You don’t need a bench. Overhead pressing (and push pressing for intermediate trainees) is sufficient to develop pushing power, and is a better movement for balanced shoulder strength and posture. If you really want to develop the chest muscles, then you can do floor press for most of the same benefits without purchasing a bench.
ephion
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The best metrics are body fat percentage or fat-free mass index.
For what it’s worth, even vaguely muscular people are going to blow apart the BMI scale. I’m 5′10″ and 190lbs at around 13% body fat. My normal weight range according to BMI is 130-173lbs. If I got down to that without losing any muscle mass, I’d be 5% body fat, which is severely underweight. I was completely sedentary before weight training, and I’ve only been training powerlifting for 1.5 years with moderate results (ie, I’m not quite as strong as most high school football players).
A quick google search indicates that salmon farming has become much better in recent years, and might surpass wild salmon soon. Most of the information on fatty acid profiles that I can find is from 2008, before these advances. The chart on this page indicates that farmed salmon has much more fat with a smaller proportion of omega-3. The total n-3 is close (1.8g farmed vs 1.7g wild), but if most of the extra fat is n-6, then you’re not doing much for fixing the 3:6 ratio.
The main benefits of fish are high protein content and most of the fats are essential omega-3 fatty acids, including the protective EPA and DHA which are mostly unavailable in plant form. The omega-3 fatty acid ALA, which is available in many plans, only gets converted at a rate of 2-10%. If you wanted to get 2g/day of EPA+DHA, you’d need to consume 20-100g of ALA, or 37-186g of flaxseed oil.
I’ve downvoted your post due to use of a misleading graphic (EDIT: Downvote retracted after your reply). The graphic is comparing low fat milk, not whole milk, while whole milk has much more nutrition than low fat milk. Additionally, nutrient density can refer to both nutrients/calorie, nutrients/volume, and nutrients/price. All are important measures. Spinach wins on nutrients/calorie, but the other two, not so much.
Whole milk, for example, has 124IU of Vitamin D while the chart only lists 2.4 IU, which approximates the 1% fat figure from Google’s nutrition information.
This is what 200 calories of whole milk looks like. This is 200 calories of eggs. This is 100 calories of spinach.
Spinach has little protein (0.9g/serving), while eggs and milk both contain 8g and 7g per serving. This extremely important number is missing from the chart. A cup (30g) of spinach (standard serving size) contains 7 calories, so you’d need to multiply your numbers in the charts by 0.07 to get the expected nutrition per serving of spinach. A serving of whole milk (8oz/244g) is around 148 calories, so we’d need to multipy by 1.48 for a serving:serving comparison. Doing this, the differences in nutrient content are much smaller for most nutrients, and milk ‘winning’ several of them.
A gallon of whole milk (16 servings) costs ~$3 in my town, and a 10oz bag of spinach (roughly 9 servings) costs ~$2. The price per calorie, per gram protein, and for most micronutrients is smaller for milk than spinach.
Spinach is, of course, great to eat and very healthy. But so are milk and eggs. That they compare so favorably to your chosen food when using more realistic comparisons supports “milk and eggs are nutrient dense.”
You appear to possess some misconceptions about weight training.
they take space,
A stack of plates with the barbell stored vertically takes 0.2m^2 (~2sqft). Here’s a picture of a 330lb set for demonstration; wine bottle and keyboard for scale. I have a lot more equipment than just the barbell, but that’s because I do powerlifting and it’s a hobby.
are no fun
This is a matter of perspective and preference. I find weight lifting to be extremely fun, especially the sport of powerlifting. Furthermore, it has no bearing on the fact that weight training is the most effective and efficient means of getting stronger.
cannot be combined with useful activity and often encourage too simple movement patterns.
The deadlift, overhead press, and row are three of the most fundamental movements a person can do. In sports science terms, these are highly general movements, which means that increasing strength in these movements will have positive carry over to every other physical pursuit that uses similar movements. Runners use the deadlift to improve their running speed, for example, and throwers use the overhead press to improve their throwing distance. Your assertion that they can’t be combined with useful activity is incorrect, as they are useful activity. And they don’t encourage too simple movement patterns, as they increase the strength of all movement patterns.
I would agree that weight training can be an ineffective choice, if you limit your exercises to machines and single-joint isolations and use too many sets/reps with too little resistance. If you deadlift, overhead press, and barbell row for 3 sets of 3-5 reps 3 times per week and progressively add weight, then you’ll get strong much faster and with less time spent exercising than on any no-equipment routine.
Why avoid weights? They’re the most efficient and effective way to do strength training. Bodyweight exercises are OK but they fairly quickly top out on any benefits, unless you get rings and other gymnastic equipment.
You can get a barbell and 300lbs of weights for under $300 used, with which you can do deadlifts, overhead press, and barbell rows. That’s a complete, full body routine of scalable difficulty which will last you for quite some time and requires no other equipment.
