[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.

[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?

[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 :)