: Guitar made me fat (finding balance in your life) (Jan. 3 2017 14:52:40)
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Hi. I'm a little late to the party, but I wanted to offer what I started doing a few years ago when our kids were born. First, I felt like loosing weight needed to be decoupled from exercise. They are two separate (but linked) things for me really, and while they each influence each other, it helps me not to think about them together. So it is like this:
Eating = loosing weight. It is just math here - calories in vs. calories burned. Over eat and I gain weight, under-eat and I loose weight. I got an app like my fitness pal to roughly track it. It can estimate how much you need to be in calorie deficit by a series of questions about your weight and activity level - to target loosing about a pound a week (which is around the max recommended to maintain muscle mass and overall health iirc). I personally started at 223, 5'11" a few years ago and dropped down to 198 just tracking calories over several months.
Next, Exercise = fitness. What I do for exercise is body weight/calisthenics stuff. There is almost no prep time, I can do it in pajamas on the living room floor, and no equipment is needed beyond a bar mounted somewhere for pullups. I can get in a full body workout like this during coffee in about 15-20 minutes, and if I super-set everything and go without rest in between, it can be cardio. My typical approach is as follows
1) Warmup: toe-touch/waybacks; arm-rotations; front, side, and back planks (target a minute in each plank hold, whether all at once or in smaller increments adding up to ~60 seconds. (I do the front/side planks on elbows/forearms to minimize the wrist strain) Then
2) workout: I typically pick one each of: pushups/dips, pullups/rows, stepups/squats, lunges/single-leg hip raises. 3 sets of each. (I actually have a power tower and rings which makes the dips/rows possible - though I know some people do those with two chairs and towels hung from their pullup bar).
3) off days: I usually do yoga or some sort of L-sit or handstand skill work. Still can't do either L-sit or hand stand. But have been working on it off and on the last year, and am pretty close on the sit.
If I am targeting cardio I'll usually include some sort of jumping like jacks or burpies in a rotation - And I'll typically switch between cardio and strength every few workouts, doing 3-4 workouts a week. I was really surprised at how flexible and strong I felt after the 4th or 5th month of doing all of this.
Regarding exercise and weight loss: At my age anyway, I cant really burn enough calories daily through exercise to make a huge difference in weight loss. I can run/jog for half an hour and burn ~300 calories, but I often don't have the 45 minutes of time that would require (warm up, getting dressed, cooldown, etc.) and I can't do it every single day. Too much wear on the tendons, plus even peak athletes need rest days and such. And then even daily, 300 calories is going to be snails pace for loosing weight (~0.5 lbs/week), especially when I can loose that by having a soda or an extra roll at dinner if I'm not calorie tracking anyway... When I started loosing - I tracked religiously for the first 2 months, and by then I had a good idea of what/how much I could eat of things. The only bad thing is you ultimately need to eat a little less if you get light enough and you want to keep loosing. I made it down to 180, then got slack and I'm back around 190 right now.
Well, my apologies for the wall of text. Hopefully you or someone will find some of this helpful. It's more personal info than I typically share online, but it is an issue that was pretty close to me. If there are any questions about the types of exercises and how to make them easier or harder or whatever, feel free to ask.
P.S. - I sympathize with the shoulder. I've had a number of dislocation issues from mountain biking in my past, and it bugs the heck out of me playing sometimes!
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