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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • A PPL split is a great choice, so no need to switch to full body unless you want to.

    I also find doing full body takes too much time on a given day. My current approach is an upper-lower split instead. That way, on weeks when I can only hit the gym 4 days, all muscles are still getting stimulation twice in that week. When I can more consistently go 6 times per week I tend to do PPL.

    The main comment I would have, which has also been mentioned by others, is you probably need to specify your goal (e.g. hypertrophy vs strength?). Then you can research the ideal rep ranges for that goal, as they can differ.

    And most importantly, you need to plan for progression - you need some form of creating ‘progressive overload’ in your programme. If your sets and reps are always static at 3X15, then how will you do that? It may not be realistic to increase weight each time, but you could increase reps over time, up to a higher limit, and when you’ve reached that, you then increase the weight and start at a lower rep number - rinse and repeat. There are many other approaches to this too - so find what makes sense for you.












  • As a gaming mom myself, I’d second the Steamdeck recommendations. I love mine! Best thing I have bought in years honestly.

    I can play in the living room, while hanging out with the rest of the family, and I take it with me on work trips as well. I don’t have Valheim on it, but I do have No Man’s Sky and it works well. I’m currently playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on the deck - there are so many great options.


  • There are many different philosophies on this, and it will depend on your goals (strength, hypertrophy, etc) and also just your own preferences.

    My basic strategy is to train something like 3-4 sets of a given exercise, and aim for each set to be in the 8-15 reps range. So I’ll start with a weight where I can do say 4 sets of 8. Next time I do that exercise, I’ll aim to increase reps to 4 sets of 10 or 12. Then when I do maybe 4 sets of 15, the following session i would increase the weight and go back to 4 sets of 8 reps at the now higher weight. And so on.

    It’s not exact, I make sure I’m paying attention to form, and listening to feedback from my body, and sometimes I’ll progress faster, other times I plateau for ages in a given exercise.

    It’s also not the only way I try to fit in progressive overload. I may add a finisher exercise for the same muscle, or do certain exercises to failure, add another set to an exercise and so on. The overall aim is to keep challenging my body in different ways.


  • It’s perhaps not a fully fledged fitness tracker, and it’s certainly not a smartwatch - but my favorite health tracking device has turned out to be my Oura ring.

    I used it alongside my Apple Watch for quite a while, but I’ve found that the Oura ring gives me plenty of insight on my sleep, recovery and (more limited) activity. And the form factor is just awesome! I don’t even notice I’m wearing it, and I only charge it every 5 days or so.

    I’ve stopped wearing the Apple Watch altogether now, and I find it freeing not to have all those notifications available on my wrist, while still having the health tracking I want from the Oura. Obviously it’s not a good fit for someone who does want the other features of a smartwatch, but solely as a health tracker I really like it.



  • I am not at all from a tech background. I have a humanities/ social science educational background, I work in the organizational management space, for a humanitarian organization.

    I do not enjoy a lot of social media, but I had been using Reddit for 8+ years, as my only social media platform really. I enjoyed it for the specialist communities focused on niche interests. I’m hoping to replicate some of that with Lemmy, which is much more aligned with my value set than a large corporate run social platform.



  • For five days a week, I do an upper-lower split. I tend to do lower body Monday, Thursday and Saturday, and upper body Tuesday and Thursday, taking Wednesday and Sunday off (I may do cardio stuff those days).

    My priority at the moment is legs, due to a bad knee which I’m focused on keeping stable and strong. You could switch this to having three upper days per week with two lower, if you’re more focused on upper body growth. Or you could even do a push-pull-legs, but then you’d only maybe hit legs once a week, which I think is too little personally - again, all depends on your goals.

    With any split, you can easily find a free starter program if you look around. Then you can tweak it based on your own needs. As an example of the content: for my upper days I focus on hitting upper back, lats, some lower back, chest, front, side, rear delts, as well as biceps and triceps. And I add abs at the end. For lower body days I do glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, adductors and abductors. Sometime o add abs on leg days too.

    Which exercises you specifically want to do for each muscle is really down to preference. If you’re very new to it, you could start off with machines, and over time you can tweak your programme to be more varied e.g. with free weight, cables etc. The main thing at first is to learn the form of each exercise, and to track your reps and weights, so you and progressively increase those over time, for growth.