TIME TO GET RRRIIIIIIIPPED!!!!! - the exercise thread

@tickingnectarine I recommend the site I linked to here. If you want to lose fat and gain muscle, you're going to need cardio in addition to bodyweight exercises. (You can't do targeted exercises to lose fat from just one area. Bodies don't work that way.)

 

So I just read this article, and it prompted me to maybe think about the possibility of exercising again.

Now. A key thing it says is "you don't have to exercise if you don't want to" and I'm not sure I want to. But my mom cringes and criticizes me every time she sees how unhealthy my habits are.
I don't want to exercise. Thinking about exercising makes me anxious.

But it's a necessary thing that I need to do if I want to live a full life. So.
.....
.....yeah I got nothing.

 

arguably, being anxious doesnt really jive with living a full life or being healthy
if its anxiety in a "this will pass once i Do the Thing" way then ok

But if itd just be setting yourself up to feel bad for no immediate payoff then idk

If you squish the definition of "exercise" around a bit csn you come up with something that would be enjoyable/doable? bc when i think about exercise its all basically "things that make me feel tired and sweaty and bad" but walking is exercise and i like walking

(sorry if unwanted or unhelpful advice)

 

No, no, it's fine. The actual exercise isn't nearly that bad, it's more the "stop what I'm doing, get up, get out of the house, and do a thing". I swear there's gotta be some deeper problem that needs solving, because like, I got Pokemon Go thinking it would help, and I haven't touched it in a month.

I think if I did everything else I wanted to do, and had nothing else to do, then I'd do some healthy-ish exercise-shaped thing
Sadly, there's a ton of other stuff on my mind.

 

I hate interruptions to what I'm doing and changes to my routine, which is why I resisted exercise stuff for so long, is that sort of your problem? I have a huge problem switching tasks and I get extremely resentful of being interrupted because it causes my brain to do the screeching brakes thing. The way I got around this was a) making the exercise a planned part of my routine on a day that I didn't have much else going on and b) basically rewarding myself or saying that I can't do [enjoyable thing] until I do 30 minutes of gym time, or something. Or giving myself, say, stars on the calendar for every day I work out, and five stars equals some kind of treat - a smoothie, a lunch out, something under $20 that I've been wanting, etc. My brain is easily trained by that kind of thing, though.

 

Hmmm...
I might be able to do that
It would be weird though. I'm at a point in my life where I'm not forbidding myself from doing anything, whether that's because money reasons or because health reasons. And Habitica doesn't really help much with that thing. Unless I set it as a daily for a certain day of the week...?
There's also the problem that I don't ever really... motivate myself to do anything that I don't have to do, like... I "have" to go to class, walk the dog, go see my therapist... but other than that if I don't "have" to do it I don't do it. That's the main problem.

 

Question: does anyone know of a nutrition tracker site/app that can calculate micronutrients without a calorie goal being mandatory? I have to eat a lot of iron and sodium and potassium daily and I'd like an app to help me out, but I not only don't care about the calorie thing I find it actively detrimental to logging my food. I know how much of my micronutrients I need, I just find calculating them by hand tiresome.

 

I should do the exercises I learned in physical therapy more to work on my shoulder/avoid back problems in the future after years of massive tits...

I'm trying to convince my roommate and a friend to get a membership at one of the inexpensive gyms with me because I know I won't work out if it's just me. I'm just... Not very self-motivated by things like that and get self-conscious. But I want to work out to gain some muscle mass so I can cosplay Zarya next summer. Screw working out to be healthy, I want to work out so I can dress as a buff pink-haired Russian woman ^.^;

 

ok so. things i have eaten in the last two days:
pizza. chips. full sugar cherry coke. caramels. chocolate tea. mocha latte. fried cheese.

edit to add beef ravioli and fried chicken to this list bc that was dinner tonight

things i have also accomplished in the last two days:
hitting the 'lost 50 lbs' marker
fitting into my highschool winter jacket

i am kicking obesity's ASS.

 

Next marathon training cycle starts in a little less than 2 weeks. I'm not as prepared as I should be because writing and GMing and the election kicked my ass this month. :/ But I'm looking forward to it. I'll take winter running over summer running any day.

I'm training with a different group this time and it's closer to home, so I should actually be able to make the weeknight track workouts. Maybe I'll get faster!

 

Fixed up my bike and ordered winter biking gear, all i need to do is change the tread on the front tire and it'll all be in perfect working order! though, everything works fine as is. Also fixed up the gear shifter, it had moved out of place. I can use all my gears now, which means switching to max gear/highest resistance when biking to work today. My legs are sore, but it was worth it.

 

So I started a bodyweight program on the Skimble app this week and today's workout went something like this...

Skimble app: Do wall push-ups.

Me: pfft lol ok easy

Skimble app: Now do a wall sit for 40 seconds.

Me: haha sure no problem

Skimble app: Now do a wall sit except come up on your toes.

Me: ...well, okay--

[repeat x3]

Skimble app: Now do a wall sit except do knee raises!

