Hacker News Reader

Comment by echlebek | Hacker News Reader

That's great advice, but it's a pretty big task for someone who might not get a lot of exercise to do 2 hours of intense weightlifting. I lift regularly, and my gym sessions only take an hour.

The good news is that if you are sedentary, older, or sedentary and older, even a little bit of exercise will be extremely effective. Go for that long walk, or maybe a shorter jog, and do some pushups and un-weighted squats. You'll be exhausted, and you'll be less likely to injure yourself. :)

View on HN

I've been doing Stronglifts 5x5 for the last couple of weeks. You do 3 sessions of 30 minute duration a week.

30 minutes? How come? You take a at least 1.5 minute break between every set. So for 5 sets of first exercise that's 7.5 minutes assuming you don't take longer breaks and that you didn't do any warmup and just went straight for proper weights. Now add exercise itself and it's easily 9 minutes. Times three (again, assuming you don't take longer breaks which is really hard to do when you start hitting heavier weights) and it's 27 minutes. Add warmup and stretching and it's easily around 40 minutes. I think my fastest stronglift session was around 50-60 minutes. The longest was easily over 2 hours. When I started hitting squats with weights around 1.4 my body mass just warmups and proper sets were 50 minutes in itself. That was about 11 sets of squats with some breaks being 3-5 minutes ones.

I think six sets of warmup (for your 11 sets) are a bit too many. Three should be enough, and you don't need a real break between warmup sets. That should help cut down. Mehdi even recommends skipping breaks when switching exercises. Indeed, with 1.4 BW it will be tough. But that's what deweighs are for, and at that level, you'll be going into 3x5 soon.

Stronglifts is amazingly high impact for the time it takes.

If you didn't take a look at stronglifts, you should give a try. Actually, it's only one of a few beginner strength training (most focused to powerlifting, but you can mix with BB if you want to) available out there. I started lifting with stronglifts, today I do greyskull LP.

it's amazing there are fitness enthusiasts on the internet who still haven't heard of stronglifts.

also, i'm not sure if you're trolling us with your 11 sets of squats. are you serious? eleven sets?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com