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Wellness Wednesday for January 4, 2023

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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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.

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.

Gym won't fix your beer belly, diet will. You'll want to at least count your proteins and total calories.

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.

How many times a week do you plan to work out? If the answer is "one", then go gift your membership to someone else. Two is the bare minimum, plus you might want to do something at home.

The basic compound exercises are your best starting point:

  • pull-up (and pulldown and bent-over row)

  • bench press (and push-up)

  • squat (and leg press)

  • deadlift (and sumo deadlift and Romanian deadlift)

For the upper body exercises, listen to your body to see what you need to add:

  • wobble? Train your stabilizers with dumbbells or kettlebells

  • weak arms? Add some pushdowns or curls

  • not enough strength at the beginning or the end of the movement? Flies and pullover might help with a good stretch or a good contraction.

For the lower body you will probably be limited by your technique at first. While you're still learning to stabilize your core, use a Smith machine or a leg extension machine or a hamstring curl machine to tire out your muscles.

Thanks for the detailed advice. Planning to start off going twice a week and work my way up from there.

If you're a complete beginner that doesn't have a lot of time, try high-rep antagonistic supersets:

  • superset means you do two exercises back to back, the only break you get is the time you need to walk from one machine to the other

  • I am not sure if antagonistic is the best term here, but you should target two completely different groups of muscles: chest press, then pulldowns, for example. This lets you take very short breaks between supersets as well, 30s or so

  • high-rep is 15-20 reps, so don't stack these plates. Instead, concentrate on the form, by rep 10-15 you should feel the burn that you will have to power through

In just 20-30 minutes you can do four compound exercises that will leave your whole body fried. Ten minutes for a warmup and a stretch before, and you have 20 minutes left to work on your arms or other muscles you want to target.