Work outs for "morbidly" obese

Walking is great. I started out super morbidly obese and walking can be quite the workout when you're heavy and you can easily progress with it and keep it challenging even after you're out of the morbidly obese category (going faster, going longer, introducing incline) plus it can be done anywhere. I'm no longer morbidly obese but a good incline workout leaves me drenched.

Swimming may not be as good of a workout at this point because you likely float easily and can unconsciously fall back on that instead of putting energy into your stroke (at least that was the case for me, drifting off in my mind and just floating through the repetitive movement). Water aerobics may be a better choice because you would be doing purposeful movements. Again, that was just my own experience. Yours may be different. It's pleasant, though, regardless.

If you're going for biking outdoors you may want to invest in a heavy duty bike. Worth the investment instead of having to constantly deal with tire issues.

I would be very careful with video workouts if you want to go with them sometimes because many of the movements can be not only too hard, but also harmful, and it doesn't even have to be a challenging or high impact movement to cause harm. I hurt my back doing the warrior pose because balance can be tricky when you're heavy and I almost hurt my shoulder trying to hold all of that weight (was over 300 pounds) on my poor shoulder joints in downward dog. Stick with things that don't challenge your body position for now, things like walk away the pounds or chair exercises. Lighter people may scoff at this, but learning a new movement pattern is riskier for us heavier folks because in many cases we can't just dust ourselves off and get up. The damage potential is higher.

JasmineDiver22 wrote: »

My BMI says I'm morbidly obese. I'm 286 @ 5'2 being a 23 year old female. I've been over weight all my life so I'm used to having a belly and I'm really flexible and can get around very easily like normal people would. I'm not like those people that have to use a scooter or anything like that lol but my point is that I'm wondering what's the best work out for me to start? Walking 3-4 times a week for 30 mins a day is what I've been doing because I don't want to push myself so hard and I plan to lose 10-15% of my body fat before I try to lift weights because of my "joints" with me being so heavy. Am I doing the right thing? Or should I do more than what I'm doing now? Help?

Hi, I started where you are back in November 2015, at 5'2" and 289.5lb I fell in the super morbidly obese category, only I'm quite a lot older and was barely able to walk across the room. tbh I started by simply sorting my diet out for the first couple of months but in January 2016 I joined a small, local gym. I was still over 260lb at this point and the owner/trainer worked with me to do a program that involved a little cardio (which for me was still walking) and some simple strength training. Around 6 months later still over 200lb I started doing compound lifting and I really wish I had started earlier. Sure it slowed the weight loss but the changes to my body were incredible. So I would try and incorporate some sort of strength training as soon as possible.

As for "exercise" I started slow, I could barely walk so to start with I worked on being able to walk for 30 mins at 3km/hr. Then I used the C25K app on the treadmill to work on increasing my speed, so instead of running the intervals I walked at 4km/hr, then once I could do the whole 30 mins at 4km/hr I re-ran the app with 5km/hr intervals and then finally added in some very slow running. At the same time I entered my first 5k (race 4 life) in the July, which I walked more than ran but completed in just over an hour.

As I've become able to do more, I've added high intensity classes in to the mix, I was over 200lb when I took my first Insanity class and had to modify pretty much everything, but as time has gone on I've got stronger and able to do much more. I now compound lift 3x week, take up to 10 high intensity classes (and not only no longer have to modify to make them easier but am given modifications on some exercises to make them harder), have 3-4 PT sessions a week and run 3-4x a week (up to half marathon although now training for a full marathon). But I didn't get to this point overnight, as I said I started being virtually unable to walk across the room, but lots of little steps have added up over the last 22 months.