[jbkunt2]

Hi all,

Just starting on a fitness journey myself. Usually goals: melt off 10-15 pounds of lard and replace with some muscle.

Would be good to hear your fitness success stories:

- The motivation/story where you decided to start

- What you achieved

- Timeframe

- How: basics of your routine and diet


Cheers... and congratulations on any successes, big or small!

[rudebwoy]

I started over around two decades ago. I had a belly, my mom looked at me and said don't let the belly get close to your heart. (Mother is a former nurse).

Lost the belly in under a year, playing squash 3-4 times a week.

Picked up the weights, met a guy at the gym who had the same goals. Never looked back since.

As you get older, diet is very crucial. If I eat bad, my body lets me know and sometime my face (breakout). Intermittent fasting is the only natural way of burning away that stubborn belly fat.

Routine - I work the main body parts. Legs, chest and back.

[Sonoma]

Got a little thick.

Went to gym, lost 20 pounds net and put on some muscle in 6 months.

Spent the next six years at that plateau and still haven't put in the hours to put on more muscle or drop any additional weight.

I'm hamstered myself to be fine where I'm at (most girls would describe me as looking in shape, but certainly nothing more)

[Mig Picante]

What I achieved: Ran a half marathon in under 2 hours. ~ 1hour 56minutes

Timeframe: Trained for about 6 months. 2 weeks out from the event I had built up to running 12-15km, 3 times a week, I ran 17km once and a full 21km once before the event.

How: When I began I could already run around 5 km without stopping but not much further. Training was a mix of running for longer periods even if it was slower. Sometimes I would run fast over shorter distances, or mix running with walking. Cycling also helped with my aerobic fitness and endurance. I trained with a few girls and none of them went cycling. I definitely outperformed them and think that it was a contributory factor. The point here is to a find a complimentary activity.
Once I got into the longer distances, recovery became important and avoiding overtraining in between. I took glucosamine for my joints as I would get mild knee pain and compression leggings to help my calves recover.
Diet: I already ate healthy meals as I was saving money. At the time I prepared salads to take to work every day with tuna or chicken most days.
Not much dressing besides some olive oil and cracked pepper. I would eat whole trays of roast vegetables for dinner with grilled meats. I could eat virtually whatever I wanted in terms of volume but was already eating a fairly clean diet.

Imagine eating 5 potatoes, a whole sweet potato, 2-3 carrots, half a head of broccoli or cauliflower and half a bell pepper with dinner every night.

[General Stalin]

I'm still writing mine, but here it is so far:

   

2 years and 35 lbs later.

[LateBloomer85]

I lost over 45 pounds in a little over a year. My new goal is to gain 20+ lbs of muscle this year by hitting the weights hard.

[Bienvenuto]

Just in terms of patience and stubborn body parts.

Very skinny and weak kid, even when I was 16 I was only 110 lbs. My dad bought us a small weights machine when I was 13, I was just skin and bone on my chest. Very insecure about that.
Got beat up at school a lot by the older years. got beat up by my brother at home, beaten by teachers, played a lot of rugby but never picked for the team, when I did get on and made the tackles Id end up with 'stingers' - unable to use my arm for a minute or so, or with a dead leg, the other kids were so much bigger than me. Coaches said to me we don't want to play you anymore.
One night when I was 14 after my elder brother had given me a sound thrashing in our back garden I went inside in tears and got on the bench press. Told myself I was going to bench 50 reps of 50kg (the stack). Of course I couldn't. I just writhed around under the handles doing 1" reps. Did that every night. Over time though even just the process of basically holding 50kg at lock out strengthened me.
Found a Canadian book on circuit training and started doing press ups against the wall. press ups against tables. Spoke to some people who actually knew weights who gave me more realistic sets and rep targets.
when I started to show signs of development the beatings from various bullies intensified as if they needed to put me in my place. I smoked weed for a while at 15 and the health and safety warning going round the sporty kids at school was "don't smoke or it will stunt your growth and you'll end up as small as Bienvenuto". Just kept going back to that weights machine every night.
Over time the work paid off, at 18 I was on the school first team, captain of my club team, played for my county then got picked for the youth team of one of the top sides in the country.
When I was 21 a real gym rat had a go at me for cheating on my bench reps. Stripped it back and got on the creatine (which felt like cheating) and was repping them out at 110kg and doing around max reps at 120kg.
I trained in a professional boxing gym with fighters who fought on prime time and the coach said to me 'no one wants to get in the ring with you. I mean sure they would annihilate you - but plenty of guys get in the ring with them and they get annihilated too, we just use them as fodder in the build up to fights. No-one wants to run the risk of catching one of your punches during preparation though. You've got a punch like a mule."
Been given plenty of beatings since but just that benching process on its own made me solid and gave me an ability to stand my ground. An exercise for me in how to turn a weakness into a strong point with just a bit of patience and perseverance.

