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Wellness Wednesday for November 9, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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So...last week I expressed skepticism at the idea of exercise boosting one's mood. I got some good responses about what to do (lift, more intense exercise, etc.) but I wanted to hold off on some of them because it's basically a law of the gym that, if I do any strength training, I overreach and injure myself.

So...I overreached and injured myself! I can't even be mad this time because it's so absurd: I deliberately didn't touch weights and injured myself doing...Kegels - which was supposed to be light work. I was literally doing 5 a day and I still managed it. Low WIS + CON is a helluva combo.

But! It did give me an opportunity to test out if I feel worse without exercise and...eh?

I was annoyed on Monday, but I honestly can't tell if that was just my usual cyclical moroseness and depression and stress at work.

One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio. Not much harder (a 16:8 schedule is pretty easy) but I just feel hungrier (which might explain why I'm more irritable). Still not sure exactly why moderate-to-vigorous cardio would make me less hungry. Maybe it's that I'm just wasting an hour and a half working out and walking home that I would otherwise been thinking about food?

Anyways, besides that I do feel somewhat uncomfortable not being able to go to the gym because working out early was becoming a keystone habit and I feel like I'm losing that progress. But I don't feel significantly worse.

In retrospect I should have kept a log right after the injury. But low WIS strikes again...

I struggled for years with injuries every time I did strength training. I’d recommend yoga and starting real slow. I made more progress in six months than I had in four years of trying to strength train with lifting.

Plus I get euphoria too.

I made more progress in six months than I had in four years of trying to strength train with lifting.

The gym bro in me wants to say "how unfit are you fuckers?" That you made more progress doing yoga than lifting. That too in 1/8th the time.. That's kind of like saying "I got more tired swimming end to end on my swimming pool than swimming across the Atlantic Ocean".

  • Either you are some kind of genetic outlier where your body is that much more receptive to yoga., and that much less receptive to lifting.

  • Or, What you mean by "lifting" is very different from what most people mean.

  • Your diet,sleep and exercise is REALLY out of whack.

  • Your definition of progress is not the kind of progress lifting gets you.

  • Your hormones are fucked.

Your definition of progress is not the kind of progress lifting gets you.

This is probably the one you're looking for. I dealt with chronic pain issues for the better part of a decade, and every time I lifted I would just injure myself or make my issues worse. Chasing higher numbers only exacerbated my problem, as well as the consistent 'pushing' ethos of most people involved in lifting/strength training.

Doing yoga helped me understand that my main problem was I would tense my muscles and not recruit certain muscles while lifting. After I realized that and started practicing isolating muscles or learning more bodily awareness, I am far stronger than I can remember myself ever being. Using your muscles the right way helps a lot.

@Tanista mentioned injuring themself during a relatively like workout, which I've also struggled with, so I figured my experience may be relevant here.

Either you are some kind of genetic outlier where your body is that much more receptive to yoga., and that much less receptive to lifting.

I have had a couple doctors diagnose me with joint hypermobility but I think that's just one of a host of BS diagnoses for chronic pain issues that doesn't have a ton of backing in real science.