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The Zen of Weight Lifting

nytimes.com

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#71
post #32

I'd love to buy a squat rack and other lifting tools to keep at home. I don't live close to a gym but have enough space to lift what I'd like to in my garage. Though, I am worried about the potential for injury or getting myself in a lifting situation that I can't get out of where if I was at a gym someone would run over to help. Is that a reasonable concern? Or am I overthinking it?

In general, no I would not worry much about it. First don't try a lift you aren't sure you are ready for and two increment by 5# max from workout to workout.

Start light, way lighter than you think you should and work almost exclusively on form. Then each workout increase your weight by 5#s. The entire time it's critical to keep watching your form. Then as you get heavier and heavier you will be much more capable of reading your body and deciding of a weight increase is warranted.

Like others have also stated most racks come with safety straps or bars, feel free to use those, especially when you go really heavy. But if you follow the above steps you more than likely won't ever put yourself in a position where you aren't prepared for the weight you have racked.

If you want to test your 1 rep max or something then do it with a friend there to spot you. But that's not something you should be doing every workout, it's more of a once in a while thing.

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#72
I love lifting, it has had a positive effect on nearly every aspect of my life. It's also allowed me to finally be able to run again after ten years of failed PT on a hip injury. I am confident now that I won't reinjure myself since I am how stronger than I ever have been in my entire life.

I was lucky and had a friend who also lifts, so for the first 6 months we lifted together 4 times a week. It's a big help to lift with someone initially so that they can critique your form and keep you accountable. These days though I work out alone and I look forward forward to that hour alone nearly every day. The routine and the goals and the tracking make me feel so good about my day, as the article mentions, even if I get nothing else done I am still happy having pr'd some lift or knowing how good my form was on squats or whatever.

I highly suggest Strong for those looking for an app to track their workouts in. It's the best I have found.

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#73
post #29

An under-reported benefit of weight lifting: near-total elimination of RSI, at least in my experience. At some point a few years ago I decided to join a gym for the first time. While I improved my posture and BMI a good bit, I might be happiest with the elimination of RSI in my wrists and hands. It started out as something annoying in my 20s, and got very painful in my late 30s. Gyroscopes, powerballs, and other reco…

doctors would tell you to isolate at home and use ice

modern science /s

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely subjective. I'm neutral about running outside, but I enjoy running on a treadmill because I can get into a kind of zen mode or watch something. Similarly, I love weight lifting because the experience of hard muscular exertion is intensely satisfying for me, and the overall lifting session gets me in a similarly zen mode. > When you run, you get outside, you go somewhere, you see and feel different thing…

I started a huge reply to rebut some stuff and/or clarify but...that's not the point here! Not here to argue. Thanks for your input. It's pretty clear that different people want different things out of exercise, and will have different individual risk factors based on what they're doing. Thinking about it more, I know that weight (fat) loss is often a goal for my exercise, and I think it's hard to do that while lifti…

> I know that weight (fat) loss is often a goal for my exercise, and I think it's hard to do that while lifting

Agreed. Diet controls weight, exercise controls fitness. I've lost tons of weight while having varying levels of lifting/cardio, sometimes almost no exercise at all. Just eat fewer calories and more substance: cabbage, broccoli, things like that.

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#75
post #3

I would like to know how to start strength training at home - to counteract sitting at a computer (strengthen the core, etc) and to trade some fat for muscle, becoming lean. any recommendations? EDIT: thank you for the overwhelming response

Renaissance Periodization gym free template: https://renaissanceperiodization.com/rp-gym-free The company is staffed nearly entirely by PhD researchers who also compete in sport: https://renaissanceperiodization.com/team It is imo the best source of cutting-edge science-based exercise and nutrition info, and while they work with elite athletes, they also produce a lot of guidance specifically for everyday people who…

+1 for RP. Very solid info, but I feel like their stuff is targeted to people who have been lifting for a bit already

