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[Hanslanda]

I now do 50 pushups as a fucking rep. Ten sets most days. I got two 30lb weights and I'm doing a variety of arm and core stuff with them.

I can do 65 crunches with relative ease, or a three minute (fuuuuuuck) plank. I can do 330 but its not comfortable yet.

Haven't been running as much but can still just run 2 miles with relatively minor distress.

Fucking crushing it, and I go to MEPS this month hopefully.

[nenjin]

How's your pull ups? That will definitely come up.

[Hanslanda]

I can do three. Almost four, I'm hoping the weights will help with that though.

[Xantalos]

Doing negatives of pull-ups is something that's always helped me with increasing the number of them I can do at once. If you get to 3 and can't do a full one after that, jump-pull yourself up and then let yourself down slowly, resisting the whole time. You'll probably be able to do another 2-3ish of those, and it's a good buildup to doing more.

[nenjin]

Took a little over a week off, just stopped everything cold turkey. I know I should probably have kept stretching during that time but eh, a break means a break from the routine in general. I think I did one five mile walk.

And man....the emotional swings are kinda real. Every few days I'd kinda cycle between getting excited to get back in the gym, and getting down and sorta questioning the process. Didn't help I've been dealing with some pain/overtension in my left elbow/forearm. When you're not working out, but you've still got some pain when you're supposedly just resting, all you have is time to dwell on it. I started getting other odd muscle pains too, like my left lat just kinda seized up in bed last night while I was reading, an utterly different sensation to it feeling worked from my workout.

I was dreading my workout today. Worried about my arm, wondering how far back I've slid, not feeling crazy motivated like I always expect to. But I got through it, and after it was over I immediately felt "like normal", ie tired but alert and feeling vital. Strong.

When you go go go all the time, you start adapting to being in that state perpetually. You start getting mighty used to the endorphins from working out, to the point you acclimate to them and the sensation levels off, which it has in my case in some ways. But as soon as I deprived myself of that, I started feeling it within a few days. Started feeling sluggish, unmotivated. A little adrift like I didn't know what to do with my time.

I guess that's one sort of unspoken thing about making fitness a kind of lifestyle. You get used to how you feel when you're worked all the time, and bringing it to a complete halt comes with a noticeable difference in mood and attitude and overall body feel. I'm glad I took it though, it was nice to just store some calories and let my body relax. Just wish my arm felt good, that's about my only complaint right now.

[NRDL]

It took me 30 minutes to do 120 push ups today. It's humbling to know how weak my upper body is at such basic shit. Gonna focus on basic calisthenics on my off days, which should hopefully help with the barbell lifts once I do get back to the gym.

[NRDL]

Overhead pressed 60kg yesterday for one rep. Still pretty shaky, but my OHP's been at 57.5kg for months now. Thanks, thumbless suicide grip, you made all the difference.

[nenjin]

I'm still struggling with my OHP at 75 pounds / 34kg. I can do 9, 8, 5 reps with a couple push press assists at the end. My shoulder stability just isn't good. But I keep cracking away at it. Does the suicide grip really help? I figure if you have grip strength issues it would, but I'm not clear on how it would contribute in other ways.

Also I encountered a major tip for biceps on the Athlean-X channel.

Basically, I have a really poor mind-muscle connection to my biceps. I have been working them almost since the beginning, two years now, and I still feel like I haven't made significant gains in size or strength. My forearms radically over compensate during my curling, to the point I was starting to get very noticeable pain/tightness in my left (dominant) elbow. After preacher curls my forearms and the elbow in general would feel lit the fuck up, and that would transition to elbow pain the rest of that day and extending in to other days.

I combated that with a Voodoo band and lacrosse ball, which caused the pain and tension to leave my elbow and center on my forearms, to where the problem actually exists.

It was starting to really hamper my workouts.

So the tip is: let your wrist fold as you come up in to the curl. Keeping a rigid, locked wrist throughout the whole movement invites your forearms to contribute. But if you let the wrist bend back (not sloppy spaghetti like of course), it helps take a large amount of contribution from your forearms out of it.

You can test this yourself. Do a normal bicep flex, but instead of keeping your wrist fixed and upright, let it fold back so the palm of your hand faces the ceiling. You will feel a much stronger and more immediate contraction in your biceps.

I did my normal curling weight with this method and lo: no elbow pain afterward, no super tight forearm flexors or muscles. In fact, the amount of DOMs I experienced in my biceps was so minimal the next day, I feel confident I can put more weight on now that I'm not worried about blowing out another joint or stressing out my tendons.

It will take a few weeks of this for my elbow and forearms to really heal up and start feeling really good again, but man am I glad I found this tip. It has made a big difference. I don't even care if I get better bicep contractions and growth out of it. I'm just happy I've found a way to relieve stress and tension on the elbow joint and forearm flexors.

The video in question if you want a visual example of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCJVOcBTJUA&t=299s

[NRDL]

In my experience, doing a bunch of band rear delt flys and rows of any kind to build up the upper back really help with shoulder stabilisation and OHPing.

