Quote:
Originally Posted by will76
Ok here is my details:
6'0 200 pounds 34 years old. My waist is 36 inches. Which since I started jogging again I've slimmed it down a little, I can notice I have some extra room in my 36 inch shorts now. I use to work out a good bit back in college and still kept decent muscle tone in my arms and chest even though i rarely work out any more.
My diet isn't the best but it isn't crap either. I stay away from saturated fats as much as possible. I eat very little junk food. When I am working home which is most of the time I will eat a sandwich or lean cruise frozen dinner, which are good because I can track calorie intake. I figure on most days I am taking in about 1500 - 2000 calories. I eat out a couple times a week (either lunch or dinner) and when I do i usually eat crap. I only drink water or no calorie drinks. If I am going to take in calories its not going to be from a liquid. I rarely drink, don't smoke.
When I jog I do it on the treadmill, mainly to keep track of calories burned. I typically burn between 300 - 750 calories depending on how far I run. The shortest I run is a speed run (which for me is pretty fast) 2.5 miles in 20 minutes. If I do a long run I will run 6 miles in about 1 hour and burn about 750 calories.
I just started mixing in some weights but for the past month I've just been running.
I don't take vitamins, pills or anything like that.
So what should I do?
Back in college before I started sitting in front of a PC all day I was about 185, ripped abs and in great shape, very active. Damn internet... yanking it and sex has been the most exercise I have gotten the last 10 years.
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1500 - 2000 sounds pretty low to me, I don't think you need to go that low, and if you're adding physical activity it's even counterproductive, if your body starves it doesn't recover well and tries to burn a lot of muscle
if you're 6'0 and 200 pounds your basal metabolism will be at least 2 000 calories / day, more likely even more
so let's say your intake would be 2 400 calories / day in five healthy, balanced meals
Now how much you should burn (example for illustration):
- 2 000 is basal
- 200 is common activity (walking etc.)
- say 600 is work out (cardio / etc.)
- that would give you a nice 2400 / 2800 ratio 400 cals are cca 1 600 kJ (I always have to use Euro numbers to recalculate) so that would mean you can be burning as much as cca 80 g fat a day (very rough estimation, someone correct me if I'm wrong)
But that way, say 5 work outs a week would mean approx 400 g (almost a pound) a week
I'd say that's about the zenith there and you shouldn't try harder otherwise you'll be burning too much muscle and feel tired
a couple suggestions
- try to cut eating out completely for a month or two, that's the only way to control what you eat, I can more or less guarantee it's gonna boost the results
- aim for five meals a day, don't starve for breakfast and eat more after the work out
- adding a protein drink before the sleep as the fifth meal shouldn't harm either, even if you'd only be exercising abs
- if you want to do abs specifically do them every second day (I used to do that at high school every morning at 5:30 AM) but it's probably much better if you have every other day for recovery
- I'd go for more than 25 repetitions in a serie and a total of 250 - 300 repetitions per session
- prefer a longer cardio work out (45 - 60 minutes) at cca 70 pct. of your maximum heart rate, they say you start to burn fat effectively after cca 15 minutes of cardio and I can attest that longer workouts indeed brought more notable results for me
- pick exercise that works for you and that you feel well, be careful with your neck, test technique until you properly "feel" the muscles