As noted, I focus on strength workouts. This is due to a mix of personal preference - I enjoy lifting heavy things a whole lot more than I enjoy running or biking in place, so strength training motivates me to actually go to the gym - and my understanding of the relative effectiveness of each as part of a weight loss routine. Basically, cardio helps you lose weight, but strength training helps ensure the weight you lose is mostly stored fat rather than muscle. Both have other long-term health benefits (and also health risks that need to be mitigated with sensible training practices and proper form), and I do try to work low-intensity cardio into my daily life via walking and cycling. But the thing that gets me into the gym is lifting weights.
I generally prefer free weights over weight machines, as I think the former are better for overall health via increased use of stabilizer muscles and generally larger range of motion, but there are some exercises where I use machines due mostly to convenience. I've tried some starter bodyweight training routines, and found that I have too much bodyweight to do a lot of the progressions effectively. I can't do a pullup, for example, and for me pushups are more in the realm of maximum effort than light warmup. So I stick with weights for now, but I'd like to add in more bodyweight moves as my strength:weight ratio improves.
The key to any effective strength training program is progressive overload - increase the stress on your muscles and your body responds by building more muscle and getting better at recruiting muscle fibers, both of which make you stronger. The easiest way to do this is to add weight every session, and there are lots of fine beginner programs that follow this method - Starting Strength, Ice Cream Fitness, the Average F'n Program, any number of Greyskull LP variants, and so on. In particular, I recommend anybody interested in barbell training should pick up Starting Strength, even if you don't follow the program it's a great reference for learning technique.
That said, I don't do any of those. I tried for my first 2-3 months of lifting, and found my lifts stalled fast and hard, meaning I couldn't keep adding weight to them. For a while I thought I was doing something terribly wrong or that there was something wrong with me, but on doing some googling around I found my results weren't that unusual for people in my situation - eating at a caloric deficit, outside of the prime muscle-building years (mid teens to mid to late 20s). It's not that middle aged fat guys can't build strength, but we have to go about it a bit differently than the most straightforward path of doing sets of 5 reps and adding weight to the bar every session.
The program I eventually latched onto as a base for my workouts is called All Pro, after the screen name of the guy who first posted it. The things I like about it are that it's based on full body workouts using mostly compound lifts, but uses different weights throughout the training week and progressive overload via increasing number of reps week-to-week on a five week cycle. This means it's easier to recover from the workouts. I have modified it in several ways to suit my needs and my understanding of current knowledge about training. My version looks like this:
Main exercises: Squat, Bench, Row, Overhead Press, Straight-leg Deadlift, Lat Pulldown, Leg Raise
Isolation/Vanity exercises: Calf Raise, Tricep Pulldown, Bicep Curl
Working weight: for the main exercises, determine your 8 rep max - the weight at which you can do 8 reps with good form, but can't manage a ninth. For the other exercises, it's the weight at which you can do about 14-15 reps with good form.
Workout 3 days a week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday is traditional, I personally do Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday. For main exercises, Day 1 is Heavy Day, do two warmup sets at 25% to 50% of working weight and then two sets of 6 reps with the full working weight. You shouldn't need much rest between warmup sets - I only pause long enough to change weights. Rest between the two full weight sets is 90 seconds.
Day 2 is Medium day. Use 90% of your working weight, and do two sets of 8 instead of two sets of 6. Otherwise same drill.
Day 3 is Light day. Use 80% of your working weight, and do two sets of 10 instead of two sets of 6. Otherwise same as heavy day.
In week 2, increase the number of reps in each set by 1. So heavy day is two sets of 7, medium is two sets of 9, light is two sets of 11. Increase again for weeks 3 and 4, and again in week 5 when you'll be doing 10, 12, and 14 reps on heavy, medium, and light days respectively.
Week 5 heavy day is test day - in each exercise, if you make both sets of 10, at the end of the week you increase the working weight by 10% and start the next cycle. If you fail a set, you keep the weight the same and start the next cycle.
For the isolation exercises, in week 1 you do two sets of 12 reps on each day without adjusting the weight. Week two is two sets of 14, keep increasing by 2 reps each week until you're doing two sets of 20 reps in week 5. If you get all the reps on test day, then in the next cycle you increase the weight by 10%.
And that's about it. I've been able to make steady progress with this routine for some time now, much longer than I could on Starting Strength. It is more of a hybrid strength/bodybuilding routine than the strength-focused routines usually recommended to novices, but I find the slightly higher rep ranges (and correspondingly lower weights) are much more forgiving on my body. This also makes use of a concept called "daily undulating periodization," which basically means changing up your weights and rep ranges from workout to workout. In some studies this has lead to faster progress than straight linear programs.
