Fitness Report
Printed From: Tippmann Paintball
Category: News And Views
Forum Name: Thoughts and Opinions
Forum Description: Got something you need to say?
URL: http://www.tippmannsports.com/forum/wwf77a/forum_posts.asp?TID=188237
Printed Date: 07 September 2026 at 10:03am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Fitness Report
Posted By: Tolgak
Subject: Fitness Report
Date Posted: 01 May 2011 at 10:08pm
|
I tried to start a fitness challenge a while back and I sort of forgot about it. I know most of you don't care, but I am ecstatic to report: 4 months ago: 235 lbs 38 inch waist 3 consecutive pull-ups (palms in) 10 push-ups (bad form) Today: 210 lbs 33 inch waist 8 consecutive pull-ups (palms out) 25 consecutive push-ups (chest to the deck) This is mostly due to a smarter diet, a push up/pull up plan (started recently), and some sort of cardio every few days. I haven't lost weight in the past 6 weeks, but I've also been relatively sedentary due to some leg pain. I think I'll update again after a few months. ------------- 
|
Replies:
Posted By: benttwig33
Date Posted: 01 May 2011 at 10:31pm
|
I've been meaning to whip myself into shape as well. with school still going, im simply too busy to have begun just yet. Congrats, I would love to drop 25 pounds. ------------- Sig is WAY too big. |
Posted By: mbro
Date Posted: 01 May 2011 at 10:33pm
|
I've been running 4 or 5 miles a few times I week lately. I've dropped a few pounds. No idea how many since I don't actually own a scale or care all that much. ------------- 
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos. |
Posted By: agentwhale007
Date Posted: 10 May 2011 at 12:36pm
|
Pardon the bump from multiple pages ago. I decided that I would use this thread to describe what I've been doing. This is not to take away from Tolga's accomplishments. What he has done is quite impressive. About two months ago I decided that the lifestyle of food, sloth and stress that pretty much drove my undergraduate career really ought to be looked at now that I've got some time to relax and think about everything in my life. In high school I managed to keep my weight and health in check because I worked out three nights per-week, I ate pretty well at home, and life was, for the most part, stress-free. Then, undergrad. A compounding of working 16+ hour days at the newspaper, working four jobs at one point, being stressed about literally everything in my life, it all compounded into a pretty terrible lifestyle. I didn't eat very well, I didn't get much sleep, and exercise was non-existent. The food was one of the worst parts. My roommate at the time, bless her, was dating a culinary student who always left the kitchen in some state of disaster, meaning that I ate out pretty much every night. This lead to me hardly ever having groceries in the apartment. That, plus the fact that I wasn't getting out of work until anywhere between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., left the options for dining out somewhere between Steak N' Shake and Taco Bell. On the weekends I was too exhausted to cook anything, so I'd eat something microwaved and down it with beer and cigarettes to relax. Well, those days are now gone. Where I'm at now is comfortable, and I've got the next four years of my life locked down, so I figured I'd begin a change. That, and I'm working normal hours, so I can actually manage this. First and foremost I've been going to sleep at a regular hour and trying as hard as I can to get at least seven hours. Second, the diet. I've completely restructured the weekly routine, making it a routine. I work well with routines. The main goal in this diet is, mainly, better heart health, so low cholesterol, low salt, low fat. My family has a history of heart conditions, so that was the number one thing here. Firstly, I've converted to a quasi-vegetarian diet. I eat meat about two nights per week, and when I do eat meat, it's chicken, turkey, or fish. Always cooked in some homemade dish with low-fat and low-salt. I've put a really heavy emphasis on leafy greens, too. Salads are a mix of raw spinach and field greens, and I try to include some kind of cooked green into every meal, including kale, mustard greens, turnip greens, collards, etc. My week of dinners consists of:
Lunch (Always packed by me) has been reformed as well:
Breakfast has remained cereal and coffee. This has been harder to reform. I've also cut out pretty much every beverage that isn't water or coffee. Except for the occasional beer. So, no more regular sweet tea or soda. I've also started a bit of an exercise routine. This area has a fantastic bike path, so my roommate and I have begun biking about two or three times per week (Although she's having some knee problems). We can usually bike about 10 miles round-trip at a nice fast pace. We also live about a mile and a half from a grocery store, so we've started making a habit of fast-walking up to the store, buying the things we need for dinner, and fast-walking back. The plan is to eventually turn that into jogging, but I'm a bit self conscious about that, and have some knee problems myself. The exercise thing is what I know the least about, but so far, the focus on heart rate and cardio seems to be having some effect. I've noticed that when I walk up the stairs at work now, I don't get that winded, which has been a pleasant surprise. I know quite a few of you here are good at the workout thing, so suggestions are always open. One of the main things I've focused on throughout this whole experiment is not to weigh myself and get caught up on the number on the scale. Now that I think about it, I've not weighed myself a single time since I started. This is, for me, about living an overall more healthy life, not about a raw number of weight. I know that if I get caught up in the weight aspect of it, and I find that I don't lose anything or it seems to be slowing down, I'm going to get depressed about it and end up at the Chinese buffet crying into a plate of egg rolls. So yeah, that's been my life change during the past two months. I've loved every second of it, so far. Sorry to drop a mega word bomb on this thread. |
Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 10 May 2011 at 4:22pm
|
Congrats whale, that's pretty legit dude. Keep in mind that dietary fats, cholesterol, and even moderate sodium intake do not cause health problems in most, and that meats are not evil. Also, you could probably shave your beard and get a respectable haircut and lose 30 lbs in the process. http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html - http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html Good link. Read it, live by it, and you won't have to worry about not losing weight. The only people who don't lose weight on a weight loss program are those who do it wrong. Any questions you have, I'd be glad to help. I know a ton about this and have a lot of experience, fitness is my hobby and my life. ------------- <just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs> |
Posted By: agentwhale007
Date Posted: 10 May 2011 at 4:44pm
Why thank you!
Oh, for sure. The limiting of meat has nothing to do with any kind of extremist stance, it just helps me trick myself into eating healthier on the regular, essentially. I tend to want to have something like mashed potatoes with my grilled chicken, for example. The cholesterol and sodium are mostly just being avoided through not eating a lot of processed foods and no fast food. I know that if you drink a normal amount of water that sodium is essentially not a worry anyway, but high-sodium food just happens to also usually be high fat food. That and my family has a history of blood pressure issues along with heart problems.
Thanks for this. I read through it just now, and it has a lot of good stuff on the exercising thing. I really have no real knowledge about how to do any of that stuff. The extent of my exercise knowledge is that: 1) It only really works when you get your heart pumping enough to do any good, and . . . that's about it. Which is why my exercise so far consists of biking until winded, then keep going, and power-walking until winded, then keep going. So the info on that kind of thing is appreciated. I'm mostly sticking to cardio stuff for now until I have the means and ability to actually learn what the hell I am doing with weights. Except for the 2lb weights that you can put a Wiimote in. Wussy, I know, but that plus the NFL Training Camp game is something. |
carl_the_sniper wrote:Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 10 May 2011 at 8:48pm
|
For Weights: Any friends who work out and look like they know what they are doing? If not, look into etting a personal trainer who looks like they know what they are doing to give you a single lesson on how to do the big lifts properly (deadlifts, squats, bench press, overhead press, rows, etc...) Be careful because 90% of personal trainers are complete crap but if you get a good one, they can show you the basics in a single session which would not be expensive and would pay off in the long run. Don't get suckered into buying their supplements or more training. If all else fails, watch youtube videos on good form and ask someone who looks like they know what they are doing to critique your form. Most people will have no problem spending 5 minutes of their life to help a new guy out. Learn to work out properly from the beginning and you are already ahead of half of the gym who has been working out for years. That being said: If your goals are more towards general health than pure weight loss, It is my opinion that you should exercise in whatever way is most fun for you as long as it is done with good intensity. Biking is a great way to get or stay in shape if that is what you enjoy. It is obvious that you are seeing the results of a better lifestyle already. As you continue to better yourself and make yourself healthier, you will start to wonder how you ever lived the way that you did before. I do. Keep it up. ------------- <just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs> |
Posted By: Dazed
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 10:10am
| I think you might like "The Four Hour Body" by Tim Ferriss, Whale. His diet is unconventional, but works. His writing is good, and the book is more about "body hacking" than just dieting. Lots of good info and fun to read. |
Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 10:44am
|
Looked it up. Some of the promises made by the book are horrendous and impossible. Gain 34 lbs of muscle in 28 days? Lose 20lbs in 30 days with no exercise? Low carb diets and using ice to lose weight? SPOT REDUCTION? No offense. It's just that the thing about nutrition and fitness is that all the best advice is available free online. And generally, the more you pay, the less effective advice/product you get. ------------- <just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs> |
Posted By: Dazed
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:00am
|
It's completely non traditional, and mostly based on bobybuilding techniques. You should give it a read before decrying it too much. A guy I work with is having pretty good luck with the diet. He hit 16 lbs. in a month, he also tried to start his workout during the third week of the diet and his weight loss plateaued that week.
