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Wellness Wednesday for October 4, 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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and will be half-assing them

The point of HIIT and circuit type workouts is that the high intensity makes up for the lack of total volume and specificity. If you are going to half-ass them you would almost certainly be better off either:

  1. Adding an additional short walk in your day
  2. Extending one of your short walks to a long walk during the day
  3. Substituting one of your daily walks with actual high intensity intervals 2-3 times a week. On a fan bike, erg, ski erg etc. if you are worried about joint impact. Like so intense you feel like throwing up.
  4. Adding conventional resistance training of some sort.
  5. Some combination of the above.

For item 4, calisthenics might be okay for your application, but barbells and machines tend to scale better. Given your goals, preserving skeletal muscle should be included in your plan. Your body has no other source of stored amino-acids to preserve heart and other organ tissue during periods when you are fasted . If your goal is to look trim, developing some lats and delts will make your waist look proportionally smaller from the front and back. Developing your chest and glutes will make your waist look proportionally smaller in profile.

That kind of advice is simply intractable for me. I know what I will or won't do, and have tried going full hiit in the past, it just sucks and there's no mental reward for doing it. I don't get runner's highs or other forms of mental reward for working out. The best that will happen is people notice and compliment me.

Obviously the intent is to build up to full hiit intervals but I'm not going to do the insanity videos at their full schedule. I'm not going to pick up a pace or schedule that's more punishing than rewarding.

At any rate, thanks for the practical suggestions, I'll keep those in mind and see if they will fit my routine.