How's your bracing? Glutes locked in, core locked, everything else in your body needs to be rigid like a tree for the weight to move upwards.

[Hanslanda]

So with minimal maintenance at this point, I can blast out 50 pushups with ease. I've started doing situps while holding a 30lb weight on my clavicle region. I can do 30 of those pretty easily. Plus I've been doing a kinda homemade exercise where I hold a 30lb weight in each hand under my ears and bend left and right to work obliques.

And shadowboxing. It's good cardio and it builds potentially useful muscle memory if I ever get into a fight.

[itisnotlogical]

I'm restarting my fitness journey for only the fiftieth time, but this time putting a heavier emphasis on my food consumption than I ever have previously. I'm finding that past the first day or two, it's actually very easy to control my appetite and not eat when I'm not hungry.

I don't really trust my home scale, since it and the scale at the doctors' have a discrepancy of up to 20lbs. However, I feel like my tummy is getting smaller and my arms are getting bigger.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of having a dedicated partner. Nothing keeps me from taking a 30-minute-long "short break" like seeing my partner go through her workouts like they were nothing. It also helps with consistency a lot as we can spot for eachother.

[nenjin]

In my experience, doing a bunch of band rear delt flys and rows of any kind to build up the upper back really help with shoulder stabilisation and OHPing.

How's your bracing? Glutes locked in, core locked, everything else in your body needs to be rigid like a tree for the weight to move upwards.

I do rows once a week, face pulls twice a week. My bracing is pretty good, glutes and core are locked in. But my bar path feels a little shaky and uneven, particularly on the way up. I do slow negatives for OHP and those feel more even than the lift. Like most exercises, it takes me months and months to start feeling out the groove. I've been doing OHP since like......summer I think, ever since I saw a dude blasting out 135 OHP I was like "I want that."

I've started doing situps while holding a 30lb weight on my clavicle region. I can do 30 of those pretty easily.

IMO you're at the upper end of what you can/should do for situps with weight. Sounds like it's time to try some more difficult configurations. If you're not doing it already, I would start attempting situps while in the butterfly position. Many people's situps actually target their hip flexors rather than their actual abs because keeping your feet braced underneath something or just flat on the floor causes you to apply leverage using your hip flexors during the most difficult part of the situp.

If you haven't ever tried to do situps with your legs in the butterfly position, you will be shocked how much harder it is, and how much more of a burn you get in your abs. You will undoubtedly need to drop or even abandon weight until you develop the core strength to do situps with minimal hip flexor involvement. Get an Ab Mat for ++ stretch on your abs, and you will have sore abs like nothing you've ever felt before. Of all the things I've learned or tried, butterfly position situps have given me the most bang for my buck.

Other things you can try to make situps more difficult is clenching your core on the way up and exhaling as you go so your core is flat and empty at the top of the situp, then REALLY locking in your core and doing a very slow controlled negative on the way down. You could also add a left/right twist at the top (assuming you're doing a full situp) to get a little oblique engagement on every rep as well. With a 25 against my chest, I will try to bend so my elbow gets close to my opposite knee.

Plus I've been doing a kinda homemade exercise where I hold a 30lb weight in each hand under my ears and bend left and right to work obliques.

Under your ears hrmmmm? Try this instead maybe:

Get a dog leash. Wrap that dog leash around the head of a dumbbell and let it hang until it's almost touching the floor. Then do your side bends. I've never tried side bends with the weight up that high, but my feeling is you're not optimally stressing your obliques with it there. I was doing a 45 plate in hand to do side bends and I really enjoy that exercise. It works your obliques and your grip and forearm strength at the same time.

I'm finding that past the first day or two, it's actually very easy to control my appetite and not eat when I'm not hungry.

That's good to hear. Bear in mind, as you lose body fat the hunger responses are going to get stronger. My strategy has been to eat two really filling meals a day and a good late night snack and avoid all other snacking/calorie bearing drinks during the day. I still have periods of hunger in between (especially in the morning), but it's pretty easy to ignore that when I know I have a big meal waiting in only a few hours.

[Arx]

Not a dietician, but for weight loss isn't it usually better to aim for multiple smaller meals throughout the day to accelerate your metabolism? As long as you're cutting down calories at a sensible rate I suppose anything's an improvement, though.

[nenjin]

Not a dietician, but for weight loss isn't it usually better to aim for multiple smaller meals throughout the day to accelerate your metabolism? As long as you're cutting down calories at a sensible rate I suppose anything's an improvement, though.

The calorie deficit is what ultimately matters. There are arguments to be made for smaller meals keeping your metabolism at an even keel throughout the day so you don't experience sharp insulin spikes (and retain more body fat) but after years of researching this online, the best I can say is that *maybe* helps. There's no true consensus in the fitness community on this one, just a lot of anecdotal experience. The most effective strategy is the one you can stick with while staying in a calorie deficit.

[Hanslanda]

... Butterfly situps are intense. Good advice.