Work out regimen

retsage · 2014-07-30T12:05:49+00:00

/r/keto and /r/paleo - lose the weight first. Working out is secondary to that and starting to lift right now won't be doing yourself any favors. Your joints are under immense pressure.
For exercise, start walking daily. The longer the better.
When you get down to ~230lbs, worry about lifting / endurance. Again, your body at 400lbs is under enough stress. Adding more will likely lead to injuries.

Realistically, dropping the weight will take you 18-24 months, but at 400lbs, you need it. Lord knows it took you more than 18-24 months to get there. Start keto today, bro.

bicepsblastingstud · 2014-07-30T14:18:05+00:00

OP, I used to work in collegiate strength and conditioning and did some personal training for shits n' gigs. You might recognize my username from posting on r/fitness.

Your priorities, in order:

Square away your diet. As a morbidly obese person, you can lose large amounts of weight through small changes like switching to diet soda (and eventually to water) and not eating junk food. I promise you that you will not be able to physically stomach enough chicken, whole grains, and vegetables to maintain your weight.
Begin simple exercise, mostly cardiovascular & machines. Park at the far end of the parking lot. Walking on the treadmill. Doing some elliptical. Etc. The people recommending programs like stronglifts don't understand the realities of being morbidly obese. You need to start at the ground floor. Do basic cardiovascular exercise and do a few circuits of the machine weights, 3x/week.
After you lose some weight (get down to below 300lbs) you can start looking into doing real strength training. At that point, you will have the body awareness and mobility to actually be able to lift. Quite frankly, right now you don't.

amonde · 2014-07-30T12:02:17+00:00

I am also relatively noob at the liftings, and I found stronglifts 5x5 to be very up my alley. The link has everything you need.

kami_kakushi · 2014-07-30T19:58:48+00:00

there are reasons why you ate your way to 400lbs, and reasons why you relapsed etc ....

make sure you spend some time figuring these reasons out, and correcting any bad beliefs you have about yourself and your relationship with the world etc etc. get a belief/attitude change along with the lifestyle change.

introspection is essential, not just for overweight people but for all people, and never stop it, do it for the rest of your life. imo, the more you understand yourself, and the more you understand the world around you, the easier life is, you can make decisions faster and easier, you know who you are more, and you know where you are going in life.

perhaps i can illustrate this with an example. lets take tiger woods, Vs some guy called frank.

tiger woods knows what he wants in life, he knows who he wants to be, what he wants to achieve etc. frank doesnt know what he wants.

id argue that to a large degree, tiger woods' lifestyle choices are pretty set out. ya know? he doesnt choose what hes gonna eat for dinner, his persona dictates that it will be something healthy-ish. its not debatable most nights if tiger is gonna have something healthy or hes gonna order a pizza. he doesnt choose whether hes gonna go to the gym or not, because tiger woods hits the gym regularly, thats who he is.

frank doesnt know what he wants in life, he doesnt have clear goals. so what can we assume about his lifestyle choices? well, he may work out or he may not, he may eat a pizza or he may not. hes gonna do what he feels like. lacking clear goals, and lacking a driven personality, franks day is not mapped out for him by his persona, and the door is open for him to make bad choices sometimes.

i strongly believe this: the more you understand yourself, and the more your understand the world around you, and your relationship to the world, the easier life becomes, and bad choices pale away, you just start living the way you want to live.

so study yourself hard, study the world (history, society, psychology, the education system, etc) just read as much as you can. find out who you are, where you want to go in life, and you will be drawn towards it, and your lifestyle choices will become not choices, but rather inevitabilities.

PolishDistiller · 2014-07-30T11:54:10+00:00

/r/fitness is great, did you read the side bar

http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/resources

The above is all mandatory reading and DOING. Also try this, it is made for people in you position.

[deleted] · 2014-07-30T14:32:27+00:00

Hire a personal trainer for one session. They'll guide you through various exercises and watch to make sure you're doing them correctly and won't hurt yourself. The last thing you want is an injury that will keep you out of the gym for three months. One session isn't going to break the bank, but it will help you with your form and so forth.

If you're really broke and can't manage to get the $50-$70 for a single training session, post somewhere online that you are just starting and would love to have a gym buddy. Someone may volunteer. You could also put yourself out there as a kind of portfolio piece for a personal trainer. Getting you down from 400lbs to a healthy weight could be good for a trainer who's new to the game. Tell them you'll sign a contract saying you won't quit training while under their direction.

If you end up doing it alone for whatever reason (don't), start out with whatever you can do. For someone your size, you'd probably be good for bench press, goblet squats, and dumbbell shoulder presses, with some cardio worked in. Nothing at all wrong with cardio, even when lifting. Most of the fittest people in history have been all-round athletes.

mudra311 · 2014-07-30T15:07:40+00:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger's encyclopedia of modern body building has really helped me immensely during my workouts. I suggest purchasing that, I wish I had done it sooner.

Mans_Right_To_Choose · 2014-07-30T17:32:24+00:00

[permanently deleted]

noblepaladin · 2014-07-30T17:24:51+00:00

At 400 pounds, it is all about diet. By simply moving, you are already lifting more weight than most people at the gym. You probably have a lot more muscle than you think if you actually weight 400 pounds because just getting up is a ~250 pound lift compared to an ordinary person. I am not sure if it is even possible for you to correctly execute some of these exercises with that much body fat (you might be blocking your own range of motion with your body), so be careful about taking advice online, because you are a special case and the trainer cannot see you. I would say you should just walk until you are under 300 pounds first, and then take it from there (it will depend on your fitness level at that point, it is impossible to know right now). Note that this is a ridiculous workout in itself, most fit guys would be crushed if they strap 200 pounds on themselves and tried to walk for a mile.

Given that you bloated up to 400 pounds, the number one concern is mental toughness and discipline. You didn't become 400 pounds overnight. You probably realized you were fat well before 300, but for whatever reason you went all the way up to 400. I've seen tons of people make ridiculous workout plans that they cannot stick to. These plans are often easy for athletes, but you get a 300 pound guy running long distances with poor form and he destroys his knees and ligaments. Or you suddenly change a fat guys diet completely and his body cannot adjust to the new food so quickly and he has diarrhea and feels sick for two weeks and he gives up and reverts back to old behavior. You have to pick something that you know you can stick to, and you build your mental toughness and discipline on that. Probably around 90% of people give up because they try to do something they cannot stick to.

Title	Work out regimen
Author	Mans_Right_To_Choose
Upvotes	0
Comments	27
Date	July 30, 2014 11:48 AM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/2c4t7n/work_out_regimen/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/work-out-regimen.141035 https://theredarchive.com/post/141035

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