[AcftW]

165-220 (lbs) @ 6’1”

Was in the low 140s when I went to basic training, and maintained at 160-165 for the next ~5 years. A couple years ago I decided to get serious with my diet and training. Quality of life has increased exponentially.

[ThrustMaster]

2009 - 5'9" ~198 32% bf
2017 - 5'9" ~200 9% bf

Vascular, called "ripped", "big guy", "beast".

It can be done.

Photos are a bit personal - but I'll IM if people are interested.

But I've added ~6.5 lbs lean a year since I started tracking.

   

[Leonard D Neubache]

A was always a skinny kid and had trouble with that body shape up to my early 20's. At that point I was 65 kg soaking wet at 6 feet tall.

When I got into a line of work that required me to be a bit bulkier I did what I'd always stupidly done and avoided getting any professional advice. I bought a knockoff of one of those Chuck Norris total gyms and started using it daily.

Looking back, I facepalm at the whole thing. Instead of doing high resistance sets every other day working practical muscle groups I was doing daily medium resistance sets that would have been perfectly designed to destroy my joints. I also didn't take any steps to alter my diet.

Still, thanks to the joys of youth I did no permanent damage and managed to gain 20 kilos of muscle in a time period I'm not even going to post because nobody here would believe me. I tend to think my body was simply reacting to a new set of orders from my lizard brain and had determined to reach its "proper size", but that's obviously bro-science at best.

Still, it taught me that the most important factor is the will to start trying. Everything else is secondary.

p.s. being young sure didn't hurt, either.

[churros]

(02-19-2018 10:15 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

Looking back, I facepalm at the whole thing. Instead of doing high resistance sets every other day working practical muscle groups I was doing daily medium resistance sets that would have been perfectly designed to destroy my joints. I also didn't take any steps to alter my diet.

Can you elaborate? I read that frequent medium resistance sets target size, whereas high-resistance targets strength only. Is that your goal? Where does your concern about joints come into play?

[Leonard D Neubache]

My concern about the damage I might have potentially done to my joints came from the fact that many of the suggested exercises in the manual called for you to lock your arms straight and move yourself entirely with your rotator cuffs (shoulder joint?) to the point of hyperextension. Many of the other exercises felt awkward but I persevered because I had no fundamental education on proper joint care and simply figured the people writing the manual wouldn't give anyone bad advice. Here's an image that might help explain.



Many of the exercises were variations of this. Vertical pull, horizontal pull, sitting vertical pull, sitting horizontal pull, all using the shoulders, all with the elbows locked. The sitting ones were probably worse because they would fully hyperextend those joints at the lowest point, which at the time I thought was a good thing. I only gave the issue thought recently when I tried to do similar exercises with free weights and realised how hard they were on my (considerably older) joints.

I'm not knocking the equipment itself. I wish I could find a cheap variant again. I'd buy another in a heartbeat. It was great, and I used it until the rollers literally wore down to stubs and the machine was written off. But the manual was a piece of shit and functionally dangerous to someone older and heavier than I was at the time.

As for size over strength, my impression was that longer, daily medium resistance work built muscle density and reduced fat while less lifting with heavier weights doing day-on-day-off systems built mass and overall power. Perhaps I'm wrong on that. Maybe I stumbled upon a perfect routine for my metabolism by pure chance. Hard to say.

[Investment Bro]

Basically: I went from a rail thin 18 year old, to a muscular, under-rated strong 22 year old. Basically I completely transformed my body. I'm sure part of this was due to getting older. I've included some progress pictures below. I'll be taking new ones again this summer once I've gotten tan.

Stats:
Height: 6'
Starting weight: 138 pounds (2013)
Current weight: 180ish (Feb 2018)
S/B/D: 445/285/495


Was 138 on the left (Aug 2013), and was 170ish on the right (Sep 2015)


Around 170 on the left (Mar 2016) and 181 on the right (June 2017).


I did all of this running my program which I've made available to RVF for free! Yes, this is a shameless plug for my data sheet

[Avon Barksdale]

Used to be a pretty fat kid (think Cleveland Brown JR from family guy) started getting my shit together when I was eighteen, however didn't know what I was doing at first, also had some family issues for a while.

Been in the military for almost 2 years now and been going hard ever since.

Routine: Been doing pyramid sets for a while ,this is a good program.

https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/pyramid...yours.html