Gym, Exercise & Weight Gainers - Page 3

You can do basic things to stay in shape for free. Run, walk. Hike. Bike. Stretches. Ab work. Pushups, chin ups. Hell you can buy a cheap weight set and do basic exercises in the garage or basement to tone up.

Yeah, basically, my workouts consist of stretching for about 15 minutes prior to running for 20-30 minutes, then pushups and crunches and curls with free-weights. Also, I bike as much as I can for commuting around town.

Prior to all this I hadn't done anything physically taxing for about ten years, since around high school, and it's definitely made a difference, gotten rid of beer gut and less depressed.

When I first kicked off wanting to gain mass, I started withWestside for Skinny Bastards and Westside for Skinny Bastards Part II and experienced both huge fat loss and huge weight gains, as well as an improvement in strength training. I coupled it with a moderate bit of cycling(4 miles per day) and got really buff, now aiming to improve my gains with a high-protein diet and this workout regimen. Still feeling great and having a blast. Give it a try, but don't discount the power of whey protein and supplements.

I read a good weight gaining tip in a secret article from back in the 80s. Eat more. Not brain surgery, people overthink this way too much. Workout all your bodyparts and eat much more than you normally do, but not junk food. Eating more will be annoying for you most likely.

I used to feel that way, but then I tried those Crystal Light individual packets for bottles of water. I gave up soda over 15 months ago (along with changing my diet and exercising) and I have dropped about 60lbs. I used to suck down 3-4 sodas/day and now I can't stand the stuff. I took a swig of a friend's drink at the bar last week and it was a Diet & Rum (I was thirsty, the waitress was taking forever and I didn't know what he was drinking). The soda made my stomach feel like crap the rest of the night. I NEVER thought I would be at a point in my life where soda would make me sick to my stomach.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that his technique wasn't the best and made it so he could last that long. When I was in college, I was a student manager for our Men's Basketball team. These guys were top-notch Division 1 athletes in peak physical shape and they could last 2-3 minutes at most. No offense to Jason, but the 15 minutes thing makes me think that his thighs weren't exactly parallel to the ground. If his thighs were completely parallel to the ground, then holy fucking damn!

If you think doing wall-sits for 2-3 minutes is tough, trying doing that while tossing a medicine ball back and forth.

• Skinny people should stop having sex — it burns calories.

• I can't imagine paying good money to drink that fake marketing protein powder nonsense — "oooh, look at me, I'm an athelete; I drink supplemented diet shit and run on a treadmill." Eat a fucking steak. Lab rat.

• Drinking a lot of coffee is enjoyable.

• Low fat foods are an affront to flavour. Can't handle fat? keep your inferior genetics out of my grocery store.

Thanks for joining us, Mr. Carlin...

I drink a beer or two most days, and have been known to put down 4 or 5 at a time on occasion, and don't notice a weight difference during those periods when I don't feel like drinking (sometimes a month or two at a time).

I generally drink stout beer, which have fewer carbs than most regular beer (but still more than most light beer, which I don't like).

By the way, you mention that ab workouts aren't helping to get rid of your beer belly. This is because it's generally not possible to 'target' fat loss -- that is, to lose fat in only one area. Crunches won't do any more to flatten a beer belly than squats or curls will.

I've seen a lot here about calories, but not much about carbs vs. protien vs. fat. If you want to lose weight, just eat fewer carbs. I consume more calories now than I did a few years ago, but it's much less carb-centric, so my weight stays down. No more bread or pasta, basically, and no fast food.

Although I don't follow Atkins very closely, I've learned a lot about how to eat fewer carbs by reading his New Diet Revolution.

That's because eliminating so much out of your diet is a short-term solution for most people. Cutting carbs only works as long as you are willing to cut carbs always. Start eating bread again, and the weight comes back very quickly. Reducing calories allows you to eat what you like, just eat less of it, which is a diet plan people can live with in the long haul.

There's a reason low-carb diets failed and that's because few people are willing to give up the greatness of carbs for a long period of time.

Low carb diets are kind of retarded. The only carbs that are a problem are simple carbs. So if you eat a lot of white bread for some reason, don't do that. But vegetables, fruit, beans, etc. are nothing to worry about. Get brown rice instead of white rice, etc. Pasta is not a big deal either unless you eat a lot of it every day and don't exercise. Not eating junk food like dessert cakes, ice cream, fried foods, soda, etc is infinitely more important than watching carbs. If a person actually wants to get in shape all they have to do is not eat those things except maybe once a month and eat a normal amount of regular healthy food while legitimately exercising for around 30 minutes every day (preferably with more strength training than cardio) or at least 5 days a week. That is guaranteed to work. Counting carbs and doing low intensity cardio is what people who are totally clueless and out of shape do.

