lifting_heavy_things | tips for setting motivational goals with bodyweight exercises?

tips for setting motivational goals with bodyweight exercises?

I suffered from some nasty lower back/sciatic nerve pain during the last months. Both my primary care physician as well as the orthopedic specialist thought that there isn't anything particular wrong with my back (like a disc injury or such), but that it was the unspecific kind of back pain due to weak muscles, bad posture, being too sedentary etc. and that it ought to improve with exercise.

So I had about a dozen physical therapy sessions, also took a class for back pain exercises, and thankfully my pain got indeed better, albeit with ups and downs. But of course I should keep doing the exercises to remain pain free, yet the ultimate goal of "I want the pain to not come back" alone isn't great to sustain motivation for me. It's too general and doesn't really offer any accomplishments to work toward and such.

Because the exercises I learned are basically a mix of bodyweight strength exercises, balance exercises and stretches, I figure that I should be able to use the strength exercises to measure progress somehow for motivation. I enjoy tracking things, but I'm not sure how to go about it with exercising.

I mean, I have noticed some progress with exercises becoming easier, so I can manage more repetitions, and sometimes when there were different versions I can now even do the more difficult exercise than just the easiest kind (though overall my fitness level is still pretty bad, like for example I can't manage any push-ups, not even the easier kind where you are on your knees rather than toes, but am still at the level where you push against a wall). But I'd like to properly track things and have a couple of realistic, concrete goals so I see improvements.

I tried looking at the bodyweight strength training books in my library to get an idea for how this is usually done, but I have to admit that the books I found were all rather off-putting. Like the ones aimed at women all seemed to be a horrible assemblage of body image and weight loss issues, and the ones aimed more towards men had a slightly different set of body image and weight loss issues that were almost as awful and often mixed that with some kind of, I guess, weird power fantasies? I'm sure there must be decent strength training books out there, but my skimming led me to think that it is one those genres you best not venture into without recs. So I mostly backed away from consulting those.

Basically I'm looking for advice with which kind of exercises or exercise progressions (like with the different kinds of push-ups getting more difficult) are good to see your progress and motivate yourself, when you don't track increased weight like with lifting stuff.

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I think I can recommend Body By You. If that's not available, then You Are Your Own Gym would work just as well--the exercises are pretty much the same in either one. I just went and scanned the first chapters of the BBY book to see if it would be a good fit for you. I ain't gonna lie, he DOES talk about weight loss, because I think most people pick up this kind of stuff with a goal to lose weight. However, he tells people that the thing to do is to be exercising, that weight loss is not the only goal, and that it is best to throw away your scale and just focus on improving what your body can do and everything else follows. He talks about how you can't tone a specific part of your body, how women who are afraid exercises will make them bulk up are operating on false assumption, and that workout needs really aren't different between men and women (though women aren't going to gain the same amount of muscle doing the same amount as men due to not having as much testosterone).

Minimum of fat shaming, I think--he talks about one client in the motivation section who started out at 230 and got discouraged and quit when after two months she weighed 221, but he wasn't calling her horrible for being fat or saying she didn't do good enough--he was pointing out that she had lost 12 pounds of fat and gained 3 pounds of muscle and had made very good progress and that it was really a shame that she quit because she had already set herself up for further success even though she felt she hadn't lost enough weight fast enough (and really, I think we know it's good that the book isn't telling people that they'll lose 30 pounds in two months, that's unhealthy and unrealistic). On the other hand, it did say that she continued her slow descent into morbid obesity, which is maybe not the best phrasing/attitude. You don't have to read these beginning chapters really, so you can skip over all that and just get to what you really want.

Because on the plus side, this book has what you want in spades, I think! It has five different movement categories and has a ladder of increasingly difficult exercise variants to do for each. You do an initial evaluation to see where on the scale you should start and then you just keep doing it and work your way on up to more and more difficult exercises. Another couple big pluses: it doesn't expect a huge time commitment or for you to have a lot of expensive equipment.

I'll also second

thalia's yoga suggestion. Yoga isn't as nicely laddered as the bodyweight exercise book above, but you can definitely tell you are advancing the more you do it and when I'm not doing it I can tell because my lower back starts hurting. I subscribe to this YogaDownload site (if I wait until sale times I can get a year unlimited membership for $60 which is a cheap cost month to month) because I've found that it can be hard for me to want to go out of the house and pay class to class. Yoga equipment needs are fairly minimal--you'll probably want a mat, a sturdy blanket that you can make into a roll when needed, a couple yoga blocks, and a strap. Things I like about yoga:

* I feel like it has improved my balance overall, even during long stretches when I haven't done it--I'm much more coordinated now than before I ever started, because so many of the exercises made me pay a LOT of attention to my body and its balance
* There are a lot of things to try and pay attention to and do correctly
* It helps stretch out and balance out my muscles so that they ache less and aren't as tense
* Did I mention it is great for my back pain because it is so great

The downsides:

* Sometimes it gets a bit too woo for my taste
* I'd worry a little bit about not starting out in a class with real supervision to get a good foundation for all the poses; there's a lot of detail to get right
* I think it's a bit more demanding timewise, I feel like it's better to do a class for an entire hour over one that lasts 30 minutes, but sometimes that feels like forever!

