bump

Easy. Sit ups, push ups and pull ups. XP for each one.

but should i include skills? like i have a mate who does parkour. how do i give xp for that?

>>13368365
Learning new tricks, XP based on difficulty

see but there's too much speculation, and how should i deal with weapons training? like 1 xp for every practice swing?

>>13368427
Go for time practiced. On the other hand if one does running, biking or any other distance sports(maybe the parkour guy as well) base it off distance.

hmmm it still seems a little too random for me. but thanks for the assist.

/fit/ dude here. To be honest, body weight exercises aren't going to do much for you. You're going to want to get on one of the programs listed here:

http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html

Also, you should earn XP based on your goals. want to lose weight? Earn XP for every pound you lose. Want to gain strength? XP everytime you lift heavier shit.

>>13368541
>Also, you should earn XP based on your goals. want to lose weight? Earn XP for every pound you lose. Want to gain strength? XP everytime you lift heavier shit.

This shit right here. Make them work for it. No pain, no level.

>>13368563

Exactly. No point in senseless grinding, like 100 rep push ups or something (since those do practically nothing for you). Progress is what you want to measure. I've actually tried this before. I gain exp every time I put another 5 pounds on any of my lifts while still completing all my reps and sets. I also gain exp whenever I lose fat/gain muscle.

I'm trying to address your question but jesus this is the spergiest thing I have ever written.

Creating a character through adventure is all the rage nowadays, so I'm going to run you through a typical day.

You start off by going to bed and waking up every day at the same time, or around the same time. And you're going to get plenty of sleep, but not more than you need (everybody needs a different amount, but seven or eight hours is average). When you don't have enough sleep, your maximum Energy is lowered for the day. For that matter, when your Energy is lowered, you're going to have to make Willpower checks to avoid eating unhealthy calorie-laden foods to make up the deficit.

The reason you don't oversleep is
* Time is a resource. We want to powerlevel here, not dawdle around smelling posies. You only have about 16 hours left in the day, and you're already going to spend *most* of them cooking, eating, driving around, working, studying, going to school, wasting time with friends, videogames or whatever. Which means GET OUT OF BED WHEN YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO. Try putting the alarm outside of the reach of your bed.
* You are going to be your worst enemy regarding exercising, and one of the insidious methods you will use to avoid it is by delaying your daily routine until you can no longer support going to the gym. Maybe you feel groggy from the night before ... you stay in bed an hour late ... you cook breakfast an hour late ... you shuffle your feet on some of your chores ... and oh look, now you don't have enough time to work out before you have to fulfill your obligations. Darn (just what you subconsciously planned all along).

Your players gain one experience for every gram of protein they consume, to a maximum of 30 experience. This cap is refreshed every few hours, so for maximum efficiency, they should grind protein every few hours. As a bit of a cheat, I'll let you on to the fact that eggs, chicken, turkey, nuts, peanut butter, milk, cottage cheese and steel-cut oats are great sources of experience. And trust me, since you're power-leveling by grinding to the cap every few hours, you'll be happy to have small foods or snacks that are still densely-packed with XP.

You'll also need Energy (carbohydrates). Now, different carbohydrates have different rates of Energy Burn, so choose carefully. Some carbohydrates have a slow energy burn ... like from oatmeal, steel-cut oats, sweet potatoes (but no other kinds of potatoes), chicken, tuna, and whole wheat bread (no other kind of bread). These burn off slowly, giving you a stable and long-lasting source of energy replenishment. Processed carbohydrates, like from sugar, burn off very quickly. But no, quick energy isn't that good a thing here ... to keep it brief, that makes you likelier to store fat and get hungrier sooner. You can get processed carbs from most breakfast cereals (ugh), white bread, potatoes, cookies, cakes, and so on.

As a corollary to the above rule, the 30 experience cap is temporarily raised to 40 within a thirty-to-forty-five minute window after exercising. This is, in fact, the most important time to eat progress-wise; if you don't have XP to spend at this point, then the majority of the exercise was wasted!

Now, experience can be gained and lost; if you don't use it, you lose it. How you spend this experience is by exercising, which is sort of an applied-spending process, kinda like Morrowind. Every muscle has a different Strength rating. You have Pectoral Strength, Abdominal Strength, Gluteal Strength, etcetera. Some muscles even have multiple Strength ratings -- one score for inner pectoral, one score for outer pectoral, etcetera.

Now, the experience you gain can effectively be put to use on as many muscles as you can train before exhaustion, so for that reason, it's good to do exercises that spend an experience pool on multiple muscles. Bench Press, Deadlifts, and Squats are examples of exercises that work multiple muscles. It's best to fill your allotted training time with exercises like these before moving on to exercises that just work one muscle ... don't think you're hot stuff because you're doing curls. Jogging, and especially swimming, are good for exercising the whole body as well but don't expect to increase a size category through those.

