My only consolation right now is that my press is improving. Even so, what I’m doing is far from impressive by any stretch of the imagination
That will continue until you start doing the difficult things that are necessary to reach your goals.
Edit: so that there is zero miscommunication, that difficult thing is put on bodyfat. Not train more.
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If you can take the steps necessary to deal with your eating disorder, to the point where you can live a healthy life, that will be impressive. More impressive than a heavy deadlift.
It will also likely be one of the most applauded feats on these boards.
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Anna, are you able to get hold of your therapist? As a relative outsider, it looks like you’re in a spiral and having a session to help ground you and get you out of it is probably the best thing you can do.
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We’re meeting this Saturday. She’s fully booked
School starts today so I think the anxiety y is playing a role there
Alright, you should spend this week doing what you can to manage your anxiety above most other things. Do things you enjoy and that consume your attention. Moving forward, it might be good to be proactive and tactical when scheduling your sessions so that you can make sure high-anxiety situations are addressed as they happen or before.
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I am a little curious about your definition of “good conditioning” and why it is important to you. If I weighed 95 pounds, my ability and potential to do “conditioning” and be good at it would skyrocket. While also killing me slowly and preventing me from achieving other, more important goals.
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Well, I don’t have any objective tests now, but at least not worse than before.
I weight 98-100lbs now (depending on sodium intake)
That’s the point- I’m not even good at what I have an objective advantage in
I don’t know much about conditioning but if it were an activity I engaged in repeatedly I wouldn’t give much credence to if my performance differs and I’m at a different bodyweight. I understand it’s hard not to, I’ve been through this with rock climbing but like, if I’m a few pounds heavier and do ~100 moves that’d make the total workload increase non-negligibly.
View it as a PR at this bodyweight instead. Also, it’s one instance. Take outcomes seriously, don’t take them personally.
@dagill2 had some great words in @aldebaran s log about how to measure yourself as a person. How you perform, and how you look, are not good markers on which to evaluate yourself. Break a leg tomorrow, and then what happens to your identity?
Since your body needs both fat and muscle this is great.
Secondly, you desire to gain muscle but you continue to do things that work against that. There are things I should be doing that are harder for me to do than write more extensively about this topic so obviously I’ll opt for the easier choice here and write about it. We’ve danced around the topic in the past and I’ve never gone into any detail.
Net protein balance. Two processes that operate on your muscles are Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS), and Muscle Protein Breakdown (MPB). MPS builds muscle. Your body assimilates protein to build muscle. The common analogy is that protein are bricks, and they make up muscle tissue. You can add bricks to build muscle. This is stimulated by two things. Ordinarily these texts are written around weight training, but you can repurpose these paragraphs to think about achieving enough muscle tension to illicit growth.
- Resistance training with moderate to heavy “weights”. Essentially, using 25% of your physical capability won’t build significant muscle, while anything above 60% will do the trick.
- Consuming a diet with adequate calories and protein. Don’t skimp on protein, or calories.
MPB breaks down muscle. Training drives MPB. You break down some protein, which is disposed of and if calories and protein intake is adequate you can assimilate more bricks than you smashed. But you don’t want an extreme amount of MPB. Here’s where your activity levels are a problem.
You want to tilt the scale to favour MPS over MPB. As @flappinit said, if he wanted to lose muscle, he’d do what you do.
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My larger point is that those things are not “good conditioning”. Walking 30k steps and doing hundreds of burpees while having these issues you have is most definitely BAD conditioning. Counter productive at the best, destructive at the worst. Your inability to maintain previous levels is because you have more meat on your bones, and that makes “conditioning” by your definition automatically more difficult. Your cardiovascular and pulmonary systems have more to support. AND THAT IS A GOOD THING in your case.
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Are you kidding?
You just did 600m of sprints (no one does that kind of volume btw for speed work). Then you did 5 sets of jumps and you expect a good burpee performance? That workout is wack. It looks like you’re just doing as much work as possible for the sake of doing as much work as possible.
You were making good progress, eating more, taking 3 days off per week, limiting volume, now you’re back to this.
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Still eating more, limiting volume got thrown by the wayside 
I figured it’d be mentally easier to follow pwns do more work so you have to eat philosophy
Also low volume work is very boring and I definitely have training add
That is NOT my philosophy. Please don’t make me culpable here.
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Do more…maybe. Do more conditioning? No way. You are upgrading the engine of your car, that doesn’t mean you drive it with your pedal to the metal all the time.
Your conditioning work seems to be your “purging” method related to your eating disorder. Some do not eat. Others stick a finger down their throat. You do conditioning.
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In that case, it’s a misunderstanding. I was under the impression that you liked to “eat to match training “ not “train so you can eat”
That’s just his way of saying that he will eat dry wall if he has to in order to support what he is doing.
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It is not that.
Anna, what you are doing is training so you can eat more. I am eating more to support my training. The difference is huge.
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Rather than increasing total energy expenditure linearly in response to physical activity, individuals tend to adapt metabolically to increased physical activity, muting the expected increase in daily energy throughput.
These metabolic changes can be behavioral, such as sitting instead of standing, or fidgeting less, but they may also include reductions in other, non-muscular metabolic activity. For example, men and women enrolled in a long-term exercise study exhibited reduced basal metabolic rate at week 40 , and studies in healthy adult women have shown suppressed ovarian activity and lower estrogen production in response to moderate exercise
. Other species have also been shown to keep total energy expenditure remarkably constant in response to increased physical activity, reducing energy expenditure on growth, somatic repair, and basal metabolic rate and even reducing lactation and cannibalizing nursing offspring, even when food is available ad libitum and total energy expenditure is well within maximum sustained levels
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Yeah I know (because my world view at my advanced age is the exact other way around), I was just being a smartass. Although I suspect you would eat dry wall if you felt it worked.
But to be more accurate about Anna, she trains more so that she can eat more…and then feels like she needs to train even more because she ate too much and goes too far.
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I honestly don’t understand the difference. I want to be able to do crazy workouts and lift really heavy weights, and to do so need to eat more, but my performance continues to disappoint
It seems to be working very well for you