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#76
post #3

I would like to know how to start strength training at home - to counteract sitting at a computer (strengthen the core, etc) and to trade some fat for muscle, becoming lean. any recommendations? EDIT: thank you for the overwhelming response

I roughly follow a book Convict Conditioning - exercising at home using my body weight (and a pull-up bar). To put it simply, there are four types of exercises (push-ups, pull-ups, squats, leg raise), and for each of them there is a very fluent progression of exercises from very simple to very difficult. So you can start at level 1 for each type of exercise, and when you manage to do a certain amount of repetitions, you level up. (Different types of muscles level up independently, for example I have strong legs and weak arms.) That means, the exercise is never too easy or too hard, and leveling up is a great psychological reward.

For me the key is consistency and social pressure. I try to exercise every day (because that is more instinctive than any other schedule) at the same time (when my kids go to sleep). That means, when the time to exercise comes, it feels natural to do it. I keep a log which days I exercised and which days I did not, and I report the data to my friends. By the way, I don't exercise all muscles every day; I alternate two types of exercise on one day, the remaining two types on the other day.

Another thing that works for me, psychologically, is outcome independence. I treat my exercise as a virtuos thing, whether it brings the desired results or not. If I exercised, I did my duty; if I didn't exercised, I failed to do my duty. Whether the muscles actually increase and the fat actually decreases, that depends on the gods; I am just making sure that I did my part. This is useful, because the progress is real but happens on long time scale, and I need encouragement on short time scale. Of course, after you succeed to exercise regularly for a few months, you will see the progress, and that will motivate you to continue; but the problem is that you need greatest motivation at the very beginning, while you still have zero results. (It is easiest to give up during the first month. After half year, the change will be so obvious that you will want to stay that way.)

Don't overdo it. Muscles also need some time to recover; for me it is rougly two days (which is why I alternate the exercises). Take sufficient breaks between the sets; this is easier to do at home, because it doesn't feel like you are wasting your time; between the sets you can browse web, watch TV, or do dishes. Sometimes I just watch a movie, pause it at a random moment, do a set, unpause and watch again... and at the end, it doesn't even feel like I exercised; I was just watching a movie and taking an occassional short break. Generally, if you can somehow make it fun, that helps a lot. (After a few months, you will not need external sources of fun; the exercise itself will become pleasurable. But first you need to get there.) Never punish yourself for failing to exercise; reflect on the fact, then forgive yourself and start again.

In addition to strength training you should also do some cardio or take a walk regularly. Once I had a job that was 20 minutes by foot from my home; that was optimal. I try to minimize car use, and during covid also started minimizing mass transit use; now I always check the map first, and if my destination is within 30 minutes walking distance, I go there by foot. I think about it as saving time, because I am going to where I need, and I am exercising at the same time.

Now, strength training itself can add you muscle, but will only remove a little fat. People usually overestimate how much energy is burned when exercising. Most energy is spent by simply keeping your body alive (body temperature, breathing, heartbeat, etc.), which is more or less a constant amount each day. An exercise will probably just add 5% or 10% to it. The inevitable conclusion is that to lose fat, you need to eat less. Even worse, you need to eat less every day, otherwise the calories you lost in a week can be regained in a day. On the other hand, starving can hurt you; your body needs enough proteins and vitamins. That means that you need to change the proportion of proteins and vitamins to fats and carbohydrates; on other words, not (just) eat less but eat differently. Raw vegetables with every meal. Proteins from meat, fish, eggs, diary, beans. (That means lots of beans, if you are a vegetarian. Like, literally every day.) Avoid sugar, coke, white bread. You don't need to get religious about this, just remove the greatest sources of sugar/carbs, learn three new recipes containing beans, and always take a raw vegetable as a side dish. (If you ignore this advice, you will get muscles hidden under fat, which is where I am now; but even that is an improvement over all fat and no muscles.)

etc. What others already said. Enough sleep (that means 8 hours minimum).

