Exercise, Nutrition, WLS, and Cooking Q&A - 1/23/2014
Some good questions yesterday. Just keep in mind you don't have to wait to see this post to ask me questions I am always available, just PM me any time. You can also email me at [email protected]. This thread is good because anyone can chime in on the answer, but if you don't see it do not hesitate to reach out.
Let's Hear 'em!
Quite honestly I am not really much of a gadget guy when it comes to fitness equipment. My experience with it is that it is never as good as it looks on TV. That being said I think you can get very far with your body weight, a mat, and a good pair of running shoes. I guess I would ask what your longer term intentions with fitness are. If you are looking to lose fat and tone I think there are bunch of YouTube videos that you can watch in your living room and do that would get you all the way there. I think you could spend less than $100 on some dumbbells for muscle building and if you really wanted to do some serious muscle building I am sure you can find a used weight bench and set of weights on craigslist or your local classifieds for around $100.
Now if those exercises look like something you could really see yourself doing for the long run, that goes a very long way. I can tell you that doing pushups, situps, and body weight squats can get a little boring, so one of my keys to success when exercising is finding something you enjoy doing and make sure you do it as often as you can. So if these look like something you might like to do, then by all means. They lower end of those is not terribly expensive so I would start with that until it breaks before making the $1000 investment on the promodel.
Some other equipment you may want to consider are the TRX or SBT suspension training system. We use the SBT in our Orange Theory classes and at first I thought they were a bit of a joke but in a very short amount of time my stability and the muscle supporting that stability improved dramatically. The exercises with those are no joke. The TRX was developed by the navy seals I believe and you can go as easy or hard core as you like. Some resistance bands and some light dumbbells and a couple of kettlebells would be a good idea too.
Something else to think about as far as access to fitness equipment is that many times in rural areas the local high school or community colleges open up their facilities to the community, so that might be an option for you as well. Sometimes it is nice to be around other people working out.
I would say would would probably want to start with the first two or three sizes 6kg, 8kg, and 12kg. And it depends on the exercises you will start to do. Some will require lighter weight and some will require heavier weights. the 12kg is about 26.5 lbs and you would want to use that for kettlebell swings, so the lighter ones would be for curls, snatches, presses, etc. Also you can find kettlebells at like Target, Walmart, and Dicks that come in US standard weights so you will want like 5, 10, 15, 25lbs something like that. You will want one good heavy one for the swings and squats.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a prior post didn't you say that the calorie counters in gym equipment were inaccurate? Today I walked on the treadmill for 30 minutes averaging 137 BPM, 6% incline and 2.9 MPH. The calorie counter said that at my weight and age (261 lbs, 44 y/o) I burned about 300 calories. Does that sound realistic to you? Or is it way off? I try to get an idea of how many calories I've burned during a workout as it helps me decide my food intake for the day (I'm preop.) Thanks.
Yes and its not that they are inherently inaccurate, they are accurate for the information they can get. So you plug in your age and weight and it calculates what it thinks your max heart rate should be on average (male/female/short/tall/muscular/not muscular/etc), not necessarily what your actual max heart rate is. Then it uses the pulse from your hands to measure when you touch the heart rate monitors which is not as accurate as a heart rate monitor sitting right over your chest. Then if you take your hands off for a while and put them back on at some point (you could be going faster or slower than other times) it averages your heart rate over that time. So unless you held on to the heart rate handles or had a heart rate monitor on, the average heart rate it calculates for you is wrong closer to the end than the beginning. It also uses data from the machine to calculate effort, not just based on your physical effort. So if the treadmill thinks you went 3 miles and the average person's resting metabolic rate is x then your calories burned is y. The thing is you are not average, your max heart rate isn't what the machine thinks it should be, and chances are your heart rate wasn't captured correctly. If you want a more accurate (not exact) calculation of your calories burned it is worth investing in a heart rate monitor. I like the one that that Polar has that is bluetooth for the iPhone 5.
Now to answer your question, for 30 mins at 3mph, 137 is in the fat burn range I would say you are closer to 150-200 calories. I can also tell you that women burn far fewer calories than men, about half in fact. So factor that in too. I will give you an example of my calories burned this morning and I wear a heart rate monitor, look at the chart below:
In 54 mins I burned 543 calories. I am 5'10, 204lbs, 45 years old, muscular, my resting heart rate is around 60, my max heart rate is probably around 175. So you can see from the chart the first half of my workout was in the weight room doing circuit training and at the end it was followed by a row. This was moderate intensity work and lots of muscle. At the end of that I was at about 240 calories burned. The second half was sprinting on the treadmill starting with a 2:00 sprint, then 90, 75, 60, 45, 30 second sprints. My 2 min sprint was at 8mph, the other sprints were all at 10mph except my 30 sec which was at 12mph. So this is high intensity. You can see from the chart my heart rate drops pretty good. In this 30 mins I only burned 300 more calories. So I am not actually saying you didn't burn 300 calories, you have more body weight, if you are pre-op then your muscles are in development, you probably are actually burning more calories than I am during a workout, so you could be at 300, I am just saying there are a few more factors. I would recommend buying or borrowing a heart rate monitor to get an accurate picture then you can at least know how much to decrease (or maybe even increase) what the treadmill says you burned. At the end of the day you just want to make sure you are tired and sweaty, then you know it worked.
I think the woman who runs this site puts up a new meatball recipe about once a week, just about every flavor combination you can imagine:
http://www.ibreatheimhungry.com/portfolio/meatballs
Something I do from time to time is get some frozen turkey or beef meatballs, throw them in a sauce pan with some olive or refined coconut oil and brown them, then the flavor comes from sauce. I use some buffalo wing sauce on them or some low sugar pasta sauce. If I do pasta sauce I will throw some mozzerella on it too. I have tried to do a Thai peanut sauce which I still think would be good but my peanut sauce did not come out that great, need to find a good one.
