Workout help wanted (long, a little complex)

[Brandon]

@pseudotriton_ruber_ruber

Thanks for the long post–I appreciate all that effort. Some quick clarifications. I’m looking to increase my calories expended and reduce my calories taken in, for general fitness and weight control. What I’ve done up this point has enabled to me to lose over 50 pounds in the past 18 months, so I feel I’ve been something right, despite my total lack of knowledge and understanding.

I’m sure you have been, congratulations on what you have accomplished thus far. Not to take away from anything you have done, but to give you some perspective - if you were in bad shape before just doing anything would show you results, and often times beginners show great improvements initially. I will say that since you have lost the weight over a relatively long period of time it is symptomatic of a proper lifestyle change and it is likely you can sustain it when compared to someone who is looking for the easy way out. The bad news is the closer you get to a healthier weight the more difficult it becomes to lose fat when compared to the earlier weight loss.

Now that I’m in better shape I’m looking for exercises that will be efficient in the time I have alloted (4-7 hours per week, roughly), that will fit into my budget (my crappy university gym is free, but not always convenient) and will be enjoyable by my own standards–i.e., I like to run but not to swim, so if swimming beats running in efficiency, I’m still going to prefer to run.

That’s good, you need to find something you can stick with; but remember that you are trying to balance it with efficiency. You need to decide what is more important to you, but I am speaking purely from an efficiency in fat loss standpoint (and that might be something you need to give a little more credence considering your time restraints).

I’ll read the material about pushups, but mostly I haven’t done them in recent years because I found it hard to lift my own weight off the floor. Now, not so much. If can reach the point where I can do a set of 50 pushups, how exactly is that not expending the calories it takes to lift 200 pounds a foot off the floor with both arms 50 times? Seems to me that’s what I’m doing, if I did 50 pushups, and should be about a effective as lifting 200 pounds of weights a foot in the air, roughly speaking, in terms of the work expended.

Roughly speaking you can argue that it’s similar, but it really isn’t. For one thing, as long as you have your feet touching something you are not lifting 200 pounds with only your arms. I would guess that you are doing like 30% of your body weight to 75%, depending on the angle you are positioned at, but I am not sure that is just a wild guess. Decline or handstand pushups are closer to lifting 200 pounds, but still not quite there. It is also important how you define “effective”. You burn more calories if you have more lean body mass, and you get more lean body mass by increasing the load your muscles have to do; in that sense weightlifting is more effective. If you are after pure muscle endurance in order to pass a military test or something then pushups would be more effective to reach that goal.

If it’s only 75% as effective, for some technical reason, it’s still a better alternative than saying “Oh, hell, I don’t have time to travel in to the gym today–no workout for me.” But I get from you (above) that it’s more or less a total waste of my time and effort. Could you estimate for me, just in terms of doing work and expending calories, the percentage that ten minutes spent doing pushups would be if lifting equivalent free weights ranks at 100%? Obviously if it’s 75 % or more, I’ll do them if that’s my only feasible alternative. If it’s 10% as effective, then I’m clearly depriving myself of some of the benefit I think I’m getting from doing pushups–though it is hard for me to believe that the difference could be as great is a 90% loss.

I don’t recall saying it was waste of your time and effort, only you can decide what is worthy of your time and effort. I will say that it would be a waste of my time when I know there are alternatives that would benefit me better. If I implied (or did in fact say) it I apologize, I’ve been doing a lot of work this weekend so I may have been unclear and hasty in what I was trying to say. I don’t even know how to approach your question about calorie percentages since it completely ignores various factors such as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), the addition of lean body mass and it’s effect on metabolism, or the stimulation of muscle growth; let alone factors like what you have eaten before hand or your technique (range of motion?) in doing either. Basically, I am unable to quantify a percentage difference in terms of calories burned in only 10 minutes; but focusing on what is burned in only those 10 minutes can result in not seeing the forest for the trees. I still get the impression that you are approaching fat loss in the wrong way, it encompasses more than just burning calories in a given period (which is why I recommended fluiddruid’s thread). Essentially, more muscle burns more calories and pushups will not put on much muscle once you pass a point which you will hit quickly, if you have not already hit it. So if we give pushups the benefit of the doubt in this and say that they burn more calories in 10 minutes, they still come out on the short end of the stick since spending that same 10 minutes building muscle would result in you burning more calories later when you aren’t doing anything. Of course pushups are better than nothing, but making a plan on the pretense that it is better than nothing generally does not bode well for the future. If you are saying that it is pushups or no workout whatsoever then do pushups, but I am just letting you know that it is not very efficient; and I think that if a person wants to maximize their fat loss while being really strapped for time they should focus on weightlifting.

I’m still not getting why my goals are hard to understand. I want to find an exercise program that I won’t find boring or grueling, that will use up calories up to an hour per day, while I reduce my caloric intake. If I find a program that works for me, that I enjoy (running on the beach, particularly at sunrise, is so beautiful and peaceful that I feel I get benefits from it apart from the caloric stuff), that I’ll actually do, then it doesn’t matter if it’s slightly less efficient than than the best possible regimen in the universe. I’m just trying to learn which exercise programs are wastes of my time.

Well, like it or not sometimes losing fat and getting healthy is grueling. You won’t want to go some days, you’ll rationalize that doing a few pushups is close enough to going to the gym, and exercising is painful and occasionally unpleasant. Sometimes it’s boring and tedious and you flat out won’t want to do it. That comes down to willpower. If you enjoy running on the beach that much, you could just become a runner. It may give you everything that you’re after, in which case my advice holds less applicable as I am not a runner (though I do run) and can’t speak to their perspective very well. Some people are perfectly happy with a runner’s body and physical characteristics, other people want to be stronger, other people want to be bulkier, other people want to be faster. That is why the clarification of goals is so imperative. It is not that your goals are hard to understand, it is that they are vague and broad. Just my take.

BTW, I did figure out recently where I got the misinformation that abs are big muscles–I read it in a book by an MD named something like Roizen. I’ll get a quote when I find that book (I think I left it at home) and if he says indeed that abs are a large muscle system, then I’ll tend to regard his other opinions as suspect.

I’d appreciate it. I’d like to see the context in which it is used. In terms of space taken up on the body abs could be considered decently sized, but if we are talking about general health and increasing metabolism they are relatively small.