By the way, being healthy can take a lot of time. Eight hours of sleep + eight hours at work + commute, that already leaves you like 4-7 free hours on a workday. If you want healthy meals, you probably need to cook them yourself. Then you exercise... and there is little time left. Plus, you probably have other duties, maybe also kids, etc. You need to be smart about this. (It is one of the reasons I exercise at home instead of going to the gym; a few minutes saved every day.) I don't have a perfect solution for this, but two important components are: short commute (even if it means somewhat lower salary) and a big freezer (so I can prepare meals for several days at once).

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#77

I've tried a few times to get into weightlifting. I can never stick with it, though. It's not necessarily a self-discipline thing, because I've run thousands of miles over the past decade. When you run, you get outside, you go somewhere, you see and feel different things. There's a race ecosystem that encourages you to get in when you can barely run a mile without stopping and allows you to push yourself as much as y…

I try to hit EASY 10-20 reptition maxes or have some sort of easy rep PR goal every session. Emphasis on easy, I reserve pretty sandbagged weights, maybe 10-20% below what I'm actually capable of doing. They're somewhat challenging, but easy enough that I almost never miss even on days when I feel bad/sick. It's just nice knowing your body is doing something it's never done before. The rest of it is actually treating lifts as a skill to be mastered rather than reps to be ground through. But not everyone has patience / personality to approach lifting like that. Finally, my typical 1.5-2hr gym session is good time to catch up on podcasts @2-3x speed. There's probably only ever 20-30m of lifting happening total. It's definitely not the kind of activity that consumes me. Unless I do cross fit or other circuit programs where you're moving all the time. Incidentally I can't stick to those because they're too close to running.

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#78
post #29

An under-reported benefit of weight lifting: near-total elimination of RSI, at least in my experience. At some point a few years ago I decided to join a gym for the first time. While I improved my posture and BMI a good bit, I might be happiest with the elimination of RSI in my wrists and hands. It started out as something annoying in my 20s, and got very painful in my late 30s. Gyroscopes, powerballs, and other reco…

I can confirm. At least in my case weightlifting (basically low bar squats and deadlifts - bench press is overrated) helped me fix both my RSI and lower back pain. I post this on every RSI thread here in hopes it'd help someone else. Yet NO doctor will suggest that something like this might help. Therein lies the danger of uncritically "listening to the doctors" - most of them are simply not trained to do anything with trained individuals and have never lifted a barbell. It's like asking a Javascript developer for advice on embedded C++. Their client base is mostly sedentary, weak, and thoroughly sick. Ex: my wife is struggling with back pain, and she will continue to struggle as long as she listens to her idiot doctor who's telling her to lie down and rest, which only screws up her back musculature even more.

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#79
I'm convinced weightlifting is helpful for knowledge workers, and I say this as an Ex SpaceX engineer and current FAANG Data Scientist who despite having great jobs, has realized that health is as important as a career.

I wrote a essay on the benefits of weightlifting for knowledge workers https://ravinkumar.com/WhyFitness.html

It's so thrilling to see other folks here post experiences similar to mine. To echo them

Weightlifting has * Improved my appearance and subsequently self confidence * Eliminated RSI and ergonomic pains that used to occur on long coding day * Auto regulated my overall health and wellness by adding an objective measure of my capability * I feel as though its improved my sleep and mood * Given me a goal that I truly own and can achieve, unlike promotions or titles or money which others control

I personally went from being a typical skinny nerd in college, to an overweight one in my mid 20s (from completely neglecting my health) to losing 35 lbs, of mistake and regret, in my early 30s.

I urge anyone reading this, don't go through the same cycle and/or start making changes now if you can. It really is worth it.

Re: The Zen of Weight Lifting

#80
Yes, it is counterintuitive but lifting weights can fix lots of issues like RSI, also from my personal experience. This article does a great job at explaining why this happens:(it doesn't specifically mention "RSI" but the concepts are similar)

https://startingstrength.com/article/muscle-imbalances-and-i...

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