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If you're data-inclined, it's a powerful tool to drive health and fitness. Extracting actionable meaning from your data isn't that hard, as long as you understa

by cheald 9y ago

If you're data-inclined, it's a powerful tool to drive health and fitness. Extracting actionable meaning from your data isn't that hard, as long as you understand the basic mechanics of what you're doing and can compute things like percentages and moving averages. I'm 34, spent the last ~15 years at sedentary desk jobs, and became quite out of shape. I've lost 70lb over the last year doing little more than just logging what I eat in MyFitnessPal, sticking to caloric and macro budgets, and recomputing my TDEE based on moving averages of my caloric inputs and weight readings. I lift for 45-60 minutes 4 times a week, no cardio. In that same time period, I've started lifting and seen excellent progress (bench 1RM ~260, squat 1RM ~320, deadlift 1RM ~465), again by thoroughly logging my workout data and using that to identify where I'm weak and strong (which lets me select exercises to improve my weaknesses), to help set and adjust training maxes, and to help set achievable goals on a daily basis. Symmetric Strength is a great tool here - it's incredibly gratifying to see my progress presented in several ways, and it helps me understand my strengths and weaknesses, as well as my progression relative to others, which can be very motivating. I attribute just about all of this to the fact that I adopted eating and lifting plans which were based on data collection and specific goals and targets to reach for and hit on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I've tried dieting and fitness regimes in the past that were basically coached as "just do this and try really hard", without laying out why, or what I could expect at a granular level, and those become really discouraging once the initial hit of motivation wears off. By contrast, having a year's worth of data to analyze any time I start to feel discouraged provides immediate reinforcement as to what does and doesn't work, and helps keep me on track.

vikiomega9 9y ago
+1 on having a lifting routine. Cardio by itself doesn't seem too sustainable as compared to watching what you eat and building muscle.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Cardio on its own is very sustainable.
  - vikiomega9 9y ago
    Yes in general. What I meant to say is for someone like me, I had trouble with what I ate, for example overeating after a cardio session. Understanding this and changing behaviour is a lot harder as compared to building more muscle which is "sustainable" in terms of a larger TDEE that's evenly spread out. Unless I'm mistaken building muscle is far more efficient than bursts of cardio. HIIT seems to work on a similar idea.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      I'm a little confused by what you mean. I'm not a nutritionist, but I am very active in both running and weight lifting (in other words, I have a lot of personal results, but take my opinions as qualified observations, not educated prescriptions). They're targeted to sufficiently different goals that I wouldn't agree you can make an efficiency comparison for weight loss. Realistically I wouldn't prescribe either for weight loss, and I'd personally suggest anyone looking to partake in one of those activities reach a healthy weight first. The likelihood of injury in distance running, sprinting and weight lifting is far higher for someone starting with a poor base weight. As for the specific exercises: HIIT will train fast twitch muscle fibers, which is more similar to weight training than long distance cardio is, but neither is really comparable to weight training (precisely because of the TDEE increase, which you mentioned). Sprinting and weight training complement each other but quickly diverge in outcomes if you do one or the other. If I understand you correctly, you're talking about the way in which additional muscle on the body increases daily energy expenditure overall, which cardio does not achieve in the same way. But that's (in my opinion) a poor way to calibrate your training - if you're optimizing for weight loss and you find yourself hungrier when you exercise, you're likely going to find yourself hungrier when your caloric needs increase in general. This will happen regardless of which particular exercise you engage in, which means it's a problem to be conquered independent of the exercise. Controlled weight loss (or gain) is most effectively achieved by understanding what your body actually needs for survival and strategically increasing or decreasing that. Exercise is helpful for altering the composition of your mass, but it's relatively negligible (hundreds of calories per day) for controlling the amount of mass you have.
- cheald 9y ago
  Cardio works for some people, but I think a lot of people go run for 20 minutes and then decide they've earned a Big Mac with Behemoth Fries. Data has completely freed me of that delusion - I've learned that I'm not willing to do enough cardio to outrun my diet. I'd rather just not have cheese on my salad than have to go hate the world for an hour on the treadmill. There are the people who run 10 miles on a daily basis because they enjoy it - I am not one of them! :) Lifting for me is less about weight loss than it is just about personal improvement, though. I want to be strong (and hey, if I'm losing this weight, I want to look good!), and lifting moves the ball towards that goal. I've found that I really enjoy it, too - it's not something that I tolerate as some grueling price I have to pay to get the body I want, it's a hobby that I genuinely enjoy and derive a lot of satisfaction from. The fact that it helps me lose weight is a great bonus, but I've found that lifting lets me hack my internal tendency to "try for a high score" by giving me a whole suite of metrics that I can rate, rank, and compare myself on. I love it.
  - vikiomega9 9y ago
    I completely agree with the first paragraph. I should have made that clear in my comment :)
mootothemax 9y ago
Data-based exercise rocks. I never knew I'd enjoy the rowing machine quite so much until I got into the stats side of thing. It helps that the major manufacturer has a beyond awesome online logbook for analysing and comparing with other real people, plus challenges and so on. If you're looking at creating an exercise app or community, take a look at what Concept2 do, it's lean yet pretty much well perfect.
- cheald 9y ago
  I'm not at all aware of Concept2 - I'll have to take a look at it. I know there's been something of a revolution lately in resistance rowing and biking tech (some of my friends are SUPER into the Twitch subculture with people who do these competitive resistance bike ride video games), but I'm not really too aware of most of it. I'm generally happy just picking up heavy-ass things. :)
  - mootothemax 9y ago
    Hah, I'd no idea about this revolution, I'll also have to take a look! While rowing's tedious, I find it much less so than eg treadmill, and calories per hour makes it pretty efficient. Funnily enough though, concept2 have just released an entirely new machine, the BikeErg, which as the name implies, is a mix of bike and rowing machine. Only downside of rowing is that there are a ridiculous number of ways to do it wrong and seriously ruin parts of your body. Nowadays you can do well with YouTube and a mirror / reflective window or iPhone-with-advance-permission in the gym.