(Agreeing with you for the most part.) Almost all diets fail because people see them as a temporary fix, rather than a lifestyle change. I hesitated to even mention going low-carb because people tend to have strong opinions for or against. Still, if you do what swedish miyagi says in terms of going more natural (rather than processed), you're basically doing a more manageable version of Atkins.

And while I agree that purposefully counting carbs is a good way to ensure failure, 5 days a week of exercise is more than anyone needs to get in shape. My method: avoid unnatural foods most of the time and work out 3 times per week.

-AiV (who's neither clueless nor out of shape)

*Edit after re-reading:
If you're "not eating junk food..." then you are watching carbs -- just not consciously. The two are the same in that your "bad" carb intake is diminished. This is why I've never understood the low-carb haters.

Hope I'm not coming across as a low-carb zealot -- it's just something that's worked for me for years and might be helpful to others.

By not eating junk food your watching bad carbs and fat intake. Those are the things that actually matter. Saying just "low carb" means both simple and complex carbs, so it's only half right. There is nothing wrong with complex carbs. And, the atkins followers act as if anything that does not have carbs is automatically ok to eat. Which is wrong. Eating a lot of buffalo wings and prime rib is not a good idea if you want to get in shape. That's all I'm saying.

donde, just don't do what this numbnuts did: Football Player Dies While Weightlifting.

This is a great thread. I was very active in the service, sort of relaxed quite a bit for the year after I got out, and now am getting back on the saddle.

Diva, if you could settle a question for me once and for all, are sit-ups bad for you? Not crunches, the full sit-up. The Army's PT test is designed around this exercise, which means that most exercises for the military are as well. I got to the point where I was able to do like 100+ situps in 2 minutes, but still in my early 20s, I'm now "enjoying" chronic lower back pain. I'm sort of trying to pinpoint what is the main source of this. My job was highly physically intensive, so it could be many things, but I'd curious if there's a conventional wisdom in the physical trainer field that says sit-ups are bad.

What exercise was a 16 year old kid doing with a 240 pound dumbell that would require him to lie supine upon a bench? That must have been a typo. Perhaps they meant a barbell (i.e., a bench press gone wrong), or that he was using two 120 pound dumbells. I don't think I've ever seen a dumbell heavier than 200 pounds, most gyms don't have any above 120 or so. In other news, last week I managed to bench press four plates for three reps. First time I managed that.

It says barbell in the article. He was bench pressing 240 which to me means it was 120 on each side. So I guess that'd mean two 45's, one 25 and one 5.

Argh. You're right, I inexplicably processed the wrong word. Probably because there is no such thing as a "240 pound barbell". More likely it was a 45 pound barbell (standard size) with 195 pounds of weight on it.

I don't think you're weight prediction is right, though. You can't have just one 25 or one 5 (the weight must be even on each side), and two plates, one 25, and one five would equally 260 pounds (the article says it was only 240 pounds). It probably was two plates, a ten, and a two and a half on each side.

Sit-ups in and of themselves aren't bad, but because so many people don't know how to do them properly they can cause lots of injuries. My guess, based on what you've posted, is that it could be a few things. First, you haven't mentioned if you've done any back exercises. Doing 100+ sit ups and no back work will leave your body lopsided. Your lower back will be underdeveloped and unable to support your body properly as you do the sit up. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, when doing a crunch or sit up, you want to minimize the arch in your lower back by drawing in your belly button, stabalizing your core. The drawing in motion utilizes both the abs and the lower back. While lying on the floor, your back should be as close to flat as possible. As you sit up, you need to maintain that stabilization and bend at the hip. What usually happens, and why people get hurt, is that their back isn't strong enough to support the body and as people contract their abs to sit up, their back can't maintain the postion and begins to arch. As anyone who's snapped a twig knows, there's only so much it can bend before it snaps. Similarly, too much pressure on an arched back can cause pain.

Secondly, doing timed sit-ups encourages bad form. You'll be more inlcined to sacrifice form in order to get those extra reps in. You mentioned this is something the military requires, but its just highly discouraged by most fitness professionals. As for your job being highly physical, my description of how both your abs and lower back need to be utilized to stabilize your torso is still relevent. You want to make sure that your back is supported properly while doing any phsyical activity.

Barring any major physical disabilities as diagnosed by a physician, you can reduce or even eliminate your back pain by doing back exercises. If the pain is indeed caused because your back muscles are underdeveloped, doing exercises to target them specifically will help develop them. Also, lower back pain can also be caused by weak hamstring muscles. They are connected to the lower back and hip and will put stress on your back if they are tight. Hamstring stretches are easy and can be done daily.

