| Congrats on the progress! > It's also a myth, perpetuated by highly trained athletes that you cannot gain muscle and do cardio, or that you cannot do these things while in a caloric deficit. I think it's more accurate to describe this in terms of definitions: "gains muscle while in caloric deficit" is possible for the untrained/beginners. > For the first 2 months, cardio was not part of it. It's really easy for bad diet decisions to counteract the effects of even a significant amount of cardio; and it's easy to fatigue the body by trying to do too much cardio. For aiming for calorie deficit, I think it makes sense "do what's least awful out of: reduce calories in food, or add cardio". > Cardio health is life changing. I noticed my chess.com rating improved just from improving cardiovascular health. > started isolated training for muscle hypertrophy utilizing machines for 5+ days a week My impression as a beginner was that free weights were scary and that there were many exercises you'd have to choose from. (Whereas machines seemed idiot proof). In practice, "squat, deadlift, benchpress" would be a good start. (Or a starting point to read about, anyway). https://exrx.net/ is an outstanding website that I wish I'd come across sooner. |
Anything is better than nothing, and many of the benefits are going to persist in some form for quite some time. I did lose some strength, but I'm still on the order of 1.5-2x as strong as I was before I did any work at all. Never mind the confidence strength training gives you when it comes to just doing basic stuff and knowing you aren't going to hurt yourself.
I think it's valuable to turn things into regular habits, but it's also worth noting for those who have this idea that it's a waste (because they'd rather be doing something else, and they don't want to work out for the rest of their life) - 6 months of basic (but hard, proper) workouts will pay dividends for probably forever.