So that's how I train. I plan to continue until either I start to stall in several exercises at once - in which case I'll probably move to an upper/lower split, hitting each major exercise twice a week instead of three times - or I hit my weight loss goal, in which case I'll finally stop eating at a deficit and be able to give something like Greyskull LP a try.
Next time around I plan to revisit nutrition, with some talk about macronutrients and meal planning. Be well.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Methodology for Defattening
Herein I speak about the nuts and bolts of my weight loss, what I do and the tools I use. As alluded to in my previous post, I've known how to lose weight for many years, but I couldn't make the jump from knowing to doing for almost as many years. Everything I'm about to say will likely sound very straightforward and easy, but for me at least it took a fair amount of self-examination before I could make it stick (down 25 kg so far, will still be doing all of this for most of 2015 at least).
Terminology note: a proper calorie is a fairly tiny unit of energy (specifically the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 cm^3 of water by 1 degree celsius at a pressure of 1 atmosphere). Energy from food is properly measured in kilocalories or kcal, units of 1000 calories. For reasons I've never really understood, in North America when we describe the amount of energy in food, we very often use the word "calories" when we actually mean kcal. As most of the sources and tools I'm going to link to are from North America, they generally follow that pattern. Any time I use the word calories in the rest of this point, assume I'm talking about kcal.
First principle: to lose weight, calories out must exceed calories in. For me, it's necessary to count calories with some precision and be aware of my caloric budget. I've read accounts by various people who lost weight without doing this explicitly (usually via heavily restricting carbohydrates), and that's great for people who can operate that way, but I can't. I use a variety of tools to do this:
1) Figure out TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the number of calories you burn in a day. It can basically be thought of as being made up of two quantities:
BMR - your basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of energy your body burns simply to keep you alive - pumping your heart, inflating and deflating your lungs, your various metabolic processes, etc. You burn this amount even if you spend all day in bed.
Activity level - Moving around burns additional calories. Standing burns more than sitting, walking burns more than standing, etc. Exercise fits in here.
There are lots of TDEE calculators online. I use this one, at a site called iifym.com, with iifym standing for "if it fits your macros." I'll talk a bit more about macronutrients in a later post.
IIFYM's calculator suggests that overweight/obese people use a formula that includes body fat percentage. This isn't critical - the difference in calculated TDEE for me between the two formulae is about 150 kcal - but body fat percentage can be a useful metric to track in its own right. Getting a reasonably exact measurement is inconvenient and expensive (it requires fairly sophisticated equipment usually found at medical centres or sometimes high end health clubs), but there are a variety of much cheaper and more convenient estimation methods. I use a circumference formula developed by the US Navy, which requires only a tape measure. It's an estimate with a fairly large error rate, but good enough for my purposes. I will talk more about metrics I use (scale, bodyfat, measurements) in a future post.
Once you've got your TDEE, your eating strategy becomes pretty clear. If you eat fewer kcal than your TDEE, you lose weight. Higher than your TDEE, you gain weight. And to maintain your current weight, you eat the same as your TDEE.
An important thing to remember is that any calculator can only estimate your TDEE, it will get you into the ballpark but both your metabolism and your activity level are unique to you. You will probably have to adjust the calculated TDEE somewhat.
So for example: I am a 47 year old male, 181 cm tall, weighing 125 kg with a bodyfat of 30%. I set my exercise level at 3/week. That gives me a TDEE of 3108 kcal/day, with a BMR of 2260 kcal/day.
IIFYM helpfully provides me with suggested calorie levels based on the level of deficit I want to run - suggested, aggressive, or reckless. You could also calculate on desired weight loss - a pound of fat represents about 3500 kcal, so if you want to lose that amount in a week you should run a deficit of about 500 kcal below your TDEE each day. Two pounds would be 1000 kcal below TDEE each day.
Through past experimentation, I'm aware that the TDEE calculator is high by about 100 kcal. I run a deficit of about 700 kcal/day, which means that I aim to eat about 2300 kcal/day and lose a little over a pound and a half/week.
2) Record food intake. Or count calories. Nowadays, the best way to do this is any of a variety of websites, preferably with an associated app. I use MyFitnessPal (MFP), but there's any number of good ones out there (Loseit, SparkPeople, etc). The important thing for me is that it have an accurate and large food database, so I don't have to spend a lot of time entering nutritional data - I can just enter my foods for each meal and be done tracking in under a minute.
