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Some information about me:

  • 26 years old
  • 90 Kg
  • Nearly no muscles, just all fat
  • Big belly
  • little endurance
  • No sport for the last 10 years
  • Home Office job + PC player (So sitting all day long)

My endurance is kind of strange. I can ride my exercise bike for an hour max on easy settings (This is still very hard for me) but when I try to run at a low speed I need to take a break after 1min-2min because I am already out of breath.

What would be my goal?

I want to get my body in better shape. I look like a big potato bag. So I would focus on converting my fat to muscles. It would also be nice to lose a bit of weight.
So in order it would be:

  • Losing belly fat
  • Get more endurance so I can have the endurance of a normal human
  • Lose my round face shape
  • Losing optical weight (So I don't look fat. I don't care if I still weigh 90kg but look good)

What I have for training:

It would be really greate if I could do my training at home. I have those things to work with:

  • 2x 3Kg dumbbells

  • Exercise bike

  • Yoga mat for exercise on the ground

  • Pull-up bar

  • fitness arm watch that can keep track of my pulse. I don't know if that can be helpful but it has a "zone minutes" function that counts how many minutes I am at a BPM of 120 (low) and 140 (high)

My self created training plan:

I have an training app installed and created a training plan. I have no clue if thaia plan is even good but here is the information:

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
Close grip chin-up, 3 sets 2 reps 1 hour exercise bike Dumbbell standing one arm extension, 6 sets 15 reps 1 hour exercise bike Crunch floor, 3 sets 10 reps 1 hour exercise bike
Sit-Up, 3 sets 10 reps Dumbbell concentration curl, 7 sets 15 reps Dumbbell bench press, 3 sets 15 reps
Dumbbell bench press, 3 sets 15 reps Dumbbell arnold press, 3 sets 15 reps Dumbbell bent over row, 3 sets 15 reps
Dumbbell bent over row, 3 sets 15 reps Dumbbell bent over row, 3 sets 15 reps Dumbbell arnold press, 3 sets 15 reps
Dumbbell arnold press, 3 sets 15 reps Dumbbell bench press, 3 sets 15 reps Dumbbell concentration curl, 7 sets 15 reps
Dumbbell concentration curl, 7 sets 15 reps Plyo push up, 3 sets 10 reps Dumbbell standing one arm extension, 6 sets 15 reps
Dumbbell standing one arm extension, 6 sets 15 reps Crunch floor, 3 sets 10 reps

What I want from you:

Is that a good training plan I can follow for the next month? I already tried how hard it is to do a single day (Till now I didn't do training for more than 1 day in a row because of laziness..). 1 Hour on the exercise bike is pretty OK. I am very out of breath at the end but I can do it with a bit of willpower. The dumbbell exercises are also OK, and strangely not even that tedious. After training my arms feel a little bit tired but that's about it. Do you have any exercise I need to implement in my plan to get better overall training?

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    If you want to be able to run: start slow, run for 1-2 minutes, walk for a few minutes, run again for 1-2 minutes. Slowly over 3-5 months, increase the running time, and decrease the pauses. You could after some months be able to run 5 km, and it will become easier when you loose weight. But take care of your knees, and stop if you feel unwell .
    – Stefan
    Sep 3, 2022 at 18:53
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    @Stefan I will try that in the future, thanks!
    – sirzento
    Sep 3, 2022 at 19:22
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    Doesn't matter what you do as long as your caloric intake is below your expenditure. Doesn't matter as long as you get your heart rate up and keep it there. Doesn't matter if you're not going to stick to it. The only 'plan' you need is that failure is not an option.
    – Mazura
    Sep 3, 2022 at 20:06

2 Answers 2

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Your goals will be achieved in the kitchen, not the gym.

From what I can tell, your primary goal is weight loss. You mention that you want to generally improve your cardio-respiratory fitness, and your exercise plan will achieve that just fine. But weight loss? That’s going to be achieved through managing your energy intake in the kitchen.

It is much easier to achieve a calorie deficit by removing things from your daily food consumption than it is to exercise your way into a deficit. Exercise helps, but unless you are training an endurance sport at a fairly high level, you just aren’t going to be burning a huge amount of calories. Most of your weight loss has to come from managing your diet.

To me, your program you present is mostly consistent with your fitness related goals - you seem to just want to be generally active and healthy, without an sport specific goals. That said, there are a couple things I would like to see added to your exercise selection:

  • a squat pattern
  • a hip hinge

You have sixteen exercise slots per week moving dumbbells around with your arms. I would throw in body weight squats, Bulgarian split squats, dumbbell RDLs, and Nordic hamstring curls, just to put a little bit of resistance training on your legs too.

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  • Thank you for the tips! Yeah I also will eat better from now on. Why I did not add leg exercise to the program is because I wanted to let my legs rest for a day after using the exercise bike. The next day I still feel it in my legs. So would you change it to not do the exercise bike every other day but with more normal leg exercise like you stated?
    – sirzento
    Sep 3, 2022 at 18:19
  • As far as I know, muscles require a lot of calories, even while resting. So building up muscles should help too. Sep 3, 2022 at 18:31
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    @sirzento The volume and intensity you’re doing isn’t enough that you need to worry about that I don’t think. Biking three times a week is a great, and just add in some leg work on your other days.
    – Thomas Markov
    Sep 3, 2022 at 18:45
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Curls and arm extensions are isolation movements, they target only 1 muscle (the biceps and the triceps respectively). It is a better use of time to only use compound movements. These train several muscles at the same time. Further the biceps is trained indirectly by doing pulls (e.g. chin-ups) and the triceps is trained indirectly by doing push, e.g. push-ups. So I would suggest you ditch the curls and arm extensions.

Arnold presses and bent over rows are good exercises. Dumbell presses are also OK but the push-up is even better. However it sounds like your dumbells are way too light to be useful. You do 15 reps of dumbell bench press. I am guessing that if your life depended on it you could do maybe 80 reps with that weight. That mean you should do between 75 and 79 reps. Otherwise the training effect is low. This is of course impractical. Ideally you should use a dumbell so heavy that you could only do 5-14 repetitions.
I would ditch the dumbells completely and only do bodyweight exercises:

  • (jack knife) pull-ups
  • push-ups
  • squats

A program that uses these exercises: My Foolproof Calisthenics Template.

Personally I prefer to do pull one day, push the next day and legs the 3rd day and repeat this 3 day sequence 2 x a week.

If you get 1 heavier dumbell (10-25 kg ca) you could do one arm overhead presses, rows and goblet squats instead of bodyweight squats. I would choose the heaviest dumbell that you could do at least 5 reps of one arm overhead presses and bent over rows with.

Getting a kettlebell and doing kettlebell swings (hip hinge) on the leg day may also be a good idea. The kettlebell may also be used for goblet squats and bent over rows.

Doing some ab exercises is nice, but not essential since they are trained indirectly by the 3 main exercises above.

Doing slow steady cardio is fine but you should also get your pulse up 2 x a week. For instance by doing some moderate sprint intervals on your exercise bike.

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    Thanks for the info! Yeah I have no clue how much dumbbell weight I need. I only had those laying around. I tested if I can to like 80 reps with them and I did! Only my arms did very tremble since rep 20. And for the pulse part, when I am on my exercise bike one hour, I get to a 140 pulse nearly half of the time and I don't even do it that fast.
    – sirzento
    Sep 3, 2022 at 18:15
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    @sirzento: yes 140 should be ca. 70 % of your max heart rate which already is classified as vigourous training so I think you are right in that you do not need to do any sprint intervals yet.
    – Andy
    Sep 3, 2022 at 18:47

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