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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   2592 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 9, 2022

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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So...last week I expressed skepticism at the idea of exercise boosting one's mood. I got some good responses about what to do (lift, more intense exercise, etc.) but I wanted to hold off on some of them because it's basically a law of the gym that, if I do any strength training, I overreach and injure myself.

So...I overreached and injured myself! I can't even be mad this time because it's so absurd: I deliberately didn't touch weights and injured myself doing...Kegels - which was supposed to be light work. I was literally doing 5 a day and I still managed it. Low WIS + CON is a helluva combo.

But! It did give me an opportunity to test out if I feel worse without exercise and...eh?

I was annoyed on Monday, but I honestly can't tell if that was just my usual cyclical moroseness and depression and stress at work.

One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio. Not much harder (a 16:8 schedule is pretty easy) but I just feel hungrier (which might explain why I'm more irritable). Still not sure exactly why moderate-to-vigorous cardio would make me less hungry. Maybe it's that I'm just wasting an hour and a half working out and walking home that I would otherwise been thinking about food?

Anyways, besides that I do feel somewhat uncomfortable not being able to go to the gym because working out early was becoming a keystone habit and I feel like I'm losing that progress. But I don't feel significantly worse.

In retrospect I should have kept a log right after the injury. But low WIS strikes again...

If you're weak to the point of injuring yourself doing kegels then you should probably get help from a physical therapist. Try to look for a clinic where they profile themselves as working with sports injuries, the others are usually garbage and might not offer adequate in house exercise facilities.

Boosting this.

I lead a fairly active lifestyle, making sure to get adequate exercise. But on a friend's suggestion, I went to see a PT about my posture, which has turned into a multi-month journey into addressing various imabalances and weakeness that I never thought about because I took many things for granted, eg. a painful left knee while running, problems with stretching my hamstrings etc.

Turns out, I was using my body suboptimally, which lead to favoring certain parts over others, which then lead to minor but evergreen injuries. A good PT can easily spot these and, given their experience, figure out a good plan for addressing these problems.

As far as how to find a good PT, the only heuristic I've learned is to look for people that had training at the https://instituteofphysicalart.com/. Not sure if true, but I get a vibe from them that they are the rationalists of the PT world.

One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio. Not much harder (a 16:8 schedule is pretty easy) but I just feel hungrier (which might explain why I'm more irritable). Still not sure exactly why moderate-to-vigorous cardio would make me less hungry. Maybe it's that I'm just wasting an hour and a half working out and walking home that I would otherwise been thinking about food?

The distraction effect is probably part of it, but it is known that cardio (transiently) increases levels of ghrelin, a hormone that makes you feel less hungry. I assume this is why I can go for a run while I'm starving and then not want to eat for an hour after I'm done.

injured myself doing...Kegels

Natural selection ?

I've been exercising most of my life... For health, for sports, for physical therapy (A LOT of physical therapy).

Exercising is pretty much the endless strengthening of the weakest link. Take your time, listen to you body, and be kind to yourself when you do hurt yourself (Low WIS + CON is a helluva combo: I strongly relate to this, lol).

One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio.

I find the same thing with myself. I always assumed it was because I was forcing my body to burn reserves... I mean, if I had any food in my stomach, I would cramp up, etc.

How do you injure yourself doing five kegels a day? If that's a literal and accurate description of what happened ... I have no idea how that's possible. You must use those muscles at least that intensely just going about day-to-day activities

My muscles are pretty weak, which pairs badly with a small bladder- which was more the motivation to do it rather than the... other alleged benefits.

Based on my research I think it's a failure to adequately unclench that throws something out of whack in a most painful way.

It's like all other cases of overstrain. Did it very lightly. Felt it was working. Then a little more forcefully. Then I was a bit sore but it's not too bad so I decide to do it lightly and reassess the next day.

Next day? Pain

I genuinely don't understand how that can happen, and strongly suspect there's things that you either know but haven't said or don't know that are important to strategy here. I can't see a way of "doing five kegels" that could cause injury outside of a medical problem or some other bizzare situation.

How many steps do you take per day / how often do you walk, roughly? The best advice I can imagine outside of 'provide more information' is 'do more very light exercise across all muscle groups, go on walks more, don't ramp up at all because ramping up seems to cause issues', but that is very weird advice

I struggled for years with injuries every time I did strength training. I’d recommend yoga and starting real slow. I made more progress in six months than I had in four years of trying to strength train with lifting.

Plus I get euphoria too.

I made more progress in six months than I had in four years of trying to strength train with lifting.

The gym bro in me wants to say "how unfit are you fuckers?" That you made more progress doing yoga than lifting. That too in 1/8th the time.. That's kind of like saying "I got more tired swimming end to end on my swimming pool than swimming across the Atlantic Ocean".

  • Either you are some kind of genetic outlier where your body is that much more receptive to yoga., and that much less receptive to lifting.

  • Or, What you mean by "lifting" is very different from what most people mean.

  • Your diet,sleep and exercise is REALLY out of whack.

  • Your definition of progress is not the kind of progress lifting gets you.

  • Your hormones are fucked.