The guy freely admits that he's doing things outside the norm and completely not recommended by doctors today. |
Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:19am
Pretty much everything I read there is super traditional. In a bad way. I looked at their site at the topics covered. Did not look good. Note that the vast majority of that 16 lbs was probably initial waterweight. When I started my current cut last month, I lost the first 10 lbs in under two days. It was waterweight. If his weight loss plateaued by starting to exercise, he is doing something wrong. I don't want to sound like a jerk. But the majority of fitness advice/products out there is/are a bunch of crap designed to convince people who don't know much about fitness that there are "mystical secrets" to losing weight that only fit people know. This is not true. ------------- <just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs> |
Posted By: Hairball!!!
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:19am
Check bicycle fit, namely saddle height. I see quite a few more casual cyclists with way too little seatpost showing, and that'll jack up your knees in a hurry.
Throw a basket or a rack on that bicycle, or get a nice big bag that works well on the bike, and make that ride every so often. A short spin like that would do wonders to loosen up stiff or sore legs and is just as fast as driving. Bicycle commuting is quite an eye opener. You'll appreciate your area more by discovering new details and views of routes you normally drive. Sharing the road with cars and trucks will make you a better, more attentive, and more reasonable driver. Fitness-wise, relatively low joint impact, and setting your own pace means you can cruise just to get somewhere or make it an intense A to B blast. Upkeep from wear and tear on a bicycle is much less than a car, and you don't have to buy or burn gas. |
Posted By: FreeEnterprise
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:19am
|
Good job Whale, nothing better than setting goals and going for it.
For your roommate with her knee problems, her bike may be set improperly causing knee pain. The seat to pedal position and handle bar height is critical to not stressing your knees when biking.
Getting it adjusted correctly can immediately eliminate knee pain. You want to be over the seat with your leg going almost all the way to down at the bottom stroke of the pedal cycle. (not locked, but only slightly bent)
Most girls ride with their seat WAY too low, which means that when fully "extended" they still have a huge bend in their leg. Which causes way more stress on the knee, and pain.
Also, many people use way to high a gear before they are ready, it should be easy to pedal when starting out. If you are cranking really hard, you are doing it wrong, and it will cause added stress to your joints.
Best tip I can give is take a picture of her from the side riding her bike with her leg "down". Then I can tell you exactly what needs to be adjusted to lessen stress on her knees. ------------- They tremble at my name... 
|
Posted By: agentwhale007
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:20am
|
Oh, another point: I've started taking a multivitamin. Just the basic Centrum one. Pretty much every doctor I've asked has said that unless I have a noticeable deficiency in one area, just a standard cover-all multivitamin will do what I want it to do instead of trying to mix-match things. Except it makes the ol' peepee green. Which is always a pleasant surprise when I forget that vitamins can do that. And I've not quite cut beer out. That's one thing I'll probably latch on to. I just usually keep the beer to one or two nights a week. Or, at least having more than one beer at a time is limited. |
Posted By: agentwhale007
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:31am
Actually, yeah. My dad used to do competitve power-lifting and Olympic weight lifting for about thirty years. Maybe when I get back to Florida I'll ask him to show me how that stuff works.
She's got a basket on her bike. We occasionally load up a salad and bike to the park and picnic. I like the walk to the store instead of biking because it gives me a reason to speedy walk. It's easier for me to get my heart rate up speedy walking than biking. I also would love to bike to work but I sweat a lot, and I don't think it would be appreciated.