MFP includes a built-in calorie budget calculator, but I prefer IIFYM's.
MFP also tracks the three macronutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates) and many micronutrients. The only macronutrient I track closely is protein, due to its importance in exercise; fat is also important for a variety of metabolic processes, so I try to be aware of getting enough but don't sweat over it the way I do protein. Carbs are the "whatever's left over" macro for me.
3) Exercise. A little fiddling with the IIFYM calculator will show that it's hard to out-exercise your diet. Based on my slow but steady weight gain over the last five years or so, I'd estimate that before I started tracking calories I was eating around 3200 to 3300 kcal/day. That means that if I tried to create a 700 kcal deficit strictly through exercise, I'd have to up my TDEE to around 3900 to 4000 kcal/day. The calculator tells me that to do that, I'd have to exercise intensely every day, or have regular workouts twice a day. That would be something like a 90 minute high intensity strength training session plus 30 minutes of HIIT cardio per day, which is not something I'd be wild about doing now (and probably not something I was physically capable of doing when I started).
That said, exercise is important for other reasons. If you eat at a calorie deficit and don't exercise, your body will decide that muscle mass is an unnecessary luxury and you lose muscle along with fat. As muscle is metabolically active while fat isn't, this means your BMR will actually go down slightly, and you'll burn fewer calories making it harder to lose weight. Exercise also contributes to joint health and bone density, both quite important as we age. And for a lot of us - and certainly for me - losing weight is in part an aesthetic pursuit, I'd like to look better, exercise helps.
I've tried both cardio exercise and strength training, and much prefer the latter. I'll go into the details of my routine in my next post.
4) Tracking weight and other metrics. I could write a long post on why scales suck, but somebody already has so I'll just link to that one. I still think it's important to weigh myself in order to track progress, and I weigh myself every morning after my shower. As recommended in that linked article, I never worry about the individual number on any given day, I only use it to make an entry in a spreadsheet that calculates a 7-day rolling average, which is the number I actually care about. I keep track of which direction that average is heading in and the rate at which it's changing.
I track bodyfat percentage in a similar way - I use the tape measure method I linked earlier, and keep a seven day rolling average. Again, I want to see it decreasing over time, the exact number isn't that important to me and won't be until I get well below 20%.
Because of my bodyfat tracking method, I also track my waist and neck size pretty closely. Seeing myself shrinking is a good motivator, particularly since I don't notice day-to-day changes in the mirror.
I've also started (as of Jan 2015) taking progress pics on the 1st of each month. A 1 month period is enough for me to see some accumulated changes. I may someday decide to post some of them, but probably not unless/until I have a fairly dramatic transformation to showcase.
And that's more or less the nuts and bolts of how I do things. It certainly isn't the only way to lose weight, merely one that's worked for me.
Terminology note: a proper calorie is a fairly tiny unit of energy (specifically the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 cm^3 of water by 1 degree celsius at a pressure of 1 atmosphere). Energy from food is properly measured in kilocalories or kcal, units of 1000 calories. For reasons I've never really understood, in North America when we describe the amount of energy in food, we very often use the word "calories" when we actually mean kcal. As most of the sources and tools I'm going to link to are from North America, they generally follow that pattern. Any time I use the word calories in the rest of this point, assume I'm talking about kcal.
First principle: to lose weight, calories out must exceed calories in. For me, it's necessary to count calories with some precision and be aware of my caloric budget. I've read accounts by various people who lost weight without doing this explicitly (usually via heavily restricting carbohydrates), and that's great for people who can operate that way, but I can't. I use a variety of tools to do this:
1) Figure out TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the number of calories you burn in a day. It can basically be thought of as being made up of two quantities:
BMR - your basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of energy your body burns simply to keep you alive - pumping your heart, inflating and deflating your lungs, your various metabolic processes, etc. You burn this amount even if you spend all day in bed.
Activity level - Moving around burns additional calories. Standing burns more than sitting, walking burns more than standing, etc. Exercise fits in here.
There are lots of TDEE calculators online. I use this one, at a site called iifym.com, with iifym standing for "if it fits your macros." I'll talk a bit more about macronutrients in a later post.
IIFYM's calculator suggests that overweight/obese people use a formula that includes body fat percentage. This isn't critical - the difference in calculated TDEE for me between the two formulae is about 150 kcal - but body fat percentage can be a useful metric to track in its own right. Getting a reasonably exact measurement is inconvenient and expensive (it requires fairly sophisticated equipment usually found at medical centres or sometimes high end health clubs), but there are a variety of much cheaper and more convenient estimation methods. I use a circumference formula developed by the US Navy, which requires only a tape measure. It's an estimate with a fairly large error rate, but good enough for my purposes. I will talk more about metrics I use (scale, bodyfat, measurements) in a future post.
