Advice for this Beginner please!

tanek747

I've been reading this forum for several weeks and am really impressed by how helpful the discussions are here. I wanted to finally go ahead and ask some questions, in the hopes that some links or pointers would be possible from people with time for it. I'll try to be thorough without being too long, but that's a bit of a contradiction!

I'll describe my situation first:
6foot Male, injured in 30's leading to chronic back pain and double front stomach wall hernia repairs (laparoscopic, mesh), exercises physio etc did not lead to rehabilitation. Lifting like 2 carefully balanced light shopping bags could be painful, very hard to exercise. Over years ballooned up to 140kg high point 2 years ago. Then a total lifestyle/diet change rapidly fixed my back pain (vegan wholefood, if that's relevant), still no formal exercise beyond walking, but I swiftly progressed to being able to manage larger items when I needed to, like 25kg potato bags or 17kg banana boxes up and down stairs in a few weeks. In the following 2 years I steadily lost 20kgs of weight upto this summer. At 120kg this July I adopted more active exercise, and later found MFP and a step tracker combo. I log every gram including spice calories, and don't eat much exercise calories back.

I'm down to 102.9kg now, and have a good weight loss progression, possibly a little fast recently, 6-7% of bodyweight in the last 30 days, but very motivated to cross the threshold over from obese to overweight at 99kg's. I eat around 1300 to 1900 cals average (varies by day as my expenditure varies a lot per day), and eat less than 50% of exercise cals back. I am setup for 1kg per week losses and can exceed that loss, expect to dial it back soon once in overweight bmi zone.

I'm trying to figure out how and where I should begin with strength training, there's a lot of conflicting info. I'm concerned I'll lose muscle, especially approaching lower BMI. Also I don't want to squander the obese beginner position.

I can describe what I do for exercise currently. I swim a fair bit with gloves for extra pull in the water (4-6hrs per week), I walk quite a bit, have a 100m track near to the house on a steep incline and I'll walk fast up and down a bunch of times (5-25) in a couple of session per day. I've found some little 2kg dumbells (that you folks would probably laugh your *kitten* off at and at least once a day I'll take them out and walk the hillside track and do curls and over heads as I step up and down the track to get a little more upper body exercise, but that's a lot of repetitions with light weights which I'm reading is the wrong approach.

I'm just beginning to figure out some calisthenics, like pushups, planks and side planks, lunges and squats - nowhere to put a chin up bar unfortunately. New body, much lighter, much more agile, not in pain - I'm trying to get used to what I can do with it.

Swimming access is easy, as is walking obviously, but gym access would be a lot more time consuming and difficult to fit into work and life demands.

Questions:

1. Will I have to go to gym for weights? I plan to at some point, perhaps next year, but I really want to know what I can do without.
2. How about home equipment? What can I get accomplished using mostly body weight and perhaps buying some (limited) home gear?
3. Suggestions on sound items for home gear that has a good return on investment and is not gimmicky but actually useful? dumbbells, kettlebells, something else entirely?
4. With swimming pool access is there stuff I can do there to get some strength gains?
5. My doc's no use about lifting, too much pressure no real time for patients in the NHS. I'm concerned I have to be sensible with the double hernia repairs, but it's hard to have a sense of where to draw the line. Exercises that compress that area and lift at same time I avoid for now e.g. sit ups - so I do leg raises or lying on back, legs in air, bicycle type movements instead, as they either lift or compress, not both at once so much. Anyone seen reputable resources for this?

Any thoughts on any of these questions, or pointers on good other places to research, would be greatly appreciated.

SideSteel

1. You can look into bodyweight based training. You Are Your Own Gym and Convict Conditioning are decent starting points. Google these.
2. You can get a lot accomplished with home gym set ups. It really depends on how elaborate you want to get but something like an adjustable bench and a set of adjustable DB's would go a long way. A power rack and an olympic bar and plates would be great too but it depends on where you're at and what you want.
3. DB's, a barbell and plates, a bench, a power rack/squat rack.
4. In theory if you could find a way to progressively load a swimming exercise it would probably make you stronger but that's beyond my knowledge.
5. I can't comment on that as that's a matter for your medical professional. Sorry! You should get a clear set of limitations/guidelines from your physician. If he's too busy, keep asking or get a second opinion from someone who deals with hernia repair. I've had two hernia repairs myself.

tanek747

Thanks a lot for the response! I'm looking into all the equipment and programs you mention. Some home gym and body weight until my other half feels ready for going to the gym too, we're on this journey together, and that's the most important bit.

I wanted to ask specifically, with the hernia repairs did/do you vary your program or take any special consideration to accommodate that? Perhaps I'm simply being too cautious in that regard. It's really motivating to hear you've had the same ops, ultimately regular heavy lifting is what I want. I know everyone covers themselves with "I'm not a medical professional" but it's very interesting to me, just to hear what's specific to you.

SideSteel

The first hernia was about 12-14 years ago or so. I had a brief (1 year or so) period where I lifted back then and it made the hernia worse. I returned to lifting about 2 months post op, and then quit shortly after. The umbilical hernia was prior to me starting lifting about 4 years ago (when I actually stuck to it).

I've not had any issues with either one and I train relatively heavy.

tanek747

Thanks a lot for the advice and replies. Seen a new doc who was a lot more helpful and I am cleared for progressive weight programs .

Also been working with YAYOG for a few weeks, like the mobile app a lot. Going to progress to weights fairly soon as some of the YAYOG exercises require a slighty casual attitude to potentially damaging your doors tables etc.

Fiancé bought the body beast dvd set as a present for me. She likes look of it for her too which is cool, much easier to always find time for fun stuff, so seems like we'll do that together at home. We need quite a lot of equipment first though. Have 1 York bench will need a second, mats and most of all a lot of weights.

Wel'l need a lot of dumbells seeing how they swap fast between 3 different weights on the dvd. That's going to be really pricey for 2 of us, so still trying to work out how best to spend to do that, particularly if we want ez curl bars and barbells eventually.

6 adjustable weights is pricey, but so are fixed dumbells, and adjustable discs could be used for curl or barbells potentially if they fit.

Tough to know how to invest well in the weights without much experience beforehand? any advice from anyone re dumbbell sets versus adjustable, where to buy, future barbell ez curl etc would be very useful.