A Lazy Workout
Project Infobox 
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| Self researcher(s) | Justin Timmer |
| Related tools | scale |
| Related topics | Diet and weight loss, Sports and fitness, Activity tracking |
Builds on project(s) |
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| Has inspired | Projects (0) |
| Show and Tell Talk Infobox | |
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| Featured image | 
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| Date | 2014/05/11 |
| Event name | 2014 QS Europe Conference |
| Slides | A-lazy-workout.pdf |
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A Lazy Workout is a Show & Tell talk by Justin Timmer that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2014/05/11 and is about Diet and weight loss, Sports and fitness, and Activity tracking.
Description[edit | edit source]
A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:
Justin Timmer is a student in human movement science and a fitness instructor. He was interested in exploring what he could do to increase his strength. Rather then starting with a typical strength training program Justin wanted to test if isometric muscle contraction alone could increase his strength. This type of exercise involves just squeezing the muscles without using any weight. He even went so far as to only target one side of his body so that he could test against his non-squeezing muscle groups. In this talk, presented at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference, Justin explains his process and the results of this 4-week experiment.
Video and transcript[edit | edit source]
A transcript of this talk is below:
Justin Timmer A Lazy Workout
Welcome everybody, I will tell you about the ultimate lazy workout. Why is it laziness? Because you can easily implement this workout in your daily life and you don’t have to do any changes to do the work out, and I will tell you later exactly what it is. But first, who am I? I’m Justin Timmer, 23 years old, a human movement scientist now student, and it’s not really a scientist. Also a fitness instructor and organize Quantified meet ups in Honigen in the Netherlands. I’m interested in sleep and everything in Quantified Self and everything you can quantify about health. So you can see I did some experiments and I would like to tell you about these, but this experiment that I’m now particularly doing it was very effective so I want to tell you about that. As a fitness instructor I want to tell you that exercise in the gym, contracting muscles is very concentrating and just squeezing your muscles and it’s not very more than that, and that’s what I found out. So I want to try to make you do what I did. What I did. I contracted my muscles just like this and then squeeze my muscles. So maybe you could try and I did it for as long as possible. So make a first ever contract your muscles and hold it like this. Just try to keep hold it and keep going and hold it as strong as possible, and now while you are doing this you can easily listen to what I am saying. So you can just sit there and contract your muscles. So next you can contract your abdomen, and just squeeze them. I did that for a very long time, and maybe you can try your legs as well by the way. That’s exactly what I did for the last four weeks. I did my right leg, abdominals, my right, chest and my right arm, and I use my left parts of my body as a control, which was basically my plan. So when did I do it. I did it all of the days, at least four times a day for just as long as possible. I did it during college and also sitting on the couch watching TV. By the way, when you are doing them altogether. You may actually feel faint, so don’t do that, but that’s a very rare experience. So I did it for as long as possible and I did them all separate. Now I will tell you how I quantified all this. Every week I went to the gym where I work and I did maximum repetitions with every muscle that I trained and I had some body variables. This was the first thing that I did, the leg press to keep track of my legs. I did with my right leg and did it with my left leg. These are my results, and I started with both legs with the same at 20 minute repetitions on the y-axis and I did it in four weeks, where one is week zero. In four weeks I almost doubled for more than doubled my maximum repetitions and in my control leg nothing really happened. This was for my chest, the chest press for my chest and my arms. I did it with my left, and also my right. Here you can see it started with 26 and it ended at 37 and the control arm almost stayed the same. This was far my abdomen, I hold my legs in this position and I kept in how many seconds I could do this. This position is very hard for your abdomen and I tracked the time. I started with 55 seconds, and after four weeks I ended up at 77 seconds, so that almost doubled as well. This is my bio amp meter, but I’m not very happy about the validity of this, but it keeps track of your body and your muscle mass. In four weeks I gained 1 kg and in fat free mass I gained 1 kg and my fat mass went up 200 g, so most of the gains I did in the four weeks were muscle and I was happy to hear this as well. So, what did I learn? In my opinion this training type was very effective and easy to do. I didn’t have to adjust anything in my daily schedule. Other things I learned was that you can easily train a complete muscle groups, and the little muscles you train, but normally leave out when you are doing a normal resistance training. What are the downsides that I learned? After three weeks from my abdomen, particularly when I contracted them as hard as possible. I get the feeling of light rising fluids in my stomach. It was a very weird feeling. When I contracted them I have the feeling that to puke and I had to burp each time I contracted my abdomen. That was not something I liked so that was something that I thought of stopping the experiment. It was not going very well, and I still have it a little, but not really as much as when I did it. And I had some unexplainable pains in my legs, so I don’t really know how good this was because it was all little thing. So I don’t know if I should suggest it to you, but it’s nice progress and I learned some pretty interesting things.
So thank you for listening.
About the presenter[edit | edit source]
Justin Timmer gave this talk. The Show & Tell library lists the following links: