The Software Developer’s Guide to Fitness & Morning Productivity
etherealbits.com
etherealbits.com
So it's just 2+2 = 4 hours at gym, plus 0.5*5 = 2.5 more hours, plus the pushups that is very little time. Let's say 8 hours per week of time spent exercising, but the benefits are huge: it's easy to focus during the week staying sit down without any pain, bad feeling or alike.
Even after a day of doing many things I often reach home that I'm still pretty rested, and sometimes I add a few hours of work if I feel like there is some interesting problem to fix for Redis, or to write some doc, and so forth.
Btw in the previous years I used the treadmill as I do now, but I did not used to do the bigger workouts nor the pushups. I changed my schedule only 12 months ago adding the new stuff, and it's a totally game changer, apparently just running was not enough for me.
It does nothing, except maybe bad things, if you don't know the cause of the back issues.
all people should stay away from heavy deadlifts until they have mastered good form of course.
As an aside, GPs tend to give bad advice on all matters of sports medicine.
So yep, I'm convinced lifting heavy stuff is good for your back (IF you use good form, of course.)
Studies like this have shown that herniated discs and other types of damage once thought to be the cause of back pain are present in pain-free people with a high rate of incidence.
Further, it's not known what the tradeoffs are in terms of risking damage vs the benefits of increased strength.
I do think extra research is needed.
FWIW your definition of heavy and mine seem to be about the same: A weight the subject can lift with perfect form for a small number of reps, e.g. <= 5. With training, likely to be in the range of bodyweight x 2 and up.
It would be strange if having the strength to lift twice your bodyweight or more would somehow be necessary for a healthy back. There are safer ways of increasing strength of the weakened muscles, but first it would be good to identify whether indeed weakened muscles are the cause of one of the causes of your problem. That's all I am saying - deadlifting is not in general a safe recommendation for undiagnosed people with back issues.
Source: my GP when he told me I was basically fat. :)
There's been a good amount of research implying if not stating out right that an intense workout of more than an hour does more harm than good.
After about an hour you've burned most of the glycogen in your muscles and are just spinning your wheels (ie overworking your muscles rather than breaking them down to build them up).
This is an extremely generalizing statement. Could you please provide citation(s)?
For example the term "hitting the wall" used commonly among marathoners practically means depleting the glycogen. However this generally happens around the 2 hour mark (assuming no replacement during exercise).
Not all exercises are created equally. A walk in the park is a form of exercise and so is endurance running. Shall we just assume these are equally demanding and stop at the 1 hour mark regardless?
It hard to find specific articles on the internet though, but here's one that's talks in a general way about it, but doens't come out and say one hour. http://chriskresser.com/why-you-may-need-to-exercise-less
Here's another that graphs the cortisol response vs time, but doesn't link to the specific article. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drryan6.htm
Intensity is the key. 45-60 minutes of intense (as in you can only have labored conversations during this time) exercise is about all your body can handle at a time though.
I wish I could provide direct citations, but as I said in my other post it's been a while since I was reading the research and it took me weeks of reading to find key nuggets like that directly, mostly it's this article based on that article based on these 10 papers and only one directly comes out and says it.
“Get your heart rate up to your target zone and try to keep it up for 20-30 minutes. Pick a few exercises and do them in circuits with little or no rest between exercises (and a short rest between sets), at high intensity. Lean towards workouts that work large groups of muscles, for example doing push ups (or better yet, burpees) instead of bench press.”
There are a few problems with this advice:
1. The arbitrary goal of increasing your heart rate for 20-30 minutes completely ignores the most important question: what are you trying to accomplish?
2. Circuit training is only appropriate for particular goals. We shouldn’t be prescribing it without the proper context.
3. Implying that push ups or burpees are superior to the bench press, especially in the context of working large muscle groups, again ignores the question of what you are trying to accomplish. If we are talking about strength training in general, then the bench press is superior to push-ups and burpees are almost completely irrelevant. If we’re talking about calorie burning and conditioning, then burpees are superior. But again, without proper context and asking the right questions, this sort of advice isn’t particularly helpful.
Yes, do find a time where you know you can be consistent. I run daily and, having tried different schedules, I find that running at 11pm allows me to achieve very good consistency (I've ran 1,500 miles in the past two years and the last time I skipped a day was back in February and that was because I caught the flu.) One problem with running in the morning is that if you oversleep, you'll likely want to skip it.
In addition to finding the right schedule, I recommend living near a gym, as that will help you avoid making excuses to skip days. I live at a place where there's 24/7 access to the gym and that helped a lot.
Going for a jog every day doesn't cut it though, people need to change their diet as well. It's not about eating less but about eating right. Ramen every day for dinner is not good for you eat chicken with salad. Oreos for breakfast isn't good for you eat eggs or greek yogurt. Drinking soda isn't good for you drink water or milk.
