Fat guy calisthenics

No, that is not intended to be funny.  I just couldn't find a lot of exercises online.  The articles I found all defer to a doctor.  Not helpful.

I did work out a quick and simple routine.  It involves 4 dynamic exercises.

1) Breast Stroke squats:  Stand with your feet shoulder width apart and push outward with your hands as you squat down.  Once you get to the bottom your arms should be fully extended in front.  Then sweep your hands out to your sides as you stand up.  So that your hands straight out at your sides once you are fully standing.  Exhale on the way down and inhale on the way up.  The arm motion helps prepare the shoulder muscles. 

The lower intensity version has you lowering your arms from straight above your head to down at your side as you stand up and raising them as you stand up. 

An even lower version would be to use the back of a chair or door knob to assist with the raising and lowering of the body. 

The lowest intensity version would be to sit down in a chair and stand up again using a table for assistance. 

A higher intensity version would be to lower your hands as you go down and raise them as you go up.

An even more intense version would be to do a full jump  at the top.

The point is to use as many as the big muscles in your legs as possible while moving your shoulders simultaneously.

2)  Push ups.  Yeah.  Obvious.  It gets into the shoulders and back.  There are a lot of variations. on pushups.  IF you are really fat you can't do a lot of pushups.  Even if you have the muscles to do it, the strain on your wrists can cause a lot of damage. 

The lowest intensity would be pushing against a wall. 

A higher intensity is to kneel on the ground so your butt is directly above your knees and do pushups with your upper body. 

Next would be to kneel on a pillow and straighten your hips and back.  Some people like to keep their knees bent at 90 degrees.  I prefer to try and keep my toes on the floor as if I was about to do a normal push up.  That way I can switch back and forth depending on how the wrist feels.

You can also play with how far apart your hands are and how high they are.  Are they low near your solar plexus, above your shoulders near your ears, or in between?  Some day I would like to be able to do very difficult version of the pushup where your hands are low near your solar plexus if your back and legs are straight and you do a large circular motion with your torso but don't move your hands or feet.  I imagine just the forward transition (from having your knees bent and your shoulders below your hands and sliding your body parallel and very close to the floor until your knees are straight and your hands are down by your solar plexus) would be immensely challenging.

3) Leg raises.  Ideally I would be able to lay on my back and fold in half so that I could touch my toes in mid air.  Not even close.  My body is out of balance besides the muscle issues.  Instead I just raise my legs without bending my knees until my feet are above my hips.  The hardest version I can do is to lay down on my back and put my hands under by buttocks and raise my head and shoulders off the ground and hold them their while bending at the waist to put my feet above my hips.

A lower intensity is to rest my head.

Even lower is to bend my knees so that my feet don't stick out as far.  Or even just get my knees above my hips and leave my feet where ever.

This should get the whole range of abdominal muscles but not the oblique.  One hard thing to remember while doing this is that when your flex your abdominal muscles to raise your legs your should be pulling your stomach flat at the same time.  Flat is a relative term.

Most exercise gurus would end with an stomach exercise that focuses more on the upper portion of the stomach muscles, but remember I am not trying to get six-pack abs.  I am trying to change something that looks like a saggy water balloon into something that looks more like a keg.

One other positive is that the leg raises can help stretch out my lower back which can sag under all the weight or lock-up during push-ups.

4) Ankle and waist rotations.  This may sound like one lame exercise, but it is really two super important exercises.  Even though it is listed fourth, I like to do it first and last a lot of days.  Being fat, it hurts to walk.  The load tends to collapse the arches.  The arch supports tend to weaken them further. The ankles start to fold sideways, and your toes start to turn out so you are walking like a crippled duck. Over time this can deform your shins and destroy your knees too.  Similar problems occur with the lower back.  These exercises specifically help with these issues. 

Stand on one foot and rotate your toes in as large a circle as you can.  You may find that you cannot do a very good circle.  The correct structure of your foot has been crushed under the load.  But do what you can. 

Similarly, stand with your feet shoulder width apart and put your arms straight in the air.  Then rotate at the hip so your arms and head move together in a big circle and you touch the ground as you go by.  If I am feeling really worn out or my kids are exercising with me, I will bend my knees and pretend to be an agitated ape.  This involves a lot more swaying and grunting.  Fewer circles.  How straight you keep your knees and how low you go on the circles can affect the exercise.  Straighter legs and reaching lower both mean more stretch in your legs.  But if you go too far or too fast you can hurt your lower back.  So ... take it in stride.

Excercising as a FAT person

There was a time when I would say I was in pretty good shape.  I was never a professional grade athlete and would never have made it on a collegiate sports team, but I would regularly run 5 miles in 30 minutes without worrying about it making me too tired for other activities.

I didn't used to think much about the exercise I did.  I had a lot of time to do it in and a lot of psychological drive to do it with. 

Now, I hold my breath to tie my shoes. 

Now, I find that I don't know much about exercise and there is not a lot of good material out there for people like me who are more than 100 lbs over weight and busy with life.  I have a hard time getting enough sleep on even one night in any given week.  How am I supposed to find the time to exercise and lose weight?  Here are a few notes from my thoughts about loosing weight:

1) Consistency is most important.  I am fat because I don't have good habits.  Establishing an exercise habit is the most important thing I can do.  It is more important than improving my diet or sleep.  Really it is.  I have set the goal of exercising 10 times a week.  Yes 10.  Why 10?  So that it becomes a core habit of my life.  How many times do you eat?  Go to the bathroom?  Brush your teeth?  Those are a few of your core habits.  More specifically they are habits required to maintain your body.  Why should exercise be any different?  And, if I don't make exercise one of the core habits of my life, I don't think I will be able to get or stay healthy.

2) Make it quick. Time is of the essence.  If I require myself to do a 30 minute workout, it will be difficult to find the time.  I need to make it a 5 minute workout.  I need to be able to squeeze it in and move on with my day.  The longer the workout takes the easier it is to decide that I don't have time.  A gym membership is completely out of the question.

3) Make it lite.  Being fat it is easy to get tired out.  And being out of shape it is easy to hurt myself by doing too much exercise.  The truth is that I am no longer familiar with my body.  If I do too much exercise in the morning I am miserable all day long.  If I do too much at night, I won't sleep well and will be miserable all the next day.  And it will be harder to convince myself to exercise again.

4) Track the exercise.  I have a calendar in the bath room that I put a number and "e" for how many times I exercised that day.  This has not worked very well for me.  I am also using it to track weight and other things as well.  I think that maybe it is too much stuff on the calendar.  Maybe it is too many goals.  But I think that recording the effort is important.

Again, the goal is to establish the habit.  Over time the exercises can evolve into more intense or more rewarding workout.  But for now... It has to be a simple routine.