Once you've got your TDEE, your eating strategy becomes pretty clear. If you eat fewer kcal than your TDEE, you lose weight. Higher than your TDEE, you gain weight. And to maintain your current weight, you eat the same as your TDEE.
An important thing to remember is that any calculator can only estimate your TDEE, it will get you into the ballpark but both your metabolism and your activity level are unique to you. You will probably have to adjust the calculated TDEE somewhat.
So for example: I am a 47 year old male, 181 cm tall, weighing 125 kg with a bodyfat of 30%. I set my exercise level at 3/week. That gives me a TDEE of 3108 kcal/day, with a BMR of 2260 kcal/day.
IIFYM helpfully provides me with suggested calorie levels based on the level of deficit I want to run - suggested, aggressive, or reckless. You could also calculate on desired weight loss - a pound of fat represents about 3500 kcal, so if you want to lose that amount in a week you should run a deficit of about 500 kcal below your TDEE each day. Two pounds would be 1000 kcal below TDEE each day.
Through past experimentation, I'm aware that the TDEE calculator is high by about 100 kcal. I run a deficit of about 700 kcal/day, which means that I aim to eat about 2300 kcal/day and lose a little over a pound and a half/week.
2) Record food intake. Or count calories. Nowadays, the best way to do this is any of a variety of websites, preferably with an associated app. I use MyFitnessPal (MFP), but there's any number of good ones out there (Loseit, SparkPeople, etc). The important thing for me is that it have an accurate and large food database, so I don't have to spend a lot of time entering nutritional data - I can just enter my foods for each meal and be done tracking in under a minute.
MFP includes a built-in calorie budget calculator, but I prefer IIFYM's.
MFP also tracks the three macronutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates) and many micronutrients. The only macronutrient I track closely is protein, due to its importance in exercise; fat is also important for a variety of metabolic processes, so I try to be aware of getting enough but don't sweat over it the way I do protein. Carbs are the "whatever's left over" macro for me.
3) Exercise. A little fiddling with the IIFYM calculator will show that it's hard to out-exercise your diet. Based on my slow but steady weight gain over the last five years or so, I'd estimate that before I started tracking calories I was eating around 3200 to 3300 kcal/day. That means that if I tried to create a 700 kcal deficit strictly through exercise, I'd have to up my TDEE to around 3900 to 4000 kcal/day. The calculator tells me that to do that, I'd have to exercise intensely every day, or have regular workouts twice a day. That would be something like a 90 minute high intensity strength training session plus 30 minutes of HIIT cardio per day, which is not something I'd be wild about doing now (and probably not something I was physically capable of doing when I started).
That said, exercise is important for other reasons. If you eat at a calorie deficit and don't exercise, your body will decide that muscle mass is an unnecessary luxury and you lose muscle along with fat. As muscle is metabolically active while fat isn't, this means your BMR will actually go down slightly, and you'll burn fewer calories making it harder to lose weight. Exercise also contributes to joint health and bone density, both quite important as we age. And for a lot of us - and certainly for me - losing weight is in part an aesthetic pursuit, I'd like to look better, exercise helps.
I've tried both cardio exercise and strength training, and much prefer the latter. I'll go into the details of my routine in my next post.
4) Tracking weight and other metrics. I could write a long post on why scales suck, but somebody already has so I'll just link to that one. I still think it's important to weigh myself in order to track progress, and I weigh myself every morning after my shower. As recommended in that linked article, I never worry about the individual number on any given day, I only use it to make an entry in a spreadsheet that calculates a 7-day rolling average, which is the number I actually care about. I keep track of which direction that average is heading in and the rate at which it's changing.
I track bodyfat percentage in a similar way - I use the tape measure method I linked earlier, and keep a seven day rolling average. Again, I want to see it decreasing over time, the exact number isn't that important to me and won't be until I get well below 20%.
Because of my bodyfat tracking method, I also track my waist and neck size pretty closely. Seeing myself shrinking is a good motivator, particularly since I don't notice day-to-day changes in the mirror.
I've also started (as of Jan 2015) taking progress pics on the 1st of each month. A 1 month period is enough for me to see some accumulated changes. I may someday decide to post some of them, but probably not unless/until I have a fairly dramatic transformation to showcase.
And that's more or less the nuts and bolts of how I do things. It certainly isn't the only way to lose weight, merely one that's worked for me.
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