The easiest lower back exercise that you can do at home is the Superman. It's just as it sounds -- lie on your stomach, arms extended in front of you. Engaging your back muscles, raise your arms, legs and chest off the floor. Hold for a few seconds. Relax and repeat. On your last rep, see if you can hold the raised position for 30 seconds. To really target the various muscles in your lower back, start in the same position as the Superman, but lift opposing limbs (e.g., the left arm and right leg). You can push down with the hand that is on the ground to help raise your other arm and chest higher off the ground.

45+45+25+5=120x2=240. That's if they're not actually including the weight of just the bar by itself. Either way, dude was lifting a shit load of weight that he shouldn't have been doing. Especially alone and especially in a "home gym".

So the cleaners at work today found two syringes in the toilet. I sure hope someone doesn't pull a Benoit on us!

Are you guys doing an Abbot and Costello routine with the weight counting? He obviously had a 45 lb bar with 2 45s, 2 5's, and 2 2.5s.

I wonder what the kid's max bench press was and if he was using a thumbs under grip. The answers to those questions were probably 225 and yes. Nobody talks about the dangers of the thumbs under grip when shit like this happens, but you can't really drop a bar if you use a normal opposing thumbs grip.

Timed situps are retarded. That's just military punishment more than anything else. They should choose a better exercise than that bullshit idea from the seventies. More of a hip flexor workout than abs. They should make people hold a planks and bridges for as long as possible or something.


http://www.lsu.edu/urec/assets/image...fied_plank.jpg
http://www.amazingabdominals.com/ab_...side_plank.jpg
http://www.uoregon.edu/~recycle/Webs...ng/bridges.jpg

I was hoping nobody would notice my atrocious math, as the mistake became obvious after the one hour "editing window" had elapsed. Good show, Miyagi, good show.

Haha, maybe as your bench press improves your math gets worse, everything has a catch these days.

I like the phrase, "I don't wander below three plates." You should make plate counting errors on purpose just to use it.

It's math like that that made law school the right choice for you. I was so damn happy that the LSAT didn't have any.

This guy just became a member at my gym:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Kovacs

I swear to Christ his forearms are bigger then my thighs. Dude can barely fit through the door. HE'S FUCKING HUGE!

Vaguely relevant story - been doing what I'd call "low impact" exercise - biking 3.5 miles (one way) to and from work every day (a few inclines, nothing to big of a nut-buster) and in the past two weeks I've pulled 3 25-35 mile rides.

Fantastic increase in stamina, lost a couple inches off the waist, an inch off the neck, some bulk from the upper body area. And a whole 3 lbs.

Tell me again about what a great measure BMI and height/weight charts are?

Just wanna chime in and say that damn I'm getting some seriously kick ass workouts using BSN's N.O.Xplode. After a week of using it I'm already seeing some gains. Goodbye kidneys and liver and hello muscle!

I've also started tucking my shirt in at work at walking with my chest out and shoulders back. I'm awesome.

If I went by BMI, I'd be morbidly obese.

This is part of my exercise/physiotherapy regimen after an MRI diagnosed a back injury (L4 and L5 bulging, L5 slight tear). Great advice, Diva.

Unless you're a professional bodybuilder I really don't see the point in getting that big (not that I could ever come within a million miles of that). Not even Arnold is that built.

More importantly, HE'S WEARING JORTS.

He had close 600 pounds on the leg press machine the other day.... for one leg.

Jesus, had you not had the Wikipedia link I would've thought Bill Brasky had shown up at your gym.

I've never understood this. Why do these body builders wear this shit? Is it to appeal to the closet homosexuals out there? Is he trying to tell us something?

Maybe he doubles as a Hot Cop.

A friend who used to bodybuild said it's damn close to homo - he'd go out with the other bodybuilders and all they'd talk about were their own and other guy's bodies.

How is it homo? Professional bodybuilding is their job and life. Analyzing each others muscle definition and symmetry is like a pro baseball player analyzing another baseball players style of play.

If pro baseball players were dressed up exactly like the village people while analyzing each other then that would be pretty gay too.

Well, my buddy LOVES women. But the idea of men sitting around and discussing each other's glutes would be suspect in any crowd other than a group of bodybuilders, and even then there's an arched eyebrow.

Not that I don't understand it - really, bodybuilding is less homo- or hetero-erotic than auto-erotic.

Glad you have a doctor who knows his or her stuff!

Holy shit does working at a gym suck. WAY to many hot chicks. I was on the treadmill yesterday and a hottie came on right beside me. I turn around to walk backwards on the treadmill and theres a hottie in the aerobics studio right in front me. Then two hotties hop on the ellipticals right across from me. My cock was going to explode. And since I work there it's sort of an unspoken rule that employees can't date members.

And, on a side note to pimp a product.... I've been on BSN's N.O. Explode for a few weeks now and holy shit is this stuff great. My workouts have been incredible since I started taking it. And I've noticed some gains as well. I've really stepped up this past month on my cardio and weight lifting. Great times!

Sounds great, how is the consistency of your bowel movements?