Hey! Long time no post - I am kinda sorting my life out in every way possible at the moment and need a bit of help with my weight and diet habits. Basically, everytime I have a competition coming up, i diet to get into my favourite weight catergory where I do a lot better. It's getting a bit stupid now as for the last 3 years my weight and diet has been like a yoyo and it can't be good for me? I've tried most diets and pretty much crash diet a month before the comp to lose 3-4kgs Afterwards I hate the deprivation so much i tend to stuff myself for a couple weeks then go back to normal diet. I've tried going on low GI diet as a permanent thing as it is more suitable as a long term thing, but still get bad cravings - pizza, cakes and biscuits mostly! I suffer quite badly with them and can get quite depressed if I can't eat them. Then if I stuff myself I feel bad afterwards I'm worried I could end up with an eating disorder - I will quit competing eventually, and don't want to get really fat. I've put on 10lb just in a couple of weeks before! i am always undoing my hard work. Basically I will normally train twice a week in TKD where we do about 30 minutes of fitness and 1 hr of kicking or patterns or whatever it is we are doing. once a month we are starting squad training which is hardcore fitness and sparring for 2hours. I might train 3 times a week sometimes but it's not really an option at the moment i wish it was as it tends to do the trick). i teach once a week, but don't really like to join in. I was reading a post, and it made me think that the solution might be weight training. Although i will gain weight, it would speed up my metabolism and i would require more calories so might be able to get away with the odd pizza without my figure suffering. maybe that could be an option but only once i have quit competing? i am 165cm and at the moment weigh 65kg. i can fluctuate between 67kg (after really eating what i like, for example after xmas) then i will slim down to 61kg's for comps. i have no idea what to do, and would appreciate any advice. maybe a little routine i can do at home using my own body weight? i would want something to build me up gently i think. Would really appreciate some advice and hope you can help
Weight loss and weight gain are primarily related to diet. So if you get your diet sorted you should be able to control your weight much more easily. Yoyoing up and down and crash diets are really bad for you and set you up for problems with your weight later in life. However the odd treat is not going to hurt you. I tend to follow an 90%/10% diet. So 90% of what I eat is good and the rest is 'cheat' food. The cheat food usually involves a takeaway meal once a week, and some cake at the weekend. How long did you try the low GI diet for? I've recently been doing what I describe as a 'partiallly primal' diet. On week days I don't eat any processed starchy carbs until my evening meal. So for breakfast I have fruit, yoghurt, cinnamon and quark cheese, for lunch either a tuna or salmon with peppers cucumber and tomato or a bucket load of veggies with chicken or fish and a sauce, mid afternoon I have a banana and a protein smoothie, and then the evening meal is usually pasta, rice or potatoes with meat and veggies. Post training I'll have a chocolate milk. Since I've been doing this I'm losing around 1lb per week and I don't generally get food cravings. I'm more motivated to train in the evenings because I don't get home and feel really hungry. Weight training would help, as would doing a conditioning session at home a couple of nights a week. With weightlifting the best exercises are compound lifts such as squats, deadlifts, bench pressing, overhead pressing and rows, supplemented with dips and chin ups. What equipment/facilities do you have access to? If you have no equipment then there are pushups, handstand pushups, pistols and other bodyweight options you can use. For conditioning ideas take a look at Ross Enamait's site http://www.rosstraining.com/articles.html
some stuff at home that works (for all of these you can find dozens of variations on them on YouTube the net etc.: Step ups step up onto a bench/chair/ledge to progress it (eg. make it harder) go for time... add weight(sandbag/dumbbells/backpack full of heavy stuff)... increase the height of step. you can alternate so step with one leg first and then the other... you can also stand side on and step across. This is a great way to build up the glutes/quads and calf muscles to add a serious coordination element to it... step up and then touch alternate elbow and knee... obviously this is the knee on the non-supporting leg. Lunges all manner of lunges... especially the multi-planar lunges. lunge forward at an angle... and lunge laterally to the side. Maintain good form and don't let your forward knee creep past your toes or shoelaces. Also remember to keep good erect posture and eyes forward not looking down. Reverse the lunge for a slightly different feel. You can add weight to your lunge by holding sandbag or dumbell. Even a backpack full of books. Go for time or reps. Be forewarned... massive lunge sets will give you sore hamstrings... but its a good thing. Planks all manner of planks to hit your core stabilizers... prone plank, side plank... you name it planks are a killer. Go for time. Press Ups All manner. If you can't quite get a full press up going just yet... do them from the knees... careful on those knees those us a bit of padding... pillow or wadded up sweat shirt. Try in incline press ups... decline press ups... killers. Even press ups on a wall are a great place to start if you cant get a full one in just yet. Balance drills Toe touches. Single leg toe touch.. stand on single leg... reach down with same side hand and touch toe... go for reps. Then go for reps reaching down with opposite hand. So you are reaching across and down. Left left hand to right supporting leg/toes.. and then reverse. Harder than they look... if they're too easy and your balance is spot on... try them on a pillow... add some instability and go for it again. anyhow just off the top of my head. Give it a go and let us know how it goes.
