Maximal gains from physical job

[ayberk22]

I am not any kind of fitness person, But I have done my fair share of sports when I was younger and some occosional bursts of fitness hype.

I was working in office job for a bit over a year and gained huge, what I call” diabetes tummy”, I looked like Alien from American daddy… Now I have been working 3 weeks in physical warehouse job, where I am frequently lifting things between 25-100kg, walk a lot, and even some machines I am using take some fitness to keep urself balanced while driving it. I am taking this job as some kind of fitness camp and thinking it more as a gym than actual work place.

So far 3 weeks results are pretty impressive: I have lost over half of that pregnancy tummy, and muscles have grown / tightened quite a bit. I can deffinitely see and feel the resullts, but other people probably won’t (outside of tummy).

But I believe I could see much faster results… I have only gained 0,5kg of weight… well, I have lost a lot of fat at same time so maybe it’s ok. But many places say that You can gain up to 2kg of muscle / month.

Based on calorie calculator I should eat around 4k calories and 90-160 proteins per day, to gain muscle. I am aiming to around 4k calories and 140g of protein each day, but damn it’s hard to eat that much.

Each day I am taking a walk to work place and back for around 1h/ day overall. I am thinking of cutting this off by taking a buss so save some calories and lettinig my body to focus more on recovery from my strenght based work I am doing.

Should I focus my proteine intake more to after work and eat more carbs during work time, to optimise rebuild periods or does it really matter?

As I am gaining weight really slowly and burning trough my Fat reserves so fast, I maybe should try to add about 2-500 more calorie surplus to my diet? Walking alone burns around 500 calories so cutting that maybe should be enough?

Also my chest / hand muscle that you are using for pushing are not taking much training, as most movements are pull movements ( my back muscles are growing super fast). So is doing pushups every morning good way to balance out muscle growth?

Any advices for maximising results from physical job please?

197/77kg 33y male btw

 

[momonthego]

@ayberk22 I don't have all of the answers but as someone who went from a desk job to landscaping and saw great improvements in physique over the last 7 years (41m) (without paying as close attention to macros as you) I can only say the gains will come. You don't need to try and rush it.

I only started paying attention to macros this past winter when I joined a gym for the first time in 8 years because I wasn't doing snow removal. And I learned a ton about macros and protein consumption. I lost 30lbs due to calorie deficit and kept most of my muscle (lost a bit, per body scan) through strength training and high protein diet (170-190g a day, using protein powder to help get there). I had been overeating the wrong things after long days landscaping previously.

Now I'm back landscaping and maintaining high protein diet and hope to see a gain in muscle again during the season (am trying to maintain at least one gym visit per week too).

If you aren't gaining weight then you probably aren't eating enough calories. Make sure you eat both carbs and protein during the day and then make sure you have protein at the beginning and end of your day too. Your body builds muscle while you sleep so it's important to give it something to work with.

On the chest development side I have the same problem as I don't do much pushing doing landscaping. I did a ton of chest workouts over the winter and my chest has improved a ton. I also have been doing pushups most days before work to try and maintain that. I'll see how that goes.

Overall I'm treating my job a bit more like a fitness challenge the past few weeks too and being more aware of of what I'm doing and eating.

Good luck!