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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 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.

This is extremely unambitious, unless you're 155 cm tall and obese. The first day I tried deadlifting, I worked up to a very easy 80 kg (my weight) and did 100 kg for a few sets of five a few days later. That's not bragging; deadlifting your body weight really is that easy.

Deadlifting a lot of weight is not as hard.

Deadlifting without breaking your lower-back or giving yourself a hernia is harder.

I've been stalled on deadlifts for over a year because I know my form isn't good enough to go heavier, but have no way of knowing how to fix it. It's annoying.

Well, Hex Deadlifts pretty much solve that problem for you, once I switched over to them, it quickly became apparent just how unnatural the standard barbell deadlift is for the human body, whereas people pretty much instinctively know how to hex deadlift with close to perfect form. I strongly recommend them if you're not competing in powerlifting (where they arbitrarily chose the deadlift as once of the 3 core lifts).