Yeah, she rides low on her bike. It's a beach cruiser brought up from Florida, so it's sort of spent its life as a comfort thing and not an exercise thing. She went to a doctor yesterday and was diagnosed with "Patellofemoral pain syndrome." They gave her a brace and told her to work on strengthening her quadriceps. |
Posted By: Dazed
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 11:45am
I understand that there isn't a magic pill. So does this guy, he's been working out for 20something years. Half marathons, weights three days a week while running 3 other days a week, minor roids before the "roids are bad" days. He's also a nerd and a hacker, and says lots of this works and is basically body hacking. Maybe not as good as advertised (but who doesn't advertise their best instead of their average?) but its working. Is it for everyone? Probably not. You seem to be as fundamentalist as they come and angry at anyone trying anything else. It probably isn't for you. I think that Whale, however, would like the writing style and find some of the addtional info in the book to be interesting. The diet is also fairly close to what he's doing (a lot more protein though) and agrees with the "splurge days" he's doing. |
Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 12:06pm
Mine makes it neon yellow. Not that you necessarily need a multivitamin. But it's not a bad thing to take either. I currently take a more expensive athlete's multivitamin but will be switching to a mainstream cheaper one for the exact reason that you stated. Fish oil and vitamin D are a good call too.
No offense and though your friend may know his stuff, there are a lot of people who do the exact same thing as him and have no clue what they are talking about. I will leave it at that as I don't know your friend. Not fundamentalist or angry at all at this. However, when the contents of the book and methodology presented on the website uses principles that were proven wrong in scientific study years ago, I don't need to read the book to know that it is wrong. I'm not saying it's all crap. But why pay for something when you could get better advice for free online? And every decent nutritional plan calls for high protein, most call for splurge days also but that is mostly to satisfy your random cravings and keep you from going insane. ------------- <just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs> |
Posted By: mbro
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 1:21pm
|
http://toughmudder.com/events/wisconsin/devils-hea-course-map-2011/ - I signed up for this, it should be awful and I should be in pretty good shape by the time it's done. -------------
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos. |
Posted By: GroupB
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 1:42pm
Mbro, that course is impossible to finish. ------------- 
|
Posted By: ArthurBignose
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 3:02pm
|
Everything you could possibly need to know about weight lifting, dieting, and exercise: http://scoobysworkshop.com/ - http://scoobysworkshop.com/ ------------- |
Posted By: GroupB
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 3:34pm
|
http://goonlifter.wikispaces.com/ - http://goonlifter.wikispaces.com has some good stuff as well. Also, for a killer calf/cardio workout, buy a pair of FiveFingers and run in them. It's amazing. -------------
|
Posted By: Reb Cpl
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 4:34pm
|
I just started running again- literally yesterday. I'm not looking to do anything more than drop a few pounds and get my heart back into a shape where climbing a few mountains in the Adirondacks this summer won't kill me. There's a small lake (Big pond?) at a park right near our apartment. I'm doing three laps around it- run, walk, run, at the moment. I could do more, and could eliminate the walk lap- but I've been months without doing much at all. I figure I'll keep it nice and slow for now, and work my way up to something where I can measure progress. I've got until next feb. to be in decent shape for a wedding I'm going to in Hawaii. (See my newest thread.) ------------- ? |
Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 5:56pm
|
Sounds wicked fun. Good luck. LOLWUT live wires?
Oh god no. Scooby is the worst.
Awesome, keep it up! As long you are doing it at a level that is intense for you, you are doing good. Taking it slow at first is a good plan.
Looks like a good link. Didn't get too far into the nutritional part but looks pretty legit from what I saw. The programs listed are all excellent. Fivefingers look interesting and I have friends who have them and love them. Most of what I have read on them has been oddly mixed, with some information calling them amazing for injury prevention, and other info calling them bad for you. Unsure what to think myself, may go try on a pair sometime. ------------- <just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs> |
Posted By: agentwhale007
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 6:04pm
| I clicked the Scooby link and saw the guy on the front page and closed the tab. |
Posted By: GroupB
Date Posted: 11 May 2011 at 6:09pm
|
Because the five fingers have zero padding, you have to modify your stride for them to be beneficial. If you keep running heal-toe in them, you will tear everything up quicker. If you run on the balls of your feet, it takes a lot of strain off of your knees and hips. -------------
|
Posted By: stratoaxe
Date Posted: 12 May 2011 at 1:47am
|
Must be get into shape year I've dropped from nearly 220 to 190, from 36 inch waist back to 33, but realy just be switching from the Bowflex to actual weights and incorporating jogging instead of my exercise bike.