As a quick note, there are some exercises that can be done with free weights, or machines. When you have a (safe) choice, choose free weights! Machines isolate your muscles, narrowing the range of muscles you're training at a given time. When you have free weights, unrelated muscles have to kick in and help you stabilize the weight -- meaning they get trained too!

>>13368952
>>13368939
>>13368912
KEEP GOING SIR

To add to that, some of your muscles *oppose* each other. You can tell what these muscles are when they do both opposite parts of a simple movement, like how your Biceps flexes your forearm and your Triceps extends it, or your hamstring flexes your shin and your quadriceps extends it. These are called Antagonistic muscles and come in pairs, but you can think of them as opposite-elements, like Fire and Water. When you train one muscle, it effectively debuffs the XP spending of its partner -- so when you wear one of these muscles out, don't jump in and train the other! Wait until tomorrow, so you're spending all your time efficiently. For this reason, expect to have at least two different exercise routines, with one member of an antagonistic pair on your first routine and the other member on your second routine.

>>13368975
You wouldn't believe how good it feels to have somebody appreciate this, because I feel ridiculous for transcribing it into RPG terminology XD

>>13368994
I'm saving it is what I'm doing. This is actually motivational to get over to the gym.

I suppose this is a good time to say (if I shouldn't have said it earlier) that nothing in your body happens instantly. Your body is a little factory, taking little bits and transporting them here and there, repairing tissues, flushing out unnecessary doodads ...

So time is an important element here. When you drink water, your hydration gauge doesn't immediately max out! When you eat protein, your XP gauge isn't immediately ready for use! When you've consumed either of these in a meal quantity, it takes about two hours for them to be ready for use.

It's also a good idea to have a small refueling about a half-hour before exercizing as well. You'll burn off a little of that protein while waiting for the majority of it to become ready for use, after all. You'll also want maybe a little fruit -- in this particular case, the sugars inside it won't be bad, not only because it doesn't have too much sugar, but also because you're going to burn out those quick-burning carbs for Energy long before it stimulates fat growth.

>>13369041
>>13368978
>>13368965
>>13368952
>>13368939
>>13368912
If you have a source you are my new hero.

>>13369066
Pretty sure he IS source.

>>13369066
Source ... hrm. That's going to be a little difficult, but not impossible. This is the result of resistance training on my own, as well as advice handed down by my forerunners, as well as my personal research.

To step away from the game terminology, the scientific stuff in particular is:

When your calories burned exceed your calories taken in, you're going to lose weight flat-out there is no magic here. What you eat and how you exercise will determine what goes away -- fat, or muscle. After all, when you're losing weight your body goes into starvation mode, thinking that you don't have enough food available, and if you don't eat right and exercise when on a calorie deficit, your body will cannibalize your muscle in higher quantities.

On the other hand, when your calories in are greater than your calories burned, you gain weight. Once again, what you eat and how you exercise (if at all) determines how much of that is going to be muscle and how much is going to be fat.

cont

Everything has to do with METABOLISM. Metabolism is basically a word that says your body is a factory that moves nutrients around, combines them, breaks them apart, and whatnot. Metabolism can be fast, or it can be slow. Everybody has their own natural speed, although it can be increases (for example, with exercise!)

Water, however, is a magical little fluid that increases your metabolism. It greases the wheels, so to speak; drink a lot of water and you'll burn calories just heating and processing it, not to mention passing through the other nutrients in your body.

Regarding protein, protein is the basic building block of your muscles. If you want to GAIN muscles, you can't do it without protein, the way you can't build a house without bricks or lumber or whatever. You and rip-and-tear all you want, it'll just result in you being ripped and torn and even a little frustrated.

As for how you actually gain muscle ... it's through muscle tearing and repair. That's how it works. Your muscles are made if bundles of muscular fibers (imagine briefly a rope, if that helps). When you lift heavy things, a lot of these fibers will tear; your body then uses resources like protein to repair those torn fibers, but when they repair, they'll repair them with even more fibers than in the first place, or they'll repair them with a greater size. The proportion of greater numbers / greater size depends on what kind of exercise you're doing; I remember sarcomeric hypertrophy, but I don't recall the other term.

(It kinda reminds me of how broken bones end up healing stronger than before.)

And the reasoning behind antagonistic muscles?

Well, as you know, muscles oppose each other in pairs. You see, muscles pull, but they never push -- they can only contract or relax. One muscle contracts while the other relaxes, then the first muscle relaxed while the other contracts. That's movement. Think of rubber bands, if that helps.

