Experiment: I'm losing weight. Is it realistic to lose kilograms before the summer?

My name is Dima, and I continue to lose weight publicly as part of the project “Championship. Lifestyle”. My task is not only to get in shape for the summer, but also to irrevocably become, if not an athlete, then an athletic guy without puffiness from overcoming several floors. In the first article I shared how I felt after the bioimpedance analysis. I have never had to get to know my body so closely. If you’ve decided to take yourself seriously, this is the best place to start.

Indholdsfortegnelse

New motivation – there’s no turning back

Before I get to the story of my sessions with my trainer, I can’t help but share a few thoughts. Two weeks have passed since the first material. They encompassed a number of moments at once that said to me, “There is no going back”. Here’s my motivation for not letting up.

Being in the public eye comes with responsibilities. My entire community now knows what I do in my leisure time. A lot of people believe in success and wish me luck. I don’t want to be an empty voice in the eyes of my relatives and readers, who may adopt my example.
I don’t want to lose progress. With the right approach, a beginner can notice progress almost immediately. We get a little more agile, a little more resilient, we spend our time doing it. It’s an incredible high when you feel a pleasant fatigue in your muscles after exercise. It’s like you’re taking your game to the next level. And you really want to reach the “main boss”.
Accidents make you gather your strength even more. Before the next session in the gym, I lost my bag with my uniform, sneakers and some documents in public transport. I was angry at myself, depressed, but then I looked at the incident differently: let it be a kind of payoff to fate. Yes, I want to be depressed, but why? I found old sneakers and shorts, an ordinary T-shirt and the next morning I was already sweating with ropes in my hands.

Sport every day

If you reduce the whole program to simple things, the secret of success is two – nutrition og activity. The menu and new discoveries in food will be devoted to one of the next materials. Now only about activity. I have divided it into two parts: everyday and sports. Thanks to a smartwatch (and previously a fitness tracker), every day can be viewed from the perspective of numbers. Every day I play a game with myself, where I have to score at least 10, and even better more than 12 thousand points (steps). And that’s without taking into account the gym.

12,000 steps

Everyday activity is easy. Take the elevator instead of the stairs, public transportation – a walk. Take every opportunity to be not only active, but also useful: walking your pets, helping your colleagues at work with handing over papers, etc., etc. Even at home, keep your tracker on. Going to the kitchen or bath will get you extra points. If you don’t have any special devices, then any smartphone will suffice. Many already have a pedometer pre-installed. If it is not, then downloading it will not be a big problem.

The most important thing – do not rush to change your way of life abruptly.

Make changes gradually. Supplement your habits with useful innovations. I do not smoke, so during work I could not leave the office at all. Now a small walk to the place of lunch or just with colleagues is an invariable attribute of my day. In spring and summer it is much more pleasant outside. You won’t notice how easily you will make 12 thousand steps.

Why make mistakes when you can learn to do everything right?

If everything is clear with everyday activity, then you can expect discoveries in the gym. An important point – in my experience, I strongly recommend that you contact a trainer right away. A competent specialist will help:

in adaptation to the gym and its capabilities,
in a visual demonstration of the correct use of training equipment,
in drawing up a program based on your current condition and ultimate goal,
with reassurance and motivation.

For two weeks now I have been working out at Crocus Fitness on Zemlyany Val. My trainer’s name is Yaroslav Brazhnikov. And he is a mega-experienced specialist, a participant and medalist of many competitions, Russian acrobatics champion and one of the heroes of the show “Russian Ninja”. Here is his story:

We work out three times a week. It’s two strength training sessions and one functional training session. I do cardio, but it’s optional and without a trainer. Consequently, the number of workouts in the gym can get to 4-5 within a 7 day period. Now with the trainer we are working on the base. Engaging all the muscles. My body is gradually getting used to the loads.

If I was working out in the gym without the advice of a coach, I would start with warming up. And that’s right, you need to prepare yourself for the exercise. However, I would start from the head and smoothly go down, doing the well-known exercises: head turns, rotation of joints of arms and legs, jerks with hands, bends and squats. There is nothing wrong with this type of warm-up, however, it takes at least 10 minutes. I was advised pre-stretching in class.