by cheald 9y ago

vikiomega9 9y ago

+1 on having a lifting routine. Cardio by itself doesn't seem too sustainable as compared to watching what you eat and building muscle.

dsacco 9y ago
Cardio on its own is very sustainable.
- vikiomega9 9y ago
  Yes in general. What I meant to say is for someone like me, I had trouble with what I ate, for example overeating after a cardio session. Understanding this and changing behaviour is a lot harder as compared to building more muscle which is "sustainable" in terms of a larger TDEE that's evenly spread out. Unless I'm mistaken building muscle is far more efficient than bursts of cardio. HIIT seems to work on a similar idea.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    I'm a little confused by what you mean. I'm not a nutritionist, but I am very active in both running and weight lifting (in other words, I have a lot of personal results, but take my opinions as qualified observations, not educated prescriptions). They're targeted to sufficiently different goals that I wouldn't agree you can make an efficiency comparison for weight loss. Realistically I wouldn't prescribe either for weight loss, and I'd personally suggest anyone looking to partake in one of those activities reach a healthy weight first. The likelihood of injury in distance running, sprinting and weight lifting is far higher for someone starting with a poor base weight. As for the specific exercises: HIIT will train fast twitch muscle fibers, which is more similar to weight training than long distance cardio is, but neither is really comparable to weight training (precisely because of the TDEE increase, which you mentioned). Sprinting and weight training complement each other but quickly diverge in outcomes if you do one or the other. If I understand you correctly, you're talking about the way in which additional muscle on the body increases daily energy expenditure overall, which cardio does not achieve in the same way. But that's (in my opinion) a poor way to calibrate your training - if you're optimizing for weight loss and you find yourself hungrier when you exercise, you're likely going to find yourself hungrier when your caloric needs increase in general. This will happen regardless of which particular exercise you engage in, which means it's a problem to be conquered independent of the exercise. Controlled weight loss (or gain) is most effectively achieved by understanding what your body actually needs for survival and strategically increasing or decreasing that. Exercise is helpful for altering the composition of your mass, but it's relatively negligible (hundreds of calories per day) for controlling the amount of mass you have.
cheald 9y ago
Cardio works for some people, but I think a lot of people go run for 20 minutes and then decide they've earned a Big Mac with Behemoth Fries. Data has completely freed me of that delusion - I've learned that I'm not willing to do enough cardio to outrun my diet. I'd rather just not have cheese on my salad than have to go hate the world for an hour on the treadmill. There are the people who run 10 miles on a daily basis because they enjoy it - I am not one of them! :) Lifting for me is less about weight loss than it is just about personal improvement, though. I want to be strong (and hey, if I'm losing this weight, I want to look good!), and lifting moves the ball towards that goal. I've found that I really enjoy it, too - it's not something that I tolerate as some grueling price I have to pay to get the body I want, it's a hobby that I genuinely enjoy and derive a lot of satisfaction from. The fact that it helps me lose weight is a great bonus, but I've found that lifting lets me hack my internal tendency to "try for a high score" by giving me a whole suite of metrics that I can rate, rank, and compare myself on. I love it.
- vikiomega9 9y ago
  I completely agree with the first paragraph. I should have made that clear in my comment :)

mootothemax 9y ago

Data-based exercise rocks. I never knew I'd enjoy the rowing machine quite so much until I got into the stats side of thing. It helps that the major manufacturer has a beyond awesome online logbook for analysing and comparing with other real people, plus challenges and so on. If you're looking at creating an exercise app or community, take a look at what Concept2 do, it's lean yet pretty much well perfect.

cheald 9y ago
I'm not at all aware of Concept2 - I'll have to take a look at it. I know there's been something of a revolution lately in resistance rowing and biking tech (some of my friends are SUPER into the Twitch subculture with people who do these competitive resistance bike ride video games), but I'm not really too aware of most of it. I'm generally happy just picking up heavy-ass things. :)
- mootothemax 9y ago
  Hah, I'd no idea about this revolution, I'll also have to take a look! While rowing's tedious, I find it much less so than eg treadmill, and calories per hour makes it pretty efficient. Funnily enough though, concept2 have just released an entirely new machine, the BikeErg, which as the name implies, is a mix of bike and rowing machine. Only downside of rowing is that there are a ridiculous number of ways to do it wrong and seriously ruin parts of your body. Nowadays you can do well with YouTube and a mirror / reflective window or iPhone-with-advance-permission in the gym.