Good home exercise routine to increase endurance?

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keithme

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Hi guys, first time poster here and newbie to exercise in general. Anyway, I'm completely clueless as to what kind of exercises to do and would appreciate some advice. I'd describe myself as skinny though not scrawny. I'm not all that interested in the "perfect" body e.g; bulging muscles, 6-packs, etc (although if it is a side-effect I'm not gonna complain :D). At the moment I'm just trying to focus on strengthening my body and pushing myself to be the best I can. Due to time constraints and inaccessibility I'm unable to go to the gym, or at least on a regular basis. At the moment I'm doing 50x pushups, situps and squats 3 times a day as well as jogging 3miles a day at the nearby park. Gradually increasing the amount as I go along. As for my diet I've been trying my best to eat more meat/fish/eggs and cut down on junk food (hardest damn thing in my life). I've read that jogging has a negative effect on muscle gain, is this true? If so, does this affect stamina in anyway? Like I said, given a choice I'd rather be able to run 10 miles looking like a chopstick than have a body like a swimsuit model but only able to run 1. Also, is there any particular food that I should be avoiding? So am I on the right track here or is there something I'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance for the help!
 
Given your goals, it sounds like you are on the right track. You might want to start looking at progressions in terms of the body weight work, for example, change some of your sets of pushups to decline (feet up on something) or add a clap, or stack your hands close, or have your hands out farther in front, etc. Oodles of variations to increase the challenge. Switch out the situps for other core work such as planks. There are lots of progressions for planks too.

Food is really the key to better health. It is hard to wean yourself from processed food, but as you eat less and less, it doesn't taste as good, and it keeps getting easier. A good place to start is stop drinking your calories - no juice, no soda, limit the alcohol, limit additions to coffee if you drink it. Real food doesn't need a 'food facts' label and doesn't have ingredients you cannot pronounce. Try for items that have fewer than 5 ingredients total and no chemistry.

Keep up the good work!
 
Thanks for the reply, do you mind clarifying some stuff though? Why is juice off limits? I was always led to believe that fruits are core to a healthy lifestyle. Are you referring to the ones that come in a carton or all juice in general? I like to blend some fruits at home and drink them straight without adding any extra sugar or stuff. Also, does weight lifting help with endurance in any way or is it purely for the "ripped" look?
 
The advise on no juice was to avoid drinking calories, not a slight against having fruit. It is very common in my experience for people to say they don't understand where the excess fat is coming from as they barely eat, then take a gulp of beer. Getting most calories from food makes monitoring easier.

Weight training can be cardio, endurance, body-buiding, power gaining, co-ordiantion work or what ever you want it to be. Doing 10 sets of 50 one legged squats passing a 1kg dumbell under the supporting leg is weight training but will not give the same result as 3 sets of 6 deadlifts with 200kg. There are a lot of generalisations used in fitness as with anything, many have some grounding in fact, but dig around and there foundations get weak.

Jogging can have a negative effect on muscle gain if you use the calorie surplus that would have been used for gains on the jog and don't replenish it. Below will try to show this.
Calories taken in 3,000
Used for survival 1,500
Used in builing session 700
Used in jogging 500
Used for recovery 300
Available for growth 0
If this looks like a disaster, please observe the really simple solution below
Calories taken in 3,250
Used for survival 1,500
Used in builing session 700
Used in jogging 500
Used for recovery 300
Available for growth 250
And you get to have a healthy strong cardio system too, bargain.

If you want to be able to run 10 miles you will have to eat enough to fuel it anyway so get those complex carbs in and get running.

What you are doing is fine as a start but as you progress you will need to make the training more balanced. There is nothing in your current program to strengthen your back, to be fair that is all you are missing, but as I am sure you will appreciate it is important to add something like deadlifts, pull ups etc. to get this balance.

Muscle gain wise, reps need to be in the 10 to 6 region for optimum gains with high weights. Your current program is very much stamina and endurance, not building up. Nothing wrong with that but if you wan't more muscle mass you will want to progress to heavier work.
 
I'll try to implement some form of exercise for my back but I think you've lost me on the calories thing. Sorry if I'm over-complicating a simple issue but is there an ideal amount of calories I should be aiming for? Is there like a rough cutoff point where calories are no longer used for growth? Also is there a tool or method I can use to tell me how much calories Im using for my work outs? Seeing as different people have different metabolisms I'd assume it would be pretty hard to calculate accurately. Following that, does excessive calories necessarily mean a loss in terms of strength/endurance? Im used to eating just enough i.e; not over-stuffing myself or under-eating. I do want to become fitter but not at the cost of having to agonize over my every decision at the dinner table. Last of all, due to some personal matters I've been unable to exercise following my previous routine where I broke it up into 1 set in the morning,evening and night. To make up for it I've started doing 3 sets at night with about 10 minute intervals between each set. Overall Im still doing the same amount of exercise. Will this have any effect on my general fitness?
 
