Exile, I tried the one leg wall sit during a slow moment at work. It was a more difficult than it sounds. I had trouble getting the knee to a full 90 degrees, had to start with the foot several inches forward and the thigh a few inches above parallel. Only able to do 8-10 seconds at a time but did enough sets to get in about 1 minute's worth. Knee is a little sore with some swelling but seems to somewhat tolerable. It definitely fully invloves the quads, a great exercise! Is a true 90 degrees the correct form and should I do multiple sets?
Hi buldog, ideally you're doing a perfect 90ºs on the sit, but I wouldn't do multiple sets. I'd start off doing it every other day. Bit by bit you should find that the quads above the knee in particular get strengthened noticeably.
Also did some wall pushups while resting between sets and even that little bit really irritated my collarbone after only 40 or so reps over 3 sets. The chest muscles aren't even getting warmed up and I have to stop. I think my chest work will have to consist of very light dumbell flys or cable exercises.
Cable crossovers are probably a good way to get going on that. A collarbone fracture is really the pits, I'm sorry that you had that trouble. It's such a fragile bone to start with... something I think that human skeletal structure isn't exactly the greatest piece of engineering—weak bones in critical places, weak muscles like the rotator cuff complex in super-critical place, all the stuff that goes wrong with people's spines... I kind of figure it's maybe a B–/C+ term project: not absolutely horrible, but it could have been done a lot better...
As far as my expectations in the gym goes I gave up powerlifting 27 yrs ago and bodybuilding at 25 yrs(with only a few brief sessions over the years). Basically my goals now are to get rid of the extra 50 or so pounds I have accumulated. The training philosophies and many of the machines in the gym are all new to me. When I started it was 2-3 hrs a day 5-6 days a week training all body parts 2-3 times each. Now people say if you train a major body part more than once a week your crazy, which with the scientific evidence makes a lot of sense.
Well, we know a lot more about how muscle tissue gets stimulated to grow than we used to, and it's not surprising that people start with the `one set good, twenty sets better' assumption. Serious understanding of the role of high intensity in training is a relatively recent thing. As you lose more weight, I suspect you'll find your resistance training improves steadily. Losing intramuscular fat—the kind that isn't visible but makes intense muscular contraction more difficult—generally translates into faster, more intense muscle contraction.
One thing that seems to help people who are trying to shed excess weight is taking a realistic view of the timeline involved. From what I've read, weight losses of one to one and a half pounds a week—from a combination of calorie reduction, food choices (complex carbs over simple carbs especially) and aerobic exercise—are safe, sustainable, and much less likely to reversed by periodic binge eating than higher loss numbers involving weird diets. So assume conservatively a lb/week. That means that you can accomplish your goal in a year, or building in a margin of error, around fourteen months, say. So if you simply do a reasonable weight loss routine, emphasis on `reasonable', and think long term, it's probably going to happen relatively easily.
Also, it was always slow and controlled reps with very strict form to prevent injury so the short quick reps you spoke of go against all my prior experience(again i'm outdated by more than 20yrs). To make a very long story short, i'm satisfied with the size of the muscles(except for the quads) just want to trim down to a healthy weight(maybe 180-190 from the current 240) but i'm struggling psychologically by working out with weights lighter than I did when I was 13(started at 10yrs old).
I know what that's like; I had to stop lifting weights for a year after my bad accident a couple of years ago, and it's very discouraging to see myself fighting to do reps, even in my strongest range, that were at the
bottom of my descending pyramid routine five years back or so. What I keep telling myself is, just keep at it, you'll get back there. I believe in muscle memory: once muscles have been trained to a certain size and intensity of contraction, they get back there much more quickly than muscles do which have never been trained to that point, even after years have gone by. I don't know the reason, but hard-headed exercise physiologists whom I respect swear this is true, and I suspect they've seen it happen enough to know, even if they themselves don't have a story yet about how it happens.
The important thing is never to be discouraged. Every workout leaves you better than you were before, even if it doesn't go brilliantly. Keeping your morale high is the hard part; you just have to keep reminding yourself that you
are making progress, even if it's not yet visible. For some reason it seems to work like that: nothing, nothing, nothing, and then, all of a sudden, you're at the next level....
