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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I guess one my my questions is, if I'm looking to primarily gain muscle for the purpose of increasing my base metabolism, so I can lose weight, what's best? Hypertrophy or strength or something else?
The general consensus I'm familiar with on this is, this isn't worth it. It's been a while since I looked into it, but IIRC, if you replace 1 lbs of fat with 1 lbs of muscle in your body - no easy feat - this adds like 30-50 extra Calories to your daily energy usage. That's only like 1-2K extra Calories per month, which is only about half a pound of fat loss, or about 6 pounds a year. Not bad, but in the scale of a year, 6 pounds is basically just noise, and you're going to get much better returns on effort through cardio and diet.
But, of course, every bit does count, and it's not as if building muscle is bad for you or your weight loss. For that, I believe you want to increase mass, since for increasing BMR, the mass is what matters most (the types of fibers likely matter as well, but for BMR, it will be minimal, since the energy required to twitch those muscles isn't factored in). Which likely means less focus on strength (weight) and more on hypertrophy (e.g. reps to failure).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link