youtu.be
This might be useful for your hip mobility
5 Minute Hip Mobility Routine (THIS WORKS!)
Here's a step-by-step routine to improve hip mobility that takes 5 minutes!Get my book on fixing injury here: https://www.amazon.com/Rebuilding-Milo-Foundati...
Bands are a great investment. Good for rehab when you need, and you can do a good amount of upper body work with them too. Easy to travel with also. I'm not saying it's a replacement for free weights or machines though, and certainly not for lower body. And they're cheap. Bodylastics bands or Sunpower loop bands were the best options when I went looking, so that's $50-$75.
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Bands are a great investment. Good for rehab when you need, and you can do a good amount of upper body work with them too. Easy to travel with also. I'm not saying it's a replacement for free weights or machines though, and certainly not for lower body. And they're cheap. Bodylastics bands or Sunpower loop bands were the best options when I went looking, so that's $50-$75.
Re hip mobility, there's a vid below. If you think you have a specific issue, I usually start with Bob & Brad on YT, then when looking elsewhere I'll look for commonalities between multiple sources.
I think you'll get benefit from the yoga cobra pose, and bird dog. Also planks. Do these most days.
Look into your seat quality if you sit a lot, and get up to walk around more often.
You mentioned you lift, does this include anything for hip hinges and spinal erectors? I would suggest the RDL. Start light ofc. Do movements like this and cobra slowly, and if you have any acute pain stop immediately. While it's important to work on the core, be careful, many abs focused moves can put a lot of stress on the lower back. Another good one is reverse hypers, which you can do on a firm bed or table, lay upper body on surface and raise legs from floor to parallel.
If you're doing squats, check your form to make sure no butt wink. If you're doing heavy deadlift, you don't need to heavy deadlift.
I recall someone telling me they swear by this routine. YMMV.
Hip Mobility to Fix Lower Back Pain
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Congrats on your journey, sounds like it's going well. That part above though isn't accurate. MFP is a tool to track your calories. You can use it to lose weight, recomp/maingain, or gain weight. The user chooses their desired goals and macros. You can track progress there by entering your weight, and also your waist and hip measurements if you want to. Ultimately, if you're doing a recomp/maingain, it's up to you to track your own progress with the lifting, and track your fat loss with measurements, pictures or other means, which again some of which can be entered into MFP. In the MFP forums, there are plenty of people talking about recomp, and some talking about body building and weight gain.
How are you doing bicep curls? Barbell, EZ, db? If barbell, the wrist flexion needed may be an issue, especially if you're gripping really hard. I would never do barbell curl, the angle doesn't work for my wrists. How many reps with strict form, or in other words, are you lifting too heavy? If you are, go lighter with more reps. You should also do specific forearm work several times a week, e.g. with a light weight and lower arm flat on the bench, use your wrist to raise and lower a light db, pronated then supinated, or pronated to supinated. Dead hangs are good too, also good for grip strength. And while doing this, find a biceps movement that doesn't cause a flare-up. Maybe spider curls?
I only do dumbbells and a whole range of different variations. I've definitely been upping the weight, and I think I usually manage around 8-10 in, I think, good form. Funnily enough it actually really started to flare up for the first time last week when I wasn't really feeling it and dropped the weight and do more reps. Maybe messing up the form a bit as I was already slacking off?
Yeah, bottom line is your forearm is probably working too hard, and you mentioned you've been upping the weight, so some combo of wrist flexion, too much grip, too heavy weight (e.g. are those 8-10 reps with good form or with body swings to help), and probably no direct forearm work. Giving the tendons a rest with the suggestions I gave, and doing some forearm specific work, will hopefully have you feeling better in a couple of weeks. Then you can ditch the forearm rehab like we all do unless it happens again :-)
I just noticed right now that Waist, Hip and Neck are default, and you can add other measurements too of your own. And then you can view your history, see a graph, etc.
In the app (Android) via main menu, Progress, click on Weight to switch to other measurements. I don't see where to add a custom one though.