Have you had a seared tuna steak? Cooked properly, it’s one of the tastiest things I’ve ever eaten.
For which respect? Tempeh is a great source of vegetarian protein and micronutrients, as fermentation removes all the nasty stuff from soy. Algae supplements have a good bit of the n-3 fatty acid DHA and EPA, but are extremely expensive with average prices being $60/mo for the recommended 2g EPA/DHA per day. Contrast this with $8/month for fish oil of the same power.
I really need to finish my post on practical body recomposition. The quality of information about this topic is very low on this website, and I feel like I could positively contribute.
Porn gets me off quicker. That is it’s utility. When I’m self-pleasuring for enjoyment, I don’t watch it, because it’s more fun to use my imagination. However, when I’m sexually frustrated and can’t focus on what I want to focus on, pornography allows me to cut masturbation time down from 10-20 minutes to under 5. This is a great time saver, and allows me to spend my time more productively.
It is superstimulation, and if you come to rely on it to come or develop an addiction (arguably the same thing), then you’ll have a problem. But if it isn’t having any negative affect on your life, then why drop it?
I agree with putting education as #1. For the #2 slot, I’d say it’s a combined Nutrition/Exercise/Sleep “General Health.” All three of these feed into each other, resulting in synergistic improvements in your entire body functioning. This includes your brain and mental performance.
Exactly. Archery doesn’t provide strength training if you have to do strength training to do archery. If it would be good at strength training than archers wouldn’t need separate strength training.
That’s incorrect. Every sport requires additional strength training in order to perform at a high level. Even in strength sports, supplemental strength training is required beyond practicing the sport itself. This doesn’t mean that the sport itself doesn’t provide a strength adaptation response. Yoga counts as strength training for the sufficiently weak.
In Olympic weightlifting, the contested lifts are the snatch and the clean and jerk. Even minimalistic weightlifting programming involves squatting, and most programs include pressing, rows, deadlifting, and other strength work as well.
Powerlifting is a much simpler sport, testing only the squat, bench press, and deadlift for one repetition. Just practicing the sport would involve doing single reps with squats, bench presses, and deadlifts. Virtually no successful powerlifters train this way. Basically all of them do multiple repetitions on the main lifts, and the majority do other exercises as well.
I bought this and it’s amazing. I was sleeping on a $900 spring mattress, and this is so much better in every respect. It’s held up for 1.5 years, now, and is just as nice as the day I got it.
I’ve read Squat Every Day by Matt Perryman four or five times, and I’m consistently impressed with how much I learn from it each time. The book combines practical strength training advice, history of strength sports, along with discussions on psychology, biology, chaos theory, systems theory, and probability.
I have no personal experience with that site, but that’s mostly because reddit’s /r/malefashionadvice thinks they’re terrible.
Having a degree seems like a good way to signal capability of doing the job. I will be studying, learning, and practicing as I go, and if I’m capable of getting a programming job without the degree, that would be ideal.
I’m planning on switching careers. Currently, I do IT support (desktop administration) and have a pretty nice job. I’d like to move into programming for the increase in flexibility and salary, as well as long-term job stability—I’m pretty sure my current career will be automated away well before I’m capable of financial independence. To further that end, I’m fairly close to finishing my BS, and changing majors to Computer Science would greatly aid my transition.
Current options:
Quit the job and go back to school full time. I’ll have enough money saved to do this in December 2014, and will graduate in May 2016. I’ll need to take on about $15,000 of student loan debt to accomplish this, and I’ll be without an income during that period, so this represents a big hit to my finances justified by a much better paying job.
Go to school part time while working. One free class per semester is a benefit of my job, and I’ll graduate in August 2019. This puts off my ability to get a programming job for quite some time, but it avoids any student loan debt, and it allows me to keep my income.
The first option will break even financially with the second option if my beginning programming job pays $60k and I get one immediately after graduation. Both of these conditions seem unlikely, so I’m inclined to think that staying in my job and getting the computer science degree slowly is a better choice. However, I imagine that there are benefits to getting into the programmer career sooner rather than later, though I’m unable to quantify these and am not sure how to incorporate them into my decision making.
Thoughts?
More frequent water-drinking makes you urinate more often, which is probably a bad thing for productivity.
Extended sedentary periods are bad for you, so if drinking extra water also makes you get up and walk to the bathroom, that’s a win-win.
I haven’t. I use calipers and visual estimation compared to DEXA confirmed images. Calipers, if taken at face value, report me to be at 8-10% BF which is definitely too low. Visually, I currently look like pictures of guys in the 13-15% range, so I add 5% to the calculated result. Even at 16% BF (the highest estimate I can get), I’d be around 7% BF with a BMI of 24.8. That’s underfat yet very close to overweight.