The jogging is great, I think as far losing weight it's done me a world of good. The weights WERE going good, I could see huge improvements in both mass and tone, but I keep losing workout buddies to schedules and girlfriends, and I moved my weight set over to my neighbor's garage so he could spot me and now he's never home.
Sooo...it's been a coupl of weeks since i've done weights, and now the Bowflex seems pointlessly inadequate. So improvement I guess, with the exception of being horribly unreliable.
I think I may have to suck up my gym-phobia and get a membership. I'm someone who values a set workout schedule, and trying to do it with friends is murdering me. ------------- 
|
Posted By: pntbl freak
Date Posted: 12 May 2011 at 4:08am
|
My new apartment gives you a gym membership. I hope I actually use it...
-------------  |
Posted By: ArthurBignose
Date Posted: 12 May 2011 at 6:47am
The thing with Scooby is he tends to be very unrealistic in his expectations of how willing people are to work and eat right. However, all of his recommendations are for common sense stuff and the biggest thing stressed is proper form for everything and knowing your limitations. Slow and relaxed, with good technique is the way you do anything, especially exercising. A lot of what he goes into is showing what not to do by making fun of guys who don't have proper technique. That's what the picture on the front page was. As a qualifier, I dropped 65lbs and body fat from 26 to 12% from March-December last year by just running, lifting, and eating kind of right. I basically followed a good majority of the things Scooby recommends. ------------- |
Posted By: Reb Cpl
Date Posted: 13 May 2011 at 6:52am
|
I bumped up my run this morning- I did the two run laps around the lake with no walk in between, and I feel awesome. Took a break yesterday, after two days out of the box following months of being sedentary, the muscles needed time to recover. This morning, they didnt feel like my legs at all. (in a good way) I expected results, but not 3 days in. Certainly is incentive to keep at it. Looking to add another lap or two next week. I haven't even measured the distance of each lap yet. It doesn't matter yet. I figure if I KNOW that 'x' number of laps = a mile or two, I'm more apt to push myself beyond reasonable limits to reach some kind of milestone, and possibly get hurt. I'm also more likely to be bummed out if i miss the mark. For now, I'll keep the unmeasured distance. ------------- ? |
Posted By: agentwhale007
Date Posted: 13 May 2011 at 10:40am
| If you play "Eye of the Tiger" on loop while you run, you cannot get injured. This is fact. Science. |
Posted By: usafpilot07
Date Posted: 13 May 2011 at 12:43pm
|
If anyone needs/wants some more simple advice or just some easy routines to do in the weight room, feel free to pm me. A lot of sites will over-complicate things and you don't always need that when you're just starting out. Also, I've put this up here before, but anyone looking to making a healthy life-style change that doesn't want to get sucked into one diet or another, I'd really suggest using myfitnesspal.com or one of their smartphone/ipod apps. Tracking your calories in a way you can look at it per item can really help you out in the long run, and will help form healthy habits pretty quickly. ------------- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo |
Posted By: Tolgak
Date Posted: 13 May 2011 at 10:23pm
|
I'm now 205! -------------
|
Posted By: Koolit32
Date Posted: 13 May 2011 at 11:30pm
|
I must say guys, I am impressed and feeling motivated again. About 6 months back I pretty much quit working out after a solid 6 months of 5 days a week training. You know how it goes, small injury kept me from it for a bit, got a girlfriend, stopped altogether. I had lost about 50-60lbs in that time, but I still felt like I had a long way to go. Now I'm back to my nasty soda and pizza habits, and I've put probably 25lbs back on due to inactivity. I'm itching to get started again though, I'm off of school for the summer. What's made it hard to get back into it was doing school full time and working 50 hours a week. Now that school's cut out, it doesn't feel like such an epic chore to get started again.
|
Posted By: GroupB
Date Posted: 13 May 2011 at 11:34pm
|
if 5/week is burning you out, I'd cut back to 4 or even 3 days. Less per week for more weeks will be healthier for you than more per week for fewer weeks. -------------
|