Good luck.
I am competing as a lightweight strongman this time. So I have to weigh in 181lbs or under. I got done cutting 45lbs 3 weeks ago, so I am just maintaining at 178 til weigh in day. When I do my competition in October, I will be competing as middleweight (181-220), so my eating will be bigger. Diet is much closer to the stereotypical gym bro diet right now. Before was eat what I want to get bigger, which stopped working very well at some point.
Yeah I think that's way too extreme. That's 14 weeks. 2 pounds per week would be a realistic target, and even that won't be easy. It sounds like you've had some difficulty keeping up with regular exercise and/or diet habits? That's all the more reason to set realistic goals, to set yourself up for success.
Good luck. I'd offer just two bits of advice there, if you don't mind my 2c. Whatever you're doing needs to be sustainable. 4 pounds out of 250, or even 210 once you get there, is a very substantial calorie deficit. Don't set yourself up to fail. Secondly, the faster you lose, the more likely you are to lose more muscle with it. Frequenting lifting plus adequate protein will only help so far with a very large deficit.
Hey, it's great that you're going. Try not to worry about how you look at the gym. Everyone has been there, and nobody is thinking bad of you. If anything, some might want to help out with form tips but are worried they'll get snapped at in response.
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Yes, fly's. If I had access to cables, I would 100% do those with cables than db's. a) Much better tension curve. b) Less risk of shoulder injury.
As well as being confirmed by studies, it's common sense right? I mean say you're more of an intermediate lifter, aiming for at least 15 working sets per week. If you do 15 in one workout, well that's really getting into junk volume after about 10 sets, with diminishing returns for each set after. And then after you're recovered a few days later and ready to go again, you... don't. OTOH, someone else who does 5 hard working sets one day, then again 2-3 days later, then again 2-3 days later, you would expect that to be better for muscle growth, right? And it is.
Sounds like Upper/Lower would work for you, assuming you aren't going to do something like Starting Strength. So chest and back one workout, 5-6 sets total for each, and legs the next workout with optional arms/shoulders. However, if it has been several days, and you don't expect to be back again for several days, do full body that time, so pick one exercise per part and do about 3-5 working sets for chest, back, quads, hams.
I am sure my wrists would hurt doing curls with the barbell, and it's not because of the weight, which btw is about 45 pounds which isn't what I'd call light weight for a beginner. Wrist pain with that movement is not uncommon. The EZ-bar is far kinder on the wrists, and you get the same curl movement to target the biceps. It will be about half the weight of the barbell btw. Or use dumbbells.
No offense, but if I was to compile a list of mistaken beliefs that could hold someone back in improving their physical fitness, you'd have ticked off basically all of them.
I think a lot of people need to read this. Great post!
An Olympic barbell is 45 pounds. If it was about 7ft long it was surely that. Maybe it was kg you saw, or maybe it was a shorter bar.
Because your body gets much bigger signals to grow from working the biggest muscles (via compound exercises) than doing bicep curls. For example strongmen have huge arms, and do you think they ever do a single biceps curl?
Yes, with a focus on compounds first. Don't waste your time doing bicep curls until after your compounds are done, if at all. Track your progress. I use Google Sheets. Progressive overload.
You don't need to do deadlifts if you don't want to. And if you did, once per week is enough. You can do perfectly fine with machines and cables, and within that category I include machines that are plate loaded, like leg press, hack squat, chest supported row, etc.
Glad to hear it, it was pretty late when I wrote that. Basically there are a lot of popular misonceptions out there about fitness training, and a lot of these are/were pushed by gyms, equipment manufacturers, magazines etc because as a business model you want to have something new to sell. That's not to say that every new machine or routine or supplement etc is worthless, but the average person often isn't given context on how to effectively utilise them, or what the basis of most of their efforts should be given their needs/goals. So we end up with a lot of less useful advice floating around.
Interesting. Could you increase volume that way? If you got the same volume on the press, and doing fly's first instead of second led to more reps on those.
