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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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I've done the most clichéd thing ever and bought a gym membership in the first week of the new year, and I'm looking for suggestions for exercises and routines to follow.
My main motivations for working out are to improve my mood, and vanity. I'm not interested in getting "huge" or "shredded", but I would really like to get rid of my beer belly and look generally leaner and more toned. I'm also planning on running a marathon at the end of this year, so any exercises which would assist with that are also welcome.
I don't really know anything about strength training, so currently my only goal is to be able to deadlift my body weight (~83 kg) in a few months' time.
Starting Strength. Has a YouTube channel and a few related books.
Important caveat: Stick to the program, but adjust at the margins based on your own feedback loops. Rippetoe gets dogmatic and I understand why [^1]. Do your thing ... but also be aware of the extent to which you've drifted from the program. Bicep curls are the devil.
I would recommend against the marathon. It occupies this place in western pop-fitness as a great symbol of overall health and fitness when it is, in reality, a hugely specialized performance. For overall fitness, resistance training is the base and cardio should be varied but mostly below 45 minutes in terms of duration. If your 5-mile time falls below 35 minutes, then you can go train for a marathon, which will mostly be a lot of boring long runs.
[^1]: Rippetoe exists as the anti "amazing new fitness routine" anchor of the world. His entire career is "do the basics right and consistently for years." Which is what is appropriate for >95% of people. When Muscle and Fitness publishes an elite bodybuilder's routine, it make no sense for the average lifter because that bodybuilder's routine is designed to move him or her from the top .1% to the top .07% of lifters. They're extreme because they're at the very limits of diminishing returns. Most people will never get there, so using it as a starting point is useless. Where Rippetoe fails, imho, is in letting people who have put in a baseline of work with the basics tweak based on their own feedback loops.
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check them out.
This will be my third marathon, but your concern is well-placed and I appreciate it.
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