Anyway, when you exercise a muscle -- let's say a Biceps -- and wear it out, it tends to stay a little contracted even when you relax it. That means if you were to try to work your Triceps after that, you have th Biceps' latent contraction already working against you, which inhibits your Triceps' ability to exercise.

more?

I'm trying to find a source for antagonistic muscles, beyond simple definition : x

Here's a source for sarcomeric hypertrophy and hyperplasia.
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/issa7.htm

>>13369375
:D

Anyway, you've got pretty much two effective modes: Bulk and Cut. You're going to want to start with Bulk.

Bulking is putting on weight to gain muscle. Granted, you're not trying to become fat -- you want to gain as much muscle without gaining unnecessary fat, which is why you'll try to eat nutritiously.

Cutting is losing weight while trying to retain muscle. One of the big things here, is not losing it too quickly; if your calorie deficit is too large, you go into starvation mode and that's what's going to cause the big cannibalization of your muscle. Your goal will be setting a consistent but reasonable deficit for yourself, and eating nutritiously and exercising so the muscle loss is minimal.

Let's take this time to dispel some myths (some were even conveniently hinted to in an earlier link).

For one, there's a lot of workout superstitions. You will, at some point, have to do some research and see why you're doing what you do; because it seems like every weightlifter has their own idea of The Right Way to do something, or something that improves a workout routine, that isn't actually helpful. I mean, it's pretty convincing to them when they're doing this thing and making progress at the same time, but that's correlation, not causation.

Hell, although I've read it before, I can't currently find information regarding why you don't exercise antagonistic muscles on the same day. I'm even finding information from people who like to work them both on the same day. Granted, one of my sources for this information used to be a powerlifter, and is now about 55; a lot of what he used has been invalidated.

So yes. EXERCISE is SCIENCE. You have to be objective, and don't get attached to your methods because you will certainly find out one day that something is wrong. Do not let anybody tell you that it works because it just works; either there is a reason or there isn't, and "I did it and I got results" is nothing more than anecdotal evidence.

There is no such thing as spot reduction. You can't 'target your abs to burn the fat away'. Your body burns from fat deposits all over your body, although you can expect to retain them chiefly below the navel, a little above the hips, on the butt and inner thighs.

Training a muscle two days in a row is a bad idea. Remember that metabolism thing? Remember how your body needs time?

Well, your body repairs muscle to make it stronger. But it needs time for that repair. When you tear a muscle that's in mid-repair, you just lose progress. People who go into the gym on four adjacent days to blast their abs looking for a six-pack are wasting their time. This is the -other- reason that you'll have at least two workout plans, and alternate (though just waiting a day between workouts is also good).

Tired. Bed now.

Bump for fitness.

Archiving thread 13368060 on sup/tg/

A compendium of exercise advice in our language may be a valuable resource for the future.

Heh, good to see another fi/tg/uy spreading the word and fighting the good fight.

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards.html

This covers all the most important lifts and is excellent for gauging strength. You even level up on the charts:

Untrained

Expected level of strength in a healthy individual who has not trained on the exercise before but can perform it correctly. This represents the minimum level of strength required to maintain a reasonable quality of life in a sedentary individual.

Novice

A person training regularly for a period of 3-9 months. This strength level supports the demands of vigorous recreational activities.

Intermediate

A person who has engaged in regular training for up to two years. The intermediate level indicates some degree of specialization in the exercises and a high level of performance at the recreational level.

Advanced

An individual with multi-year training experience with definite goals in the higher levels of competitive athletics.

Elite

Refers specifically to athletes competing in strength sports. Approximately 2% of the weight training population will attain this level.

How about legendary heroes and adventure manuals?

Rippentoe - Starting Strength.
The book teaches squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead presses and clean and press. A DVD is also available detailing the above.

http://www.exrx.net/index.html is a useful resource, and is helpful for learning more.

Here I am at level one, weak overall.

>>13368060
Another suggestion would be to incorporate some roleplaying and storytelling into your adventure. Work out together and bring the camaraderie of the tabletop into the gym. Imagine yourselves as heroes training up to take the fight to the BBEG, or pre-campaign as first level commoners becoming fighters.

Award XP for mental and social growth stemming from excercise. Like how your once-skinny friend after two months of weightlifiting, picked a girl up and then curled her a few times. Hell, it might get them laid.
Nothing better than competition to stimulate testosterone and muscle building.

I remember one time I was DMing a DH game, and I went to the gym with a real f/itg/uy who wanted to play a feral assassin. Man, he was strong. When ever he played his character with toughness and strength 40+, my image of the character was always of the dude himself. It inspired me to get strong and lead to the picture here, which is about 4 months progress.

Level two and gaining.

bump

Now in a portable image format!

Thread's still up? Wow. Not sure i had one last overnight.