tips for setting motivational goals with bodyweight exercises?

[ratcreature]

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.

Comments

[killabeez]

I have a pretty serious back injury (vaguely defined as spondylosis, which basically means "vertebrae in places they shouldn't be"). I started out with pilates-type PT, and worked my way to weight lifting. My current self-motivational exercise is deadlifting. It's one of those exercises where you can measure exact improvement, and I love it. It's not the only exercise I do, obviously! The most beneficial thing I do is actually rowing, followed by squats and kettlebell swings. But the deadlifting is how I motivate myself. I'm currently working on increasing my hand/wrist strength so I can lift more, as my hands are now the weakest link in my form.

[thalia]

It's really hard to quantify improvement with exercises like that. For me, it's enough knowing that my form is improving, and I can do more reps, and I can do harder variations... but tracking that is a whole other thing.

On the back pain front, my chiropractor talked me into giving yoga a try, and it's great. I've hardly had any pain at all in the two months since I started. And for me, knowing that my form is improving is enough to keep me coming to the classes, but YMMV.

[foxfirefey]

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!

[rydra_wong]

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.

What are the exercises you've learned and are using at the moment? I might be able to suggest progressions, or ways of measuring progress.

[rydra_wong]

By the way, are you looking for suggestions of other bodyweight exercises you can try? I can think of various ones which would help with improving back and core strength.