I'll volunteer, as a gym bro in good standing, that your definition of "Yoga" may be just as fucked. Yoga can be an incredibly physically challenging practice, isometric and leveraged poses and flows done correctly and intentionally can build a great body. It's pretty rare to see someone who builds their body purely through bodyweight and gymnastics training reach a similar degree of musculature as someone who uses weights today in the west, but it's very possible to do it. The barbell is just a simpler tool to provide necessary resistance compared to the skill and balance required to achieve a similar result with bodyweight.

who builds their body purely through bodyweight and gymnastics training reach a similar degree of musculature as someone who uses weights today in the west, but it's very possible to do it.

I don't think its an apples to apples comparison.

You would have to be in a much higher percentile of calisthenics (how many people do you know can do a muscle-up?) ability: relative to lifting ability to achieve the same amount of muscle mass.

Yoga can be an incredibly physically challenging practice, isometric and leveraged poses and flows done correctly and intentionally can build a great body.

I'm skeptical.

Headstands, handstands, frog stands, and all the other isometric poses in yoga are challenging (for an unfit person). But they are not very difficult to pull off. Not as difficult as even a 3-plate dead lift.

So those movements do build some muscle mass but don't hold a candle to weights when it somes to muscle/strength building.

This is anecdotal but, I am saying this as someone who spent a good portion of his teenage years physically upside down. I was very into "bboying" which is 100x more physically challenging than yoga. And no I wasn't into it for the dancing, I was into it for the cool athletic movements like flips, handstand hops, windmills, etc. And it still doesn't compare to lifting.

Embrace the dancing buddy. Glad to know there are two of us on here. Maybe three if @fivehourmarathon dances too? ;)

I did it for the flips and other athletic movements. I wanted to learn them and the only people willing to teach you those for free were the bboys, lol.

They were less pretentious as well, they would practice wherever there was grass on even sometimes on concrete. The gymnasts wouldn't do much outside of their bouncy gyms that required a hefty membership fee.

Why aren't you interested in dancing? It's pretty damn manly. Depending on your type of woman, it impresses much more than lifting heavy weights. (Assuming you're in decent shape ofc)

There are a lot of things you and I find inherently uninteresting even if they are great things to do and have so many benefits. For me dancing for the performance art is one of those things.

Actually, learning to dance is an unfulfilled new year's resolution for me, I've been trying to drag my wife to classes together all year. So if anything, I'm jealous. I feel like an inability to dance is a basic human failure for me.

Try West Cost Swing. It's a good starter dance and teaches you good connection. Too many people start trying to learn all the ballroom dances (waltz/foxtrot/tango/quickstep/east coast swing).

They quickly find that there is practically no social scene for any of the dances except tango and east coast swing. Other problem is that the way most of these classes teach you is NOT the way it's done socially, because they dumb it down for old people. Vast majority of dance studios just milk retirees who do endless back to back classes.

Go for a 6 week West Coast Swing dance series and try to find one that has at least middle aged folks in the class or teaching it.

Same goes for Latin like Salsa/Zouk/Bachata etc but in my experience leading is significantly harder, especially to learn as a first dance.

This is anecdotal but, I am saying this as someone who spent a good portion of his teenage years physically upside down. I was very into "bboying" which is 100x more physically challenging than yoga. And no I wasn't into it for the dancing, I was into it for the cool athletic movements like flips, handstand hops, windmills, etc. And it still doesn't compare to lifting.

Teenage boy develops muscle less efficiently than grown man, more at 11. But like, I'm curious, are you worried that you'll be mocked for dancing? Being a good dancer is probably a rarer skill among Motte-demographics than is deadlifting 3 plates! That's awesome! But muscle building is highly variable on modality; my arms get jacked when I climb a lot, other guys climb the same stuff and stay string beans.

But I think you're defining lifting as "intelligent power/barbell lifting" and yoga as "the common yoga studio." But I think the average guy who "lifts weights" is still doing something unbelievably dumb, when I find myself in a commercial or college gym I see very few guys actually pulling 315 from the floor. Somebody who follows Starting Strength religiously is going to be much stronger than somebody who goes to Intro to Power Yoga and spends half of it in child's pose; but I'd probably take a guy who can do planche push ups over a guy who screws around at Planet fatness once a week.

Your definition of progress is not the kind of progress lifting gets you.

This is probably the one you're looking for. I dealt with chronic pain issues for the better part of a decade, and every time I lifted I would just injure myself or make my issues worse. Chasing higher numbers only exacerbated my problem, as well as the consistent 'pushing' ethos of most people involved in lifting/strength training.

Doing yoga helped me understand that my main problem was I would tense my muscles and not recruit certain muscles while lifting. After I realized that and started practicing isolating muscles or learning more bodily awareness, I am far stronger than I can remember myself ever being. Using your muscles the right way helps a lot.

@Tanista mentioned injuring themself during a relatively like workout, which I've also struggled with, so I figured my experience may be relevant here.

Either you are some kind of genetic outlier where your body is that much more receptive to yoga., and that much less receptive to lifting.

I have had a couple doctors diagnose me with joint hypermobility but I think that's just one of a host of BS diagnoses for chronic pain issues that doesn't have a ton of backing in real science.

You got injured doing goddamn Kegels?! How is that even possible?

Not injuring yourself in the gym is pretty easy:

  1. warm up with 5 to 10 minutes of cardio

  2. Don't do weights close to your one-rep max

  3. Slowly increase your total weekly volume to give your tendons time to adjust

  4. Don't improvise in the gym, instead have a pre-planned routine with exact weights on an excel sheet that you stick to

  5. If you're doing complicated movement patterns like squats and deadlifts, make sure your form is correct

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