Muscle Toning ?

atucker_mom

I am new to working out and have a question for all you experts out there. I am 302 lbs and have been working out for 6 weeks now. I started out just walking, and I am not up to 30 minutes of fast paced walking 3 days a week, and 40 minutes at the same pace 2 days a week. I have also added Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred 5 times a week. Level 1 is still kicking my butt. I tried to move to level 2 but I can not do it, so I am moving back down to level 1.The main thing I couldn't do on level 2 was the all the plank position exercises. My arms will not hold my weight. So I am working out 6 days a week, 4 of those days are walking plus shred, 1 day is shred only, and the other day is walking only. I have 1 day a week where I don't work out at all (Sunday), just to have a rest day.

My question is adding weight training. Specifically for my arms. My under arm area is extremly large and flabby and I would like to speed up getting this gone. I need to know what weight exercises to do and how many and how often. Do I need to a rest day between working my arms? Thanks for the advice!

Impala007

Hi,

Weight training will help you gain strength and build muscle, but will not help your arm the in way you are thinking. You have to get rid of the fat to see the muscle and that is best accomplished by reducing what you eat and cardio exercises. By all means do weight trainig too....adding muscle will increase the amount of cals your body burns. I have read it takes 50cal/day to maintain a lb of muscle and 2 cal/day to maintain a lb of fat. As for exercises do ones where you can complete at least 15 reps with a given weight and probably 3 sets. Give at least a day of rest between working the same body parts.

pftjill

I have to comment on this before people continue to preach cardio to lose more weight. Cardio is great especially for improving your cardiovascular functions-like heart rate and O2 levels. However strength training is one of the best things you can do. Though you cannot target specific areas like you want to-if you keep it up all sorts of things will continue to shrink-so just keep it up!! You should have a rest between muscle groups. At the boot camp I work at we do chest /bis on mon, leg/shoulder endurance on tues, back/tri on wed and hard core legs on thurs. It isn't necessarily bad to do the same group two days in a row, however the rule is to take a rest to allow for recovery. You said you were having a hard time with the planks. Keep it up as long as you can maintain good form. As you keep doing it-you will get better. Your muscles make many adaptions too.

yyzdnl

Specifically for your arms and the plank you could try doing push ups against a strong counter. Put your hands on edge of counter with your feet out from counter about 3 feet. Perform push ups slowly with good form. If this is to easy try push ups against a staircase the higher up on the stairs you put your hands the easier they will be. You can perform these with your back to counter or stairs to work triceps (back of the arms).

Remember even if you can only do a bit of the plank position exercises keep trying and the strength will come. I am going through the same thing with dips right now I couldn't even do one a few weeks ago and this week I did three sets of six.

Keep trying and completing level 2 will be success in itself.

Edit: I wouldn't get to worried at this point about getting overly structured in strength training with days off and all of that. I would just try to add body weight arm exercises and holding just a plank position to the workouts you are already doing. You could even do the exercises above anytime during the day just a few reps here and there or holding the plank position for a few seconds will help. Just don't work your arms if they are tired or sore.

Good luck,
Daniel