You need to get rid of the instant pleasures to get the more lasting ones such as increased confidence, intelligence, and energy. Making the change is definitely worth it.
edit: You should also get a healthy amount of sleep (6-8 hours). Too many people think they can function on 5 hours when only a small percentage can work effectively with that much rest.
I also agree with the bit about protein consumption in the morning. It can be a simple smoothie, along with scrambled eggs & some almonds, or it could be one of those whey-enhanced protein shakes - either way, it'll keep you going in full steam till lunch time.
http://twit.tv/show/twit-live-specials/124
If you have a lot of energy problems during the day -- besides exercising, going completely very low carb is a good way to even out the post-carb crashes that plague lots of people like myself.
However with the gradual approach, you probably won't get that dramatic shedding of weight some people talk about. I don't care about that, personally, because I get enough satisfaction out of steady progress and make a game out of optimizing my diet with delicious yet low/moderate carb food.
http://twit.tv/show/dr-kikis-science-hour/135
And who couldn't use some more willpower?
Interestingly, another thing she mentions as having significant benifits is meditation. I've seen that anecdotally in successful people, as well.
As for exercise, it's very true that finding something that works for you is very important. Just to throw another idea out there: For me, I struggle to get full benefit out of going to a standard gym. What I've found works fantastically for me is going to a Crossfit gym in the morning. They're short, high intensity, varied, interesting workouts. Having a group of supportive people around you, and a skilled trainer has been invaluable. I've had great success (and fun) with this.
I've recently started swimming and love it. If you have access to a pool, I cannot recommend it enough. I'm also in the middle of the "100 Pushup Challenge."
Just remember that whatever you do, do it with drive and intensity or don't expect results. In much the same way that leaving a tab open on Codeacademy won't magically make you a better developer, loafing around in a gym won't get you the results you want. Especially if you're lifting: if you aren't sleeping enough, eating properly (moar protein!), and training hard, you won't see the progress you're capable of.
"do it with drive and intensity or don't expect results"
I made a pretty radical change in my diet and dropped 82 pounds. I think the first 70 or so came off in 6 months. It required some focus, but not a lot. I had done a lot of reading about habit, and was already professionally trained as a hypnotist, so I combined habits with hypnosis and made a fairly dramatic behavior change with pretty minimal effort.
Likewise, at the same time, I was going to the gym every day, but because I had a severe health issue, I was working out very, VERY gently. I was basically walking on a treadmill at 3 miles per hour for an hour every day. It's more active than not exercising at all, but I couldn't call it a "drive and intensity" situation.
I think this whole "drive and intensity" myth is the major problem with Hacker News as a community, in fact. I abandoned hacking entirely for almost a year, during which I just sold how-to videos and coaching on my blog. I made decent money and there was not a lot of drive or intensity involved there, either.
Drive and intensity can be great things, but I've definitely had a great number of experiences which point to them being inessential to success. I'm happy to go so far as to say that neither are of equal value to research, clarity, good logic, or sound strategy.
Intensity without drive. Working on something for 8 hours then forgetting about it for a week or more.
Drive without Intensity. Working on your project all the time, but never getting anywhere with it. (Always in planning/research, making it perfect, etc)
I'm active enough on enough fitness communities to see plenty of people make good-great progress on their own or ho-humming things. Compared to a completely sedentary lifestyle, ho-humming it will result in great progress.
Drive and intensity for something unproven (working on a side project, startup, etc) obviously yields unpredictable results. That's where the problem with HN is. But for something like exercise that has a long body of research and countless case studies, drive and intensity (provided proper form, nutrition, etc) only improves results.
I eat beans, fruit, and vegetables, and that's basically it. No starchy vegetables (i.e., potatoes, squash), and occasional nuts and seeds.
No meat, grains, salt, sugar, alcohol, or pretty much anything other than fruits, vegetables, and beans.
In addition to losing weight, I lost 100 points of cholesterol and also saw improvements in my blood pressure, my teeth, my skin, and other areas.
I went off it because I got bored, and I got all the weight back. I went back on it about a month ago and I've already lost 16 pounds or so.
Crash diets work for a few people, sure: people who have the self-control and determination to adjust to a normal diet following the crash period. But the vast majority of people they simply do not work. I'd have given you the benefit of the doubt before, but your past experience clearly puts you in the latter category. So why continue?
Who are you kidding? I stayed on it for a year and a half and then got bored. It wasn't a struggle, I just stopped making it a priority. It's a pretty gigantic leap from there to "clearly can't sustain."
"Crash diets work for a few people, sure"
It's not a crash diet. Re-read the pages I linked to, and the comments I made. I don't have time to continue this conversation but it's nothing personal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk#Lactose_intolerance
Besides that, if you ingest a protein shake and eat nothing for a few hours the toxic waste products of digesting the protein will stay in your bowels longer then with a richer meal.
And that is true, even if I only do it for 10 minutes in the morning.