Behind the newfangled term is stretching. Muscles relax, become elastic, blood circulation improves. It’ll take two or three minutes, no more.

If I had practiced without the advice of a trainer, I would have gone to the treadmill or straight to the exercise machines.

But before exercising, especially when losing weight, you should choose an elliptical. The ellipse should be given 7-10 minutes. Use your hands to grasp the movable levers, choose the optimal resistance (I have 5), put your foot with the whole foot, not just the toes, and most importantly, watch your heart rate. In my case for warming up it is optimal to keep the range of 110-120 beats. Do not forget that our task is to prepare ourselves for the exercises, not to spend all the strength in the first half hour. The load should be distributed wisely. In warming up on the track, too, there is nothing illegal. But if you are overweight, you should not switch to running. This can harm the joints of the legs. The same 7-10 minutes of walking at a steady pace at a low angle is enough.

The basis is functional training

Functional and strength training consists of several series. There are 4 supersets in each series.

Asuperset is doing two (or more) different exercises in sequence with no rest in between.

My superset has 3-4 exercises and 12-15 repetitions in each. The break between supersets is no more than a minute. Then the break will gradually decrease and the loads will increase smoothly. I will definitely return to strength training and cardio in future articles. Now I will dwell more on functional training.

Functional training works muscles all over the body. It helps you learn new exercises more easily and it makes it easier to acquire skills. One of the supersets of my functional training consists of TRX, squats on an unstable surface with a medball, one-handed push-ups on a step and an electric sled.

TRX is a suspended exercise machine where a person’s weight is used as a weight-bearing device. It simultaneously trains and develops strength, flexibility, vestibular apparatus and elasticity of tendons and ligaments surrounding the joint.

Squats on an unstable surface with a medball develop coordination, stabilizer muscles and increase the load on the gluteal muscles.
One-handed push-ups on the step create an imbalance in the distribution of forces in the arms. They are done on the arms in shifts and allow you to engage the main muscle groups, and above all the muscles of the arms, chest and abs.
The electric exercise machine “sled” was a real discovery for me. No, you don’t have to move it from place to place like a classic sled. This device may remind you of a treadmill, but it is driven by your legs. Set the resistance, brace yourself with your arms and run as fast as you can. Each approach lasted 30 seconds. During training with the sled, practically all muscles are involved. This is how explosive strength is trained.
After all the exercises, a warm-up is important. We return to the elliptical, but now our heart rate should come back to normal. Keep it in the neighborhood of 110 beats. Do not relax too much, but also do not exceed the pulse maximum.

It turns out that you can not “die” in the gym

At the time of writing this article, we have already had five sessions. During this not-so-long time, I realized a few important things.

Expand your horizons, go beyond someone else’s or old experience. Not only a beginner, but also quite experienced fitness club attendees conduct their classes in an understandable and comfortable mold. We have a baseline knowledge based on past experiences, articles and videos on the internet, conversations with friends or gym classes in school. Step out of the comfort zone of your favorite exercises, get your new experience.
And pay attention to your non-favorite exercises. I’ve always avoided the bar and push-ups. But you can’t tell a trainer, “I don’t know how to do it/I don’t like to do it, so I won’t do it.” It’s precisely the unloved exercises that are worth paying close attention to. Especially if they are supposed to help you achieve a goal. For example, on the bar, I do pull-ups with a green rubber band on which I place my feet. The color determines the level of stiffness, and therefore resistance. And with the green one it’s still not so easy, but it’s quite comfortable.
Don’t squeeze yourself out completely. One of the big discoveries. I used to languish on the elliptical, maxing out my body while running. I thought it was advisable to go to workouts every day and just crawl out of the gym at the end. Of course, this is wrong. In another relevant truth – everything has its measure, everything has its time. You need to sweat, you need to be tired, but “do not die”! Listen to Zemfira.

Preliminary results

And now the preliminary results. Two weeks ago I weighed 96 kg and my waist was 119 cm. I’ve lost some weight and weigh 95.6 kg. I would like to believe that this is due to muscle gain. My waist has decreased by 4 cm. And these are the most pleasing figures. I take all measurements in the morning on an empty stomach and once a week. More often there is no point, the dynamics will be different. It’s a good start! Let’s keep working.