Diet is not as complex as many make out in a lot of ways. Most of what the body needs is fuel, and ideally this should be predominantly complex carbs aka starch. Masses of excess sugar, fat and protein will become an issue, or many, but sensible balance is all you need.

Everything you do uses energy, including ironically digesting the food to get the energy. Key to the question this also includes growth. There is no dead set calculation that will say how much so some of it is guess work, especially because the more muscle you have the more energy you burn just feeding it even at rest. The exact amount of food you will need is not going to be available but I think the fitness.com site has a calorie consumption calculator, if not google it. These will take your weight and activities and tell you how much energy this will burn on average. This is only ever a guid but is better than nothing.
Growth requires excess, and anyon edeclaring they get this perfect is kidding themselves. Staying lean and growing means you will have burned some of the muscle you gained, keeping all the gains will likely mean adding a bit of excess fat to go with it. If you obsess over it, you're life will be miserable, just get close and adjust up and down overall as you notice the corrections are needed.

The example I gave was just to show that the only way jogging would prevent muscle gain was if it burned all of the available energy you have taken in leaving no excess spare for growth. I run 4 times a week, according to my tracking app each uses around 700 calories, so well over a days normal persons intake of food just used up in running. I haven't dropped weight doing this, I just eat more to cover the need.

There is a lot of research on duration and frequency of activity. Most points to frequency during the day being irrelevant so you should be fine.
 
keithme said:
Thanks for the reply, do you mind clarifying some stuff though? Why is juice off limits? I was always led to believe that fruits are core to a healthy lifestyle. Are you referring to the ones that come in a carton or all juice in general? I like to blend some fruits at home and drink them straight without adding any extra sugar or stuff.
Click to expand...

If you are blending some fruits, and not adding sugar, no problem. Juice that you buy, even "no sugar added" juices actually have more sugar than regular Coke ounce per ounce and that is why they are not good for a body, also, all the fiber has been removed. Fruit is good because the fiber is intact, the micro-nutrients are intact, and the natural sugars are bound up in the fiber so there is no insulin spike, and load on the liver for handling the fructose is minimal - this is crucial for reducing risk of metabolic syndrome (something that most Americans and in fact virtually anyone who eats the western industrial diet is at risk of even if normal body weight).

There is a school of thought that raises concerns about some of the high power blenders that turn veggies/fruits into smoothies. The concern is that the insoluable fiber is so torn up that the structure is lost. That structure is what supports the micronutrients and the soluable fiber, so the benefit of the whole food is gone...
 
Ok, thanks guys. I really appreciate the advice. Never knew there were so much do's and don't s for exercise. Guess I'll just continue with my routine and eating habits for the moment and adjust accordingly as I see fit.
 
Crazy part. The deeper you study the more you realise high level is the best place to monitor from. If you try to get x grams of y per z pound of body weight etc. you will find it unbearable and spend your entire life stressed about a few grams under or over, I have seen it.
Reality is your diet will not be perfect, ever, I will guarantee it. Every day you will consume too much of some things and not enough of others, and your body is set up to handle this incredibly well, within limits. As long as on average your diet is well balanced and there are no gaping holes of massive over indulgences you will survive and be able to train effectively.
If you are consuming masses of junk and food that has had any semblum of goodness processed out of it, this will take it's toll, but be sensible and you will be fine.

Exercise biggest do, enjoy it. If you don't do this you will quit because it will be a chore. If you enjoy what you do and it is a slower road to success you will still do better than those taking the fast track and hating it, because they will either stop or miss sessions where you won't.
The details are complex, because there is risk to getting things wrong, but once you are doing it you wonder what people find so confusing, then remember you were one of them once.
 
Every day your body burns up a certain number of calories just by keeping you alive - pumping your blood, breathing, thinking, and the like. This is called your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Exercise and other physical activity contributes to burning more calories. People start getting fat when their body can't use up all of the calories that a person is taking in daily. Evolutionarily, your body wants to store the excess as fat so that if there is a time of food shortage (a hard winter, that kind of thing), there will be energy to stay alive even with a much more restricted amount of food.
 
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