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deniseblossoms

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stroutman81

I've just started a program of lifting weights and have been getting very sore for 2-3 days after. What can I do to minimise DOMS?

Honestly... just hang in there. You can use an anti-inflammatory / pain reliever. But at the end of the day, the novelty of lifting weights initializes a cascade of events that leads to soreness. There's just no way around that. The degree to which you get sore will minimize as that novelty wears off.

What makes matters worse is most newcomers to the 'iron game' are overzealous. They lack patience. Why dip your toes in the water when they can dive right in? Problem is, this sets them up for more soreness than is necessary. Backing way off, focusing on learning the correct movement patterns, and using sane volume should be top priority. Worrying about lifting hard/heavy comes later.

lauratws

Awesome thread. Thanks

shrinkinginQualicum

Bump! Thanks for the great info.

sam308lbs

Another question worth asking yourself is how sustainable is this way of eating for you. If you're comfortable to a point where you can see yourself sticking with this for the long haul... so be it. If it doesn't seem manageable for that long though, I'm not necessarily saying things need to be changed now... but I am saying that you need to have an exit strategy planned out ahead of time.

I cant thank you enough!! Could you suggest me an exit strategy..are you talking eating on maintenance or something else?

stroutman81

Another question worth asking yourself is how sustainable is this way of eating for you. If you're comfortable to a point where you can see yourself sticking with this for the long haul... so be it. If it doesn't seem manageable for that long though, I'm not necessarily saying things need to be changed now... but I am saying that you need to have an exit strategy planned out ahead of time.

I cant thank you enough!! Could you suggest me an exit strategy..are you talking eating on maintenance or something else?

That's a tough question to answer. It's more a matter of formulating a mindset where expectations are managed accordingly. Case in point - many people, feeding off of initial motivation and ambition, diet their hardest in the early stages of their fat loss. The problem is, motivation is a temporary phenomenon. And fat loss is a very slow process... even when you're dieting hard.

When the utility, novelty, and motivation wane, people tend to fall off. The folks who are dieting the hardest tend to fall the hardest and fastest. That's due to a number of reasons. For one, hard dieting typically entails a lot of rigidity and sacrifice. So on a psychological level, there's this rebound effect. We have a finite capacity to exert attention and focus. When it depletes, our 'mental performance' tends to weakness. The net effect is a huge reduction in restraint. I call it the rebellious teenager syndrome. Essentially the restraints reverts into gluttony. It's almost as if while dieting hard, they're accumulating a debt. Once they fall off, their mindsets are such that the only thing they can think about is repaying that 'debt.'

On the physiological side of things, pretty much every aspect of your body is primed for fat storage when you're coming off a hard diet - from cells and hormones on up.

The the psychological and physiological aspects of this have this negative synergistic effect. They compound to set most people up for failure.

For this reason, in almost all cases, I promote eating as much food as possible while still allowing a reasonable rate of monthly weight loss.

In the other cases where I feel that a 'jump start' diet is a fit, I'll do an aggressive diet for a month or two to knock as much weight off as possible. There's research out there that supports this approach in the context of long term adherence and results. It smacks people with a heavy dose of belief and realization that they're in control, that they can lose weight, and that they own their actions/decisions and the effects that they bear.

But before starting such a diet and all throughout, I'm educating that individual to know that these results they're experiencing during the aggressive diet exceed reality. They're not sustainable and before soon they're going to reach a point where more sustainable tactics need to be deployed. At that point, a couple of things need to be cemented:

1) Most importantly, the sustainable tactics need to be individually tailored based.

2) These tactics are going to be of the sort that are meant to be engrained for life. They're not as much tactics as they are behaviors that will come naturally after enough practice.

3) While transitioning into these behaviors, some weight regain is likely. Some of this might be fat. Most of it will be water due to glycogen repletion, etc.

You're in sort of a gray area. You're not dieting ridiculously hard. But you're deeper than I'd typically suggest given your weight. I'm not so sure you need to be overly concerned about what I discussed above. I'd venture to say ride this as long as you can, assuming you're reasonably comfortable. When it stops working (which it likely won't if you can stick with it since a big deficit is always going to lead to weight loss - see anorexia as an extreme example) or when it simply becomes too unbearable, then simply revert to more sane tactics where you're in a slight deficit, you're centering your diet on protein, you're eating plenty of fibrous veggies and fruits, etc.

Basically all the stuff I discuss in my Nutrition 101 article.

sam308lbs

You are right..being in the grey area was my plan all along..but i will make sure to include some rubbish food every week from now on so i dont become very rigid.You have made some amazing points there!! i am gonna copy paste this..Again thanks a lot

natty_34

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