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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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 -
Unless you are focusing solely on powerlifting, it's generally a good idea to include a vertical press and upper body pull, probably a vertical and horizontal pull. So really at least five, probably six exercises. Bench honestly kind of sucks as an exercise, but everyone knows about it, so it's embarrassing to have a bad bench if you regularly lift weights. Weighted pushups and dips are probably better if you think you'll never get asked how much you bench.
The basic reasoning for free weight over machines is that to lift a free weight you have to control all six degrees of freedom, whereas for a machine you only have to control one. Squats also require you to practice loading the whole kinetic chain, rather than just the legs as in a leg press or leg extension. In terms of "functionality," that has much better carryover to general physical preparedness. Cables are somewhere in-between, but harder to load heavy enough to provide a near-maximal load for a healthy average-sized adult.
Machines sell memberships and do "work," especially for hypertrophy, but it's very rare to see someone get legitimately strong on only machines.
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