It takes 6 - 12 months to change your body. | Hacker News Reader

It takes 6 - 12 months to change your body.

nytimes.com

3 pointsAndrewWarner9 comments

Another important note: fitness goes away much faster than you gain it. After six months of twice-daily training (cardio in the morning, power lifting at night) I was in amazing shape. Then I stopped. It only took three months for me to lose approximately 50% of my strength.

Now I'm "back on the wagon" so speak, going to the gym daily (though only once) and it is very slow going to gain my strength back. I lost 40-80+ pounds on every lift and much of my stamina as well. It is very demoralizing, so I recommend that if you can get into a regular exercise habit, for god sakes, stick with it! It is so much harder to form the habit than it is to break it so you must be very vigilant.

As an added bonus tip, anybody who tells you that going to the gym "a few days a week" is always enough because of muscle fatigue and so forth is an idiot. Segregating muscle groups properly and using the bare minimum of supplements allows you to go at least every day. Personally, I feel as if once a day isn't enough to accomplish much of anything as I am forced to split my days between weight lifting and cardio to achieve any sort of balance.

Edit: replace "every day" with "6 days a week"; a day of rest goes a long way.

Segregating muscle groups properly and using the bare minimum of supplements allows you to go at least every day.

I'm not convinced by that; if you are going heavy on major compound exercises (e.g. squat and deadlift) you will need CNS recovery at the very least. Right now my programme looks like weights day, light cardio day, heavy cardio day, repeat, rest day, back to beginning. That's only 2 weights days a week but believe me, that's plenty.

If you only have two lifting days per week, going heavy on compound exercises makes sense. Also, presumably, you're working a greater number of muscle groups per day which requires more recovery time, especially if you're doing low-weight, high-rep work. I avoided compound exercises (other than deadlifts on Back day) and was doing high-weight, low-rep, not to mention the fact that having 6 days over which to spread out muscle groups helps substantially.

Combined with a high-calorie (balanced) diet and supplements, I was able to make consistent gains week-over-week for the life of the program. In the beginning it was more difficult as my body wasn't used to the work, but as time went on it got to the point where I was fully recovered in the areas I needed to be to complete the day's routine with more weight than the previous week's iteration (each day was a separate routine).

My weights day 1 is squat, leg press, calf extension, leg extension + whatever else I feel like - sets of 5x5 or 3x8. Weights day 2 is deadlift, pull-ups, t-bar/bent over rows + whatever else I feel like. Pressups on cardio days.

I plan to stick with this 'til the end of February then adapt it to prepare for a Marathon in May.

Right. See, that's an insane volume (number of sets per body type) and a really high total number of reps. You're doing 125 reps per workout at a minimum! It should be noted that even advanced trainers only have a volume of about 4-6 sets per body part, whereas you're doing 15-20 on legs alone (press/calf-ext/leg-ext + squat).

Since you're preparing for a marathon it seems to make sense to focus on lower-body and mainstay complex exercises (squat/deadlift), but I am unfamiliar with that specific sort of training so I can only speculate.

As mentioned, you seem to have an exceedingly high volume, especially considering the narrow focus of your exercises (at least one day 1). Your rep count (5) suggests a focus on raw strength, but the set count (5) is more common for endurance.

I'm driving my squats through the heel, so it's much more of a posterior-chain exercise and doesn't really hit my quads or calves much. If I was training like a bodybuilder with a raised heel, I'd switch the leg extensions for leg curls.

My objective right now is to improve core strength and relative strength, then in the 3 months leading up to the Marathon to shift a bit more towards power-endurance (e.g. Tabata, Fartlek, weekly long run). Previously on half-marathons I've really lost my form towards the end, that's just wasting energy needlessly, especially on cross-country. This time I'm going to keep it tight all the way.

I'm suspicious about the experiment. How did they verify the subjects exercised the proper amount? How can you tell that I'm giving something "my best effort?" Seems kind of impossible.

In my opinion they proved that random subjects cannot stick to an exercise regiment assigned to them by researchers...

The real numbers are: you can lose 1-2lbs of fat a week. You can gain 10-15lbs of muscle a year. And that's if you do everything right: train hard, get enough sleep, eat right. Even 12 months is optimistic if you have a lot of damage to undo.

Anyone hoping for a drastic change withing a month or two needs to focus more on diet than exercise routine. There are so many misconceptions involving working out and weight loss & muscle definition. It's borderline depressing.

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