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Wellness Wednesday for March 1, 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'm 42 years old. Male. My weekly fitness regiment is

  • Madcow 5x5 (Mon/Wed/Fri). It's a barbell lifting program. Status is 280# squat (5 reps), 315# deadlift (5 reps), 165# bench (5 reps)

  • Cardio 5 1/2 hours/week. 80% Zone 2 training, 20% is VO2max training. Status: VO2max of 45. Can run about 6mph at Zone 2 for about 90 minutes, maybe more.

I trust that if I keep this up I'll continue to make strength and VO2max gains, though it's been kind of slow. It feels kind of impossible to make progress on getting my VO2max up.

If I had time to add something else in, what could I do to get biggest bang? Maybe something proven to really improve bone density? (My last DEXA showed a z-score of -1 on BMD)

Time is the biggest variable, and your body's tolerance/recovery for extra volume. I've had luck with adding significant volume of bodyweight and light(er) kettlebell work on a daily basis, but ymmv because it's highly variable and dependent on your body's unique issues. Building work capacity is good.

As far as things that will improve your other exercises, if you have a climbing gym close by adding one day of bouldering a week is going to do a lot to balance the push heavy powerlifts. After I started climbing I stopped having shoulder issues from pressing.

hmmm, not sure how much I want to update on advice from /u/FiveHourMarathon :P

How many warmup sets do you do on your lifts?