Oh, another suggestion: get a foam roller if you don't have one already! It's a good compliment to exercise to help get your back muscles behaving.

What do you use a foam roller for?

This article looks like it explains it okay--I use it to help my upper back and roll along the outsides of my thighs (my muscles get tight and my knees end up twinging from it on the outside). I also have a Back Buddy to help release my shoulders which get HORRIFICALLY tense, probably from boobs + computing.

Ooh, thanks for the foam roller link--I just bought one over the weekend and have been trying to figure out what to do with it. That's the best explanation I've seen.

I cringe linking to this because the surrounding site is so RAH-BLAH but I bumped into it recently and it has a pretty good run down of targeting different muscle groups with the foam roller:

http://www.t-nation.com/readArticle.do?id=475832

Hmm, I'm not sure I have these trigger points. My physical therapist also massaged various areas in some sessions, and while she did say that some muscles were tight, I never experienced any of this unknotting or pain/release feeling with the massage.

Hrm, well, if your physical therapist's massages didn't relieve anything, maybe a foam roller wouldn't. But if tightness keeps being an issue, a foam roller is a tricky thing to get the hang of but pretty beneficial.

Well, I think the massages helped with mobility when it was quite bad (at times bending forward/downward didn't just hurt, I just couldn't do such movement), so they might have relieved tightness, and they had a firm pressure that kind of hurt as pressure, but I don't recognize any sensation I'd describe as "unknotting", like that sequence where it hurts worst in a specific spot and then relaxes is not something I recognize.

Some of the back pain books I've read described this technique as well with a small ball or as self massage for pain relief (not with a foam roller though, hence my confusiom) and described which areas to try for these "triggers", and I tried that for alleviating the pain -- my sciatic pain at its worst was the worst pain I ever felt, worse than an abscessed tooth, was constant regardless of sitting/standing/lying and oral pain meds didn't do anything, so that were some really unpleasant weeks and I was game to try all sorts of stuff from temperature to pressing on various body parts to positioning my back and legs or whatever to make any sort of difference -- but I never found any spots that produced this kind of effect.

I think there are definitely ways to use a tennis ball instead for the same purposes; I just think people find the foam roller easier to manage. For instance, my physical therapist tried to get me to do some things with some tennis balls on my shoulder muscles around the spine and I just could NOT get it to work right and got the Back Buddy instead.

Foam rollers aren't really pleasant to use either, but afterwards things don't feel so tight for me.

Oh, and an alternative to the YAYOG book is the app they have for a few bucks on Android or Apple's App Store.

I don't think Yoga is going to work for me. With all of these also spiritual health practices I tend to have serious trouble with the framing (what you call woo I guess). And sometimes also with the people they attract at least around here.

Like, I once did a qi-gong course some years back, and the movement was okay and helped with my then milder lower back pain too, but the talk of the instructor was so idiotic. Not even the talk about qi, I expected that about "energies" signing up for something based on Chinese traditional medicine, but he said all kind of nonsense, like how aids was occurring because of the "modern lifestyle" (not primarily in a homophobic sense as if was a gay disease, he meant because we weren't active enough anymore), totally ignoring how it is most prevalent in poor areas in sub-Saharan Africa and caused by a virus. And yeah, one example, but not a singular one, so I'd need to have the conventional movement approaches fail before I switched my framing like that, because otherwise the potential aggravation for me is not worth it.

Also I don't really want to learn a new practice, one that seems to take quite a lot of dedication if you want to do it properly, and research about what type you want to practice etc. when actually the straightforward PT exercises helped make my back pain go away too, and I already learned those.

I can tolerate weight talk much better than the spiritual stuff, so that's not an absolute. The You Are Your Own Gym one is actually one of the books I looked at in the library, and I found all the "I was special forces and the military does this" weird and somewhat off-putting (it's the kind of thing I meant with power fantasies in my post), but if you say the exercise progressions are good, I might just look at those again.

There is definitely a ton of yoga that doesn't concern itself much with woo, but it can be hard knowing whether or not you might run into some going in. And from what you're saying it does sound like it's not for you.

Went and got YAYOG to see what you were talking about (since I'm trying to get back into an exercise kick myself right now) and yeah, there is waaaaaay more male power fantasy stuff in the text than in the Body By You book. Additionally, I think the Body By You book has a more straightforward program of exercise progressions, even though YAYOG has more exercises listed, and I think the range of the exercises starts easier.

I also really like the way the BBY book has your initial assessment of what level of exercises you should start out with as well as not having a defined progression of what level of exercise you should be doing week by week--you move up the ladder when you can do the full set with good form. So, my advice is to try and find the BBY book--it's probably the least odiously burdened material you're seeking. If you feel like you're graduating out of BBY or getting bored with the exercise on rails, hop on over to the YAYOG book instead.

Sounds like the YAYOG/BBY books illustrate the gendered differences in the motivational fantasies in strength training books I noticed, lol.

My library had the German version of the BBY one available as ebook, so I'll give it a try. Thanks for the rec.

Keep in the Part II section, chapters 4-6, and you should avoid the majority of the stuff you aren't into, I think.

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tips for setting motivational goals with bodyweight exercises?

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