[health] Rock climbing builds muscle (pic!)

[mattbell]

I've been doing indoor rock-climbing as my primary form of exercise since mid-April, and it seems to have had a significant impact on my amount of muscle.  Since I started tracking my lean mass in mid-May, I've put on around 10 pounds, mostly muscle.  I've put on close to 20 pounds since I got back from my trip, (at which time people described me as rather emaciated).  Meanwhile, my girlfriend, who's been doing a fitness challenge, has dropped her body fat percentage by 6.5% while adding a few pounds of muscle. 



I wish I had a good "before" photo...  This is the closest I could find.  I look kind of emaciated in this one, which was taken about three months after I got back from my trip:

Comments

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

Cool!

I've been using a reverse pomodoro to get myself to exercise this past week. I'm using pomodoro to time my work, then I exercise during the 5 min break.

I'm primarily doing pushups. I try to do the "max convenient amount", i.e. about 50th percentile in terms of how exhausting it is for me. A week ago I was doing 10, and squeezing out the last 1 or 2. Today I was able to do 20 in less than a minute at each rep. So I end up with around 100 pushups per day, with only the 3rd rep getting harder. I think I can bring this to 100 per rep by the end of next week.

The rate of strength increasing has been surprisingly amazing! I think it's the fact that I do it "all day", but I'm not sure.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Make sure to not do it every day... your body needs time to heal if you're pushing yourself to the limit. Most sports trainers recommend strength workouts of any given muscle every 2-3 days.

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I reduce load every other day. I used to have a personal trainer who taught me how to do strength training, the thing is, with him every single rep had to be 100th percentile. I'm keeping it low on purpose, combining a "hard thing" (pushup), with a reasonable level of exhaustion. When I was doing the strength training with him, it would be *really* hard stuff, to maximal exhaustion, and then at least 2 days rest.

To summarize: yeah, taking it easy.

[mary-wroth.livejournal.com]

Hot!

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Is there something wrong in my brain that I find you SIGNIFICANTLY more attractive in the "before" picture? Not that I expect you to care about my opinion of your attractiveness. I just think it's weird that my brain is wired this way. It seems backwards. Muscles are evolutionarily advantageous so I should like them... shouldn't I?

[integreillumine.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the muscle... at least, it doesn't for me. I like the naturalness of the lower picture much better, thought the upper one looked more stilted; in any case, I think he has other pics that would show the compared differences better.

Also, M, the 6.5% bf is just during the challenge; I've had even more physical health-change since you got back from your trip. It's so great that I can share fitness-stuff with you! =)

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

You're right... the lower picture is better overall.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Nah, nothing wrong. It's good that not everyone is attracted to the same types of people -- this works out better for society as a whole because it lets more people find attractive mates. And hey, from an evolutionary perspective, if large muscles were a big evolutionary advantage then they'd be heavily selected for and everyone would have them. Instead we see a wide diversity of body types. Chances are that there's evolutionary pressure at a *societal* level for body type diversity within each society, as it's useful to have people of many different shapes to perform different jobs.

*I* personally don't like it when I can see my ribs sticking out as they do in the bottom photo, though, so I'm happy.

[catithat.livejournal.com]

I think you should do structured-light scans once a month in the same pose. After a while we can make cool movies of the changes :)

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

That would be fun. Then we could take my body and remap the 3d movie onto some flat surface and use it as the input for some geological simulation. Hills would appear out of nowhere, and rivers flowing off the mountaintops of my abs would end up as a lake in my belly button.