Hi guys, thanks for the welcome.
Quote:
Originally Posted by puneri
Glad to meet you.
Since you are a fitness consultant a question for you.
My trainer tells me to do 1 day back, 1 day legs and 1 day shoulder weight training. Core exercise every day. Since I am 60 years old, I should allow 48 hours rest for each muscle group.
But, I like to exercise every day and I start my exercise with interval cardio for 15 min. Followed by strength training for 20 min. Followed by yoga for 20 min.
I eat all perfectly healthy food. I lost around 22 lbs and now it has stopped for nearly 7 months. My dress size has been dropping though.
Can you tell me what could be wrong?
Frankly, there isn't one set way of going about things - 60 or not. It's pretty much folklore that you need 48 hours between bouts in order to recover. Granted, most trainers base their advice on hearsay.
Now quite honestly, the "rule" of resting 48 hrs between bouts isn't necessarily detrimental. In fact, in more cases than not, it's likely optimal. At the end of the day though, programming needs to be tailored to the individual. The process of tailoring should factor in things like individual recovery ability, training experience, strength levels, schedule, etc.
As an example though, I have clients your age who resistance train 6 days per week successfully. Something a lot of people forget about is the fact that our bodies adapt to a stress (such as progressive resistance training) on a variety of levels. Everyone is well aware that one of those adaptations is increased strength/muscle. But people tend to forget about things like an adaptation to recovery ability and the ability to handle training frequency.
Sorry for the diatribe... hopefully the above opens your eyes to the fact that there are no hard-fast rules like the ones you see many trainers espouse. Well there are some... but they're very simplistic and often overlooked.
Specific to what you're doing, if you were my client, I'd likely try spreading out the types of exercise you're doing. It's great that your schedule permits as much exercise as it does. But lumping everything together, at times, can have a dilutive effect. For instance, depending on your goals, you might only need 2-4 days of resistance training. So dedicate those days to that and insert conditioning work on the other days.
In regards to the resistance training, I hardly ever setup programs where you're training one body part per session and each body part once per week. For a variety of reasons, you should be hitting each major muscle group multiple times per week... which is where stuff like full body training comes into play, which I can get into if you've not heard of it before.
Based on your question, it sounds like your goal is continued fat loss. Most notably you mentioned that your dress sizes continue to drop. Don't fall into the trap of letting the scale dictate success or failure. Simultaneous body composition changes (fat down, muscle up) can certainly happen.
If you do find that you hit a wall on the scale and in terms of body comp, I'd turn to your nutrition first and foremost before looking at your exercise. It's very rare where the culprit behind a plateau is the actual exercise program. Much more often than not it's something nutritionally or it's a mismanagement of expectations/patience or it's messed up "math" pertaining to calorie needs/metabolism.
I've already rambled away for far too long and I'm sure you have more questions than answers. So let them fly if you're still interested in what I have to say and I'll do my best to help.
