Hi.

I used to be pretty fit but 10 years in an inactive job have taken their toll and now I'm pretty unfit. I have recently joined a gym with the intention of losing fat and gaining muscle, as well as dramatically improving my overall fitness.

As of this moment, I am just under 6 feet tall and weigh 250lbs. My work outs will consist of the following:

Monday: 45 minutes cardio followed by 30 minutes weight training

Tuesday: 90 minutes of tennis

Wednesday: 45 minutes cardio followed by 30 minutes weight training

Thursday: 90 minutes of tennis

Friday: 45 minutes cardio followed by 30 minutes weight training

Saturday: A rest day with just a little swimming

Sunday: A rest day with just a little swimming

Firstly, any comments on the routine? It should be OK as it was devised by one of the fitness trainers. I will also subsitute some work outs with classes at the gym when appropriate.

Secondly, how much should I now be eating? I found a site that calculates Base Metabolic Rate, basically the amount of food needed by my body each day without any extra exertion. This comes in at 2,600 calories a day. So I figured around 2,000 a day should lead to a good weight loss. Or is this too little given the amount of exercise included?

All advide welcome!!!

Thanks

First of all, welcome and congratulations on making the decision to change your life for the better. With regards to your routine, it seems ok, although without specifics its hard to judge. I would have your cardio after your weights workout as opposed to before. There are many protein and whatever related reasons that I won't go into, but most importantly you want as much energy as you have got for your weights workouts.

That looks like a good amount of cardio you have going there, from personal experience tennis gets the HR pretty up there, so I would say thats a good amount to start with, you can always increase/reduce depending on results.

As for your calories, someone of your current weight I would aim for around 2200 calories if it were me, but everyone differs. Your best bet is to try perhaps 2300 - 2400 for a couple of weeks and see how your weight goes with that. You will soon find how your body responds to caloric intake, and with all that excercise I would think you have definately created a deficit with 2200 cals. In a couple of weeks or so then your diet will need altering to suit your new weight, metabolism etc etc.

Post us up your proposed diet and then we can try to help further.

Hi there - welcome to the site and congratulations to you on taking an interest in your health and body. :)

I think the routine is okay. If you are a "newbie" then just about anything is going to be better than what you were previously doing (assuming it was just not working out at all). I personally would not do so much cardio but I have a little more experience as well as different goals (looking for more muscle gain than fat loss). I prefer heavy workouts (heavy weight, high intensity) as well as high intensity cardio sessions (less time but basically faster running - like wind sprints, interval cardio, HIIT, etc.). Again, though, for a newbie I do think you can see results with this routine.

I am not a big expert on nutrition but I do know what works best for me. When I first really started getting serious about my bodybuilding I started off with a little less precise measurement procedures - I was doing essentially "body for life" type of dieting (http://www.bodyforlife.com), which you don't really go by calories/protein/fat/carbs too specifically. You don't count grams, you count what they call "portions" - you basically eat 6 meals a day, and each meal would consist of one "portion" of carbs and one "portion" of protein, with one of those meals also consisting of one "portion" of vegetables. The "portion" was measured pretty easily - you try to make each portion the size of your closed fist. While this did work for me for the 12 weeks I followed this program, I have since gotten more specific with my calories/protein/fat/carbs and the results have been better as I log everything and can tweak accordingly. The reason I'm telling you all this is just to give you more food for thought (so to speak), and if you are really new and having trouble with all the calculations and measurements then this might be a decent idea for you to work with at least for a few weeks while you're getting used to things.

(I hate seeing people who just start out making things way too complicated than they have to be, and then getting worn out and frustrated and abandoning everything completely after a month or so.)

If you are taking in 2,000 calories a day, and you are not seeing the results you want after a couple of weeks, you can always tweak things further (gradually decrease or increase calories). I do believe that it's calorie manipulation which drives fat loss the best, not necessarily "cut out all carbs," but I do see added benefits to timing your carb consumption properly (carbs are utilized great right after you work out, for example, especially the simple carbs).

Well sorry this post was kinda confusing, but I hope you can take some pieces of info here and there and use them. :)

Good luck!

With regards to your routine, it seems ok, although without specifics its hard to judge. I would have your cardio after your weights workout as opposed to before. There are many protein and whatever related reasons that I won't go into, but most importantly you want as much energy as you have got for your weights workouts.


This is a good point I didn't think about. I personally don't like doing cardio either right before OR right after weight training, as I like to concentrate on just having high intensity during my weight workouts. But if I was going to do cardio in the same "session" of my weight workouts (that is, during my same trip to the gym), then I would choose to do the cardio after my weights. It would just allow me to put more intensity into my weight training I would think.

Then again, maybe in the back of my head I'd not train as hard, knowing I still had to do cardio...(?) I don't know.

A friend of mine is in contest prep right now and he does MAXOT. He does his weight workouts (5 days a week, about 35-40 minutes per session), then afterwards he does MAXOT cardio (after each workout EXCEPT on leg days). It does seem to be working well for him as he's dropped a lot of fat in the last few weeks and his muscles seem to be staying pretty solid (so he's not losing muscle from what I can tell).