Me: uh

Skimble app: Now do a plank and walk your feet up the wall behind you and hold that for 40 seconds!

Me: WHAT THE HELL MAN

[repeat x3]

...the feet-up-the-wall plank turned out to not be as hard as it sounded but still, WHAT THE HELL MAN. Also maybe it was just my imagination but Greg the Robot Trainer was way too fucking chipper this morning.

 

Vague thoughts:

The motivational-poster-y exercise talk about "No Excuses" and "Pain Is Weakness Leaving The Body" is helpful when you're basically healthy but tired and grumbly and don't want to work out and need a kick in the ass, but it becomes actively damaging when you're injured. "I need to heal" isn't an excuse. Some kinds of pain don't mean you're getting stronger, they mean you're setting yourself back.

My accomplishment for the day was to cut my planned run short. I'm nursing a knee injury and I've gotten to the point where I can walk around normally without pain, but it flares up after a mile or two of running. I don't need to be told to tough it out. I need to be told to make a good decision for Future Me. Stop, go home, do my strength exercises, stretch, ice, and don't be so focused on the short term plan that I do long term damage to myself.

 

Skimble: do this series of familiar yoga poses

Me: *does them, doesn't bother looking up at video because I know chair and tree and dancer and so on*

Skimble: do visvamitrasana

Me: ...what the shit is that? Let me look up at the video and see what the hell you're talking about--

Skimble:



Me: ...........oh HELL no.

(I did attempt it but my arms are too short and I couldn't get my front foot off the floor so I ended up subbing bound right angle. And later I found some modified versions I might try if this one ever comes up again.)

 

Any suggestions for building muscle without using too many calories? I lost a ton of muscle tone and weight in the hospital, and I need to rebuild both fat stores and muscle. (I also have a restricted diet at the moment and so can't just eat really high calorie foods to offset the loss from exercising.)

 

hm. maybe low-impact stuff like light yoga, or working with resistance bands? that's a shot in the dark though, if someone's more knowledgeable please advise

 

Skimble directs me to do a yoga pose that involves balancing on my butt with all my appendages off the floor.

I hold it for two seconds and fall over.

Skimble Trainer Robot Lisa says "Yes! That was graceful!"

Do I detect a little sarcasm there, Lisa?

 

Spoilered because runner talk gets tedious.

Spoiler: Shut up WithAnH

I'm absolutely delighted today because I did speed intervals last night and I can walk normally today. Having turned the corner into "clearly recovering from injury" rather than "injury seems equally bad no matter what I do" is awesome.

That said, the 17 mile run on the schedule for this weekend is going to be the test of whether I'm getting better enough to be reasonably confident that I'll finish the marathon on 3/11. If I make it through the run at something resembling my goal pace and I can walk across the room the next day, I think I'll be good to go. If not... I'll be unhappy.

In other news, I seem to have decided that I'm not suffering enough and I'm looking into trail 50K races in the May-July range. If I come out of the March road marathon without needing too much down time, move my long runs back to trail miles, and switch in a day or two of hill repeats a week, I should be in a good place to do my first ultra. If my knee is still feeling shaky, obviously those plans are going to get scrapped.

I tried to explain to someone who isn't a distance runner why I do this and didn't articulate it very well. It's part challenge - can I do it? How much distance can my body actually handle? Can I do better than I did in the last race? It's part mental health management strategy. Something about the combination of achievable but ever-progressing goals and the effects of aerobic exercise on neurochemistry conspires to make me feel pretty good when I'm running regularly and absolutely awful when I'm not. Which is part of why getting sidelined by injuries sucks so hard - my executive function goes to shit, all my anxiety problems come roaring back, and my mood tanks. It's part that I've never had any luck with meditation because I can't stop thinking in circles, but sometime after the first or second mile of a run my brain switches off and hours can go by where I don't have a single thought I can hold onto, and it's a weird kind of peace that I can't seem to reach any other way.

Usually I boil that paragraph down to just "*shrug* Guess I'm a little crazy."

Edit: to clarify, I'm not doing the "taking up running will cure your depression/anxiety, no need for meds uwu" thing. It's part of my maintenance plan after many years of treatment, and I imagine that if I was under the kind of stress now that I was dealing with ten years ago, it wouldn't be nearly enough. But the people who tell you exercise HELPS are, annoyingly, not full of shit.

 

Hhhh I wanna take up running or at least get back into walking but I don't feel like many people in the area of my dorm go on walks and I have anxiety about doing noticeable things in public

 

im making an attempt at getting back into shape and so far that plan involves, in addition to whatever other exercise i can scrape together, daily sit-ups (starting at 30 and then always doing More than the day before, for as long as i can keep that up lmao)
and i just needed to say that 2 weeks ago i was exhausted after 30 total and had to take breaks after like.... every 7th one
and today i did 50 in one go and then 50 more and i feel fine so im just gonna keep going and see how many reps i can do before i have to stop halfway thru. wheee

.....potentially i should consider adding pushups into this whole mess but pushups are the devil and don't want them