Resistance Training Prescription for Muscle Function, Hypertrophy in Health
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov25 points by ultral 3 hours ago
25 points by ultral 3 hours ago
I have a few heavy kettlebells and dip bars in my room. I've never felt or looked better. I know many people out there get stuck on the "where am I gonna put a squat rack and barbells?!" hurdle. You don't need much!
I work out at home with dumbells, the one thing I miss vs a gym is some way to do lat pull downs. I can’t do a chin up and don’t feel like I’ve got a good way to work up to it.
I also don’t work legs super seriously, I have 2x75lb dumbells I use for squats and deadlifts, I could do more if I had heavier weights but that’s not a priority.
If you haven't tried single leg movements, that's the way to increase load on your legs when you don't have more weight available.
I managed to get down to 13% body from more than 25% with a single set of adjustable dumbbells that cost me $60. For the first time in my life I had visible abs. What pushed me was a single week of counting calories - I never realized how many extra calories I was consuming.
Boy do I hear that. I was mostly eating what was very healthy, but I'd throw in an apple here, some crackers there... it adds up so fast and grinds everything to a halt.
Or you can do simple calisthenics. Especially if you are beginner, save yourself time and money and do exercises like push ups and squats at home. When you progress on that go to outside gym which is also free and never crowded from my experience.
You know, I went through Darebee's "foundation" program, recommended for people with no idea what they're doing, on the theory that being in better shape would be nice.
https://darebee.com/programs/foundation-program.html
It has plenty of good points. But it's a miserable failure at letting you get into shape for the simple reason that it's a 30-day program with approximately 30 unique sets of daily exercises.
And Darebee seems to think of this as a strength! Variety, in their minds, will keep you interested in continuing with the program.
This incredibly misguided approach means that it's almost impossible to keep up the habit. Participating at all means that every day, you have to go find the program, find your current place, and look up whatever new exercises they've decided to introduce that day. Maybe those exercises will happen again two weeks later. Maybe not.
What I want is a set of exercises that I can memorize so that, if it becomes convenient to do some daily exercises during the day, I can do that without having to look up a schedule and then study what exactly I'm supposed to be doing. Working through the entire program left me completely unable to even repeat the same program.
I just can't understand where they got the idea that you need to be enticed into doing something most people consider unpleasant by imposing a lot of mandatory busywork every time you do decide to get on with it.
I'd rather recommend beginners check out r/bodyweightfitness' recommended routine
Congratulations! People definitely overestimate how difficult it is to start getting into gym and weightlifting. Pull-ups, push-ups, and crunches will get you 50% of the benefits with 1% of the effort. Adding on some additional weight from things like kettlebells is all you need then for your lower body. Gyms are nice when convenient but not at all necessary.
Won’t post the ChatGPT summary here, but if you’re obsessing over sets and reps and cadence, worth having a look