Great advice from Frodocious and Slip One thing that helped me lose weight in a relatively pain free way was to get up half an hour early every weekday morning do 5 X two minute rounds of brisk shadow boxing before breakfast. Not a proper workout but enough to get your heart racing. Training at this time of day is a great fat burner and doing it five times a week will speed up your metabalism. Give it a try, a nice side effect is that you feel more energetic and wide awake for the whole day
All sounds great thanks! At the moment I am eating porridge with rice milk for breakfast, raw carrots with low fat houmous and a smoothie, slim fast for lunch (i have very little time during lunch or break and sometimes can go without food all day which ends up with me eating a lot!!) Dinner sometimes i skip if i dont have time and am super hungry after training. I really like salads and healthy foods - the only trouble is dressing, is mayonnaise okay? i like the 90/10 as i feel it's something i could do. i feel though that if i lost 1lb i would then gain it again by having a heavy meal at weekends. Unfortunately i have no access to any equipment but i don't think it's necessary - i am crap at the plank so already i know what will help. now all i need is the motivation to do exercise on my own as part of a routine!!! I'll have to get the music pumping. Really appreciate this, thank you!
cavallin. Have you heard of metabolic typing? This is not a fad diet, but rather being able to choose the foods that suit your body type. For example, you are living in England, so lets assume that you have a European background, with European parents and grandparents. Now historically we have frozen winters over here, so that leads us to assume that we would have had to live on a largely protein and fat rich diet in the winters, because fruit and veg did not grow in the frozen land. If your background is say from the Bahamas, then fruit and veg would have grown all year round, making high protein and fat not necessary. These are very rough examples, but you can see how your heritage can have an effect on your mtabolic type. It would be unhealthy giving an Eskimo a fruit smoothie and porridge for lunch. His body would not be adapted to digest it. There are questionnaires available that would help you find your metabolic type. A majority of people will insist that most of your energy should come from carbs, but for most people in this country that does not suit their metabolic type. The good thing about metabolic typing is that it is not a short term solution, but a method of choosing an individual's genetically-based nutrition and diet requirements. Not only will you loose weight without trying, you will start to feel younger again because your internal systems will function with you rather than spending energy fighting and dealing with what you put in your mouth. As a side note do NOT take sweetners or food that says LOW SUGAR. Artificial sweeteners tell your taste buds that 'sweet stuff has arrived', which to the brain means 'nutrition has arrived'. When the artificial drink or food reaches the small intestine, the receptors find no nutrition. A message is then sent back to the brain saying 'We've been tricked-there's no nutrition here'. The appestat (the part of your brain that triggers satiety) sends the message to 'keep eating because we need nutrition to help process all this fake food and run your body. Remember you cannot loose weight, or train until the food you eat has run your body first. The body does not care you have a competition coming up. It does care about running your internal organs, skin, hair, teeth, maintaining core temperature, digestion, elimination and so on. Metabolic typing will naturally take care of this because you will be eating what you need, not what you think you should have, or worse what one os us sugggests.
Thought this might help. It is a link to the Australian Institute of Sport site and has a section on Making Weight with advice from professionals. http://www.ausport.gov.au/ais/nutrition/factsheets/sports/taekwondo
Don't go all day without food, as you've noted it makes you eat a lot more later on. Take a bag of fruit and nuts or a protein/meal replacement bar with you, so you can always eat something. It depends on how much you use. I tend to use a french dressing or balsamic vinegar based dressing. As long as you're sensible and don't over-eat then it shouldn't be a problem. Just plan what you order carefully, e.g. I stopped getting a nan bread with my Indian and now get an extra veggie side dish instead. Bodyweight exercises like Slip recommended are fine when you are starting out. You can add weight to them using a backpack filled with books or you might consider buying some resistance bands. Not the crappy ones you see for pilates but decent heavyweight bands like these - http://www.absolutegolduk.com/shop/bands.html
it says on that website to eat low residue food to empty your digestive system - white pasta??? for real? i am not convinced...
Keep in mind that this is in relation to your meal the night before the competitiion. I think they also point out that you need to keep up your carbs when training. This is not just any website... The Australian Insitiute of Sport is heavily funded by the govt and is cutting edge when it comes to sports science. All of our Olympians and most other elite sports train there - some full time.
As Wayneshin states that advice is aimed at the last 24hrs before a competition: It is aimed at athletes trying to make weight for a specific competition, not at people wanting to alter their diets and lifestyles to help with healthy wiehgt loss.
that's really good news i like - the best news ever however: the weight divisions have finally moved and i no longer have to diet!!! i am so happy!!!!!! thanks for everyone's help, i'm not going to pig out obviously but at least i can stick to a diet now and not have to starve to death before a comp
I actually don't think you have a huge problem here. Yes your weight is fluctutating and it's probably better if it didn't, but it's not fluctuating that much. I would hazard that high school wrestlers would routinely fluctuate around the same levels. Loosing 3-4 kgs in a month isn't really dangerous at all. Loosing it in a week yes, but generally it's suggested that losing 1kg a week is very good to aim for when losing weight. Unless you are professional or aiming at being professional your main focus should be maintaining a good weight for general health and wellbeing, rather than on competition weight. And doing strength training will help your MA even if it doesn't effect your weight, so do it anyway.
Cavallin, I'm not a big fan of diets and I hate weight divisions (one of the reasons I gave up serious kickboxing, Judo competition in favor of Dog Brothers stickfighting (no weight divisions ). IMHO you should constantly have a 'healthy' diet and a solid fitness programme, you should walk around normally only about 2/3kg off of your fight weight. You should have a phased plan for competition fitness something along the lines of: 12-6 weeks: Focus on strength training 6-4 weeks: Focus on cardio, complex and HIIT 1 week: Cardio only, keep it easy With the complexes (search for them at www.t-muscle.com) you'll see any excess you've been carrying around vanish (so long as you have the diet under control). With a plan like this you may not be in the lower weight division that you'd want, but I'd guarantee that the majority in the division you would be in would not be training this hard, and you'd be somewhat of a 'beast' Think CrossFit only better
