Booey
I'm 230, 5'10". I've read that running's impact on feet and ankles could lead to an injury cause I'm a tad big. Should I do cycling? Perhaps a stationary bike? I'm looking to join a YMCA so I can get my weight down.
Answer
Walking and swimming are good places to start. You can assess where you are and move to more demanding exercises as you are able. Here are some ideas on how to improve fitness.
First, for all of the "quick and easy" weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is, particularly if you have to pay for it.
On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common questions amount to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.
Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.
There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.
The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.
Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.
To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.
For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.
Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.
There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.
If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.
Aloha
Walking and swimming are good places to start. You can assess where you are and move to more demanding exercises as you are able. Here are some ideas on how to improve fitness.
First, for all of the "quick and easy" weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is, particularly if you have to pay for it.
On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common questions amount to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.
Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.
There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.
The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.
Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.
To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.
For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.
Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.
There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.
If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.
Aloha
Wal-Mart mountain bikes?
Jessie
I keep hearing repeatedly that one should stay as far away from Wal-Mart as possible when buying a bike because it will be nothing but a piece of junk. What I want to know is, what is so horrible about them?
I ask because I don't have much to spend. Under no circumstances will I ever race. Nor will I actually bike on mountains or super rocky terrain. I just want a bike that is okay to ride on unpaved surfaces in case the opportunity ever comes up to ride off-road...but any trail I tackle is going to be pretty tame. There are no actual mountains around here.
So, if I just want a bike for a fun way to enjoy the outdoors and get a little exercise, why is a $200 Wal-Mart bike so aweful? They are not too heavy...aluminum. Why does everyone keep telling me that it is a complete waste of money and I have to go spend $400 (minimum) at a specialized bike shop? I mean, I'm not looking to go pro afterall....just fun.
Answer
Reasons to avoid a wal-mart or target bike.
1.) they are alot heavier than decent bikes
2.) this is probably the biggest one. They are not assembled or inspected by a bike tech. They are assembled in mass by someone trying to slap as many together per hour as possible to make their boss happy. They are the same minimum wage workers who clean up the bathroom or fold t-shirts. They have no proper training for truing wheels, adjusting derailleurs, or setting up the brakes. It is a total safety hazard.
3.) The quality of the product is very low at target. The frame is whatever, its heavy but its not going to break, same with the shocks. The real difference between a decent bike and a walmart bike is in the shifter components. Cheap shifters are hard to adjust properly and very fickle when it comes to staying properly adjusted. Combine this with the fact that they're not being assembled by a real bike tech and you have a problem 9 times out of 10.
4.) Add ~35 bucks to the cost of any bike from wal-mart because you will most likely have to get it serviced at a bike shop to get it to work properly.
5.) cheap bikes that are set up poorly from the get go will have more problems over the life of the bike. Either you will spend more money getting them fixed (think around 20 a visit) OR you will get frustrated and leave the bike to sit in the garage. Then you've just wasted $200. This is probably the most common thing. People buy cheap bikes, they break, then they get frustrated and just give up.
Heres a compromise. You don't have to spend 400 bucks to get a decent bike! Heck, if you're too intimidated by a real bike shop you don't even have to go there.
Not everyone here will agree with me, but I used to work at a sporting goods store (Di*ks) and can tell you then sell a range of bikes, from almost wal-mart level up to $2000 bikes. You can get a quality bike from a sporting goods store, assembled by a competent mechanic for less than you would pay at a bike shop. Our cheapest quality bike at dicks was ~230 dollars, but 299 was the absolute best bang for your buck. You got quality shimano trigger shifters (not the garbage grip shifters that come with a cheaper bike) double wall rims (less maintenance) and a lifetime warranty on the product. In case you want the models, for women it would be the diamondback Lustre 1 and the Lustre 2.
Reasons to avoid a wal-mart or target bike.
1.) they are alot heavier than decent bikes
2.) this is probably the biggest one. They are not assembled or inspected by a bike tech. They are assembled in mass by someone trying to slap as many together per hour as possible to make their boss happy. They are the same minimum wage workers who clean up the bathroom or fold t-shirts. They have no proper training for truing wheels, adjusting derailleurs, or setting up the brakes. It is a total safety hazard.
3.) The quality of the product is very low at target. The frame is whatever, its heavy but its not going to break, same with the shocks. The real difference between a decent bike and a walmart bike is in the shifter components. Cheap shifters are hard to adjust properly and very fickle when it comes to staying properly adjusted. Combine this with the fact that they're not being assembled by a real bike tech and you have a problem 9 times out of 10.
4.) Add ~35 bucks to the cost of any bike from wal-mart because you will most likely have to get it serviced at a bike shop to get it to work properly.
5.) cheap bikes that are set up poorly from the get go will have more problems over the life of the bike. Either you will spend more money getting them fixed (think around 20 a visit) OR you will get frustrated and leave the bike to sit in the garage. Then you've just wasted $200. This is probably the most common thing. People buy cheap bikes, they break, then they get frustrated and just give up.
Heres a compromise. You don't have to spend 400 bucks to get a decent bike! Heck, if you're too intimidated by a real bike shop you don't even have to go there.
Not everyone here will agree with me, but I used to work at a sporting goods store (Di*ks) and can tell you then sell a range of bikes, from almost wal-mart level up to $2000 bikes. You can get a quality bike from a sporting goods store, assembled by a competent mechanic for less than you would pay at a bike shop. Our cheapest quality bike at dicks was ~230 dollars, but 299 was the absolute best bang for your buck. You got quality shimano trigger shifters (not the garbage grip shifters that come with a cheaper bike) double wall rims (less maintenance) and a lifetime warranty on the product. In case you want the models, for women it would be the diamondback Lustre 1 and the Lustre 2.
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