Pointers / No Weight Loss

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sprakonline

New member
Hi everyone, thank you for reading my post.

Let me start right away with the requested information:

I am 35 and male.
Current weight of around 138 - 139 pounds
Height of 5 foot, 5 inches
BMI is approximately 23.1
Body fat is approximately 20%

Food Intake

I usually have a regular banana for breakfast in the morning. I'll have hot tea with a couple of Splenda packets throughout the day. Could be between 24 and 40 oz each day. For lunch, I have a large salad - about two cups of iceberg lettuce, onions, mushrooms, carrots, tomato, and sunflower seeds. Low fat ranch dressing. Combined together, this is about 400 calories according to the calorie count websites I look at.

For dinner, I have a mix of different things. Cut-up potatoes, mixed vegetables, baked chicken breast/thighs with oregano and garlic salt sprinkled on.

Every now and then I do 'splurge' and have a small helping of candy, cheese, crackers, or chips but nothing significant and not over 200 calories worth. Fridays and Saturdays I'll usually have a glass of sweet wine.

Looked at another weight loss site (Free Dieting) a while ago and used their calorie counter. Showed to maintain weight, about 1,788 calories a day were needed. Fat loss - 1,438 calories and extreme fat loss was 1,112.

Exercise

Have a desk job - so I sit most of the day but do get up every now and then to walk around the building. For exercise, I have a gym membership. Started out on the elliptical in a performance/hill climbing mode for 30 minutes and it would show approximately 2.6 miles. For the past few weeks, I changed it up and I jog on the track for about 30 minutes - about 2.5 miles.

I then follow it up with using about 18 different weight machines for lower and upper workouts to strength train. Three sets of 12 repetitions on each machine. Overall, about 90 minutes of workout three days a week. I have 'moved up' in some weights during the process.

I have not lost any weight for months. Bouncing between 137 and 139 depending on when I weigh. I initially joined the gym around the beginning of the year and was 145 pounds. So in a whole year, only five pounds have come off, although I wasn't watching food intake nearly as much until September.
 
Welcome to the forum. Why do you want to lose more weight? You sound very fit & trim to me.
 
BMI is at the higher end of the 'normal' scale. Also have a bit of extra weight around the stomach area which is the primary goal to get rid of.
 
Extra weight around the stomach can just be from bloating (wheat intolerance, drinking beer or other gassy drinks....) BMI is such an imprecise measurement, but 20 % body fat is excellent.
 
First thing I noticed is the low protein content of your diet, a piece of chicken breast is roughly 27 grams of protein with very little protein during the rest of the day, you have around 50 kg of lean mass which means you should be consuming 50 grams of protein at a bare minimum with weight training that minimum is 100 grams.

1452 calories is your BMR and 1597 calories TDEE (maintenance calories) so if you have been basing your calorie intake on the other site you are likely eating to much. however TDEE is only ever a starting point unless measured in a lab.

Why on earth are you using 18 machines ? This is insane and counter productive both for achieving results and placing yourself at high risk of injury, However not enough info to offer solutions here except reduce reps per set and increase weight appropriately as high reps are not ideal for maintaining muscle in calorie deficit. On lifting days cardio should be done after lifting, not before.
 
Thank you for the response Trusylver. Yes - the other site said the maintenance calories were a few hundred higher. Your BMR count is higher than I've been consuming - which is around 1,200 - 1,300 a day.

How are you calculating the BMR? I used a calculator at verywellfit.com and chose "Sedentary" and it shows 1,791. But with three days of 90-minute exercise, I don't think Sedentary was the right selection.

18 machines - just counted and there are actually a few more. There are eight lower body machines (leg curl upwards, leg curl downwards, two bench press machines, inner thigh, outer thigh, hamstring). Nine upper body machines and three 'middle' machines (abdominal machines - one moves up and down, another side to side, and a back extension). Can't recall all of the upper body machines but there is the bench press, lat pulldown, row machine, bicep.

The reason I started doing all of the machines - I used to only do either the lower body or the upper body each time but with seeing no results, I started doing all of them every day which doubled the strength training from about 30 minutes to an hour.

Good tip about doing the cardio after - I just started doing this last night and did the jogging afterwards.

The calories and type certainly makes it more complicated than just watching calories and exercising.

Goal isn't really to increase my weight lifting capabilities right now; I plan to do that once the extra fat weight comes off first.
 
For calorie calculation I use the Katch-McArdle Formula, which bases calories on lean mass, unlike the other common formulae which are based on whole bodyweight including the fat which is not metabolically active in general and therefore not burning calories. The exercise your doing still keeps you in sedentary.

more exercises is not better when it comes to strength training, using all the machines in the gym each time is a recipe for serious injury in the long run from muscle imbalances.

strength training and fat loss

doing lots of different exercises for lots of reps is a hypertrophy training regime, hypertrophy occurs during calorie surplus or in people very new to training who have very high fat reserves. In calorie deficit you are doing very little, with not enough weight to fully maintain lean mass. Training like a bodybuilder is not ideal for fat loss.

Strength training (lower reps, higher weight) is not designed to build muscle size but primarily strength plus but if in calorie surplus some hypertrophy will occur.

strength training is what you need for maintaining lean mass during calorie deficit for fat loss, giving the more athletic final appearance rather than simply being skinny but still having a flabby look when all done.

Exercise selection and time lifting in the gym

exercise selection is important for muscle balance and joint health, the muscles which work on a joint need to be trained equally or joint problems come into play. eg Biceps and triceps both activate the elbow joint, there are a lot of bicep machines and free weight exercises in the gym and there are generally less tricep machines so if you are using all the machines in a gym then the biceps will be worked more and harder than triceps which is a problem. common injury problems in this situation in tendinitis and bursitis in the elbow, the imbalance also means stronger biceps compared to triceps will lead to tight triceps making the tricep more susceptible to tearing.

A long weight training workout does not mean a good or effective session.
 
Good information.

So what do you believe I should be doing? Sounds like I should not be doing as many repetitions on each machine - should I cut it down to 3 x 8? 3 x 6?

Should I focus on doing upper body one day and lower body the next? Effectively splitting the strength training in half? Overall, I began doing both upper and lower body each session to extend and make the workouts longer - thinking that is more calories burned.

Is the cardio portion OK? Jogging for 30 minutes yielding about 2.5 miles?
 
The biggest calorie burn from strength training comes not from the time doing the actual exercise but the metabolism boost for the following 38 hours. from a tracking perspective time lifting should only include the time actually spent lifting and not the rest between sets otherwise your calorie tracking apps will far over estimate the calories burnt during the session.

Effect of an acute period of resistance exercise on excess post-exercise oxygen consumption: implications for body mass management

exercise selection

full body or split routine are both fine, there are many ways to split up a routine and many different reasons why but in this situation it is not that important.

try to select 1-2 exercises per body part (muscle). doing 3-4 sets at 8 reps, weight should be one where you feel you could not complete a 9th rep with good form. If you do a bicep exercise also do a tricep exercise, if you do a quadricep exercise then a hamstring exercise also needs to be done (A push pull split has you doing these exercises on different days in a similar way you are familiar with doing an upper body/lower body split).

Compound exercises are better than isolation exercises working more muscles at once, burning more calories and means less time training.

eq a free weight Squat is a compound lift, it works your entire core, quads, hamstrings calves and glutes. To achieve this with isolation machines you would need to use roughly 6 different isolation exercises to train those same muscles.

Cardio

there is nothing wrong with steady cardio however you will achieve a higher calorie burn by using HIIT with the added bonus of increased post workout burn similar to the lifting.
 
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