Weight Loss Thread

Captain Suave said:

That seems like an unbelievably high activity rate to sustain for four hours unless you're an elite athlete. ~550 cal/hr, maybe, though that's more than I'd credit myself for an hour spent doing competitive jiu jitsu (and which I couldn't keep up for more than 2 hours at the outside). 175 bpm is a typical maximum heart rate for someone in their 40's. Raking leaves is normally classed as light to moderate exertion. I'd bet your fitbit is giving you bad data or aggregating strangely.

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quite the opposite I have very low blood pressure and a high resting heart rate due to heart damage. I've been training for months just to get my resting heart rate below 100 bpm. On a good day now my resting rate is around 80bpm. Athletes have like 50-60 bpm resting heart rate cus their heart is strong and efficient.

doc says something about fucked up ejection refraction or some shit, idk my heart doesn't pump right.

Oh I know it's just a fitbit, even the bpm isn't accurate. I've been doing cardiac rehab 3x a week so i'm working out hooked up to an EKG with nurses monitoring my heart rate and it's usually 10-30% different from what a wearable reports.

I don't know what you are talking about but raking leaves is no where near a 'walking-pace" activity and never has been even before my accident. It may not be that intense to some but it's definitely beyond just walking.

I do 30 min of cycling daily on a trainer maintaining around 150-160 bpm, lift weights/kalestinics another 30min and I also do 1 hour of treadmill/elliptical at rehab and raking leaves is easily 3x as much work as either of those activities.

I also do a daily walk with my dogs 30 min per day, there is literally no comparison of walking and raking leaves. Maybe if you have 1 tree and it takes 3 minutes to rake them? i'm on 2 acres with tons of white oak mixed with pine (straw) it's fucking intense.

I can call raking leaves a lot of things.

"Intense" is not one of them.

Guess I live in crazy world then because it is and has always been a rather intense aerobic activity. half the reason people even had children after we moved off the farms was to rake up fucking leaves in the fall. the other reason was to push the lawnmower. Literally no other chore is even comparable. I got a riding lawnmower so that part's easy peasy but raking leaves has never been anything other than intense.

it's been a few years but back when I was healthy i've done multiple centuries (100 mile bike races) in central valley california in the summer, tour de fresno, goat head century, etc, 5 hour rides in 112 degree heat, and they are less intense than raking fucking leaves.

Cad said:

We're talking about this right? Just ordinary raking of leaves?

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Man, my mind is gonna be blown if this is some weird regional euphemism for something else.

Um that pitiful light dusting of leaves barely counts. That's a dude raking up 1 juvenile trees worth of freshly fallen leaves, that's 3 minutes of work.

As I said I had my heart attack last fall where I couldn't take care of it so I had an entire seasons worth of leaves compacted and starting to compost. You know when the layer under the top is black and wet and nasty as shit. Like 2-3 feet thick where they had started to gather along the fence and at the base of the trees. What light layers like you see in that video that still were around were woven in the grass as it has started to grow and entangle the leaves. I furiously raked at them for about 10 minutes and then said fuck it and just mowed the lawn to break them loose.

I use a medium sized backpack Blower not one of those rinky dink hand held ones and I used that to gather up at least 30 piles of leaves around 6 foot in diameter and about 3 foot deep (so large that the blower could no longer move the pile) and those piles I had to then move manually and yeet them into the deep woods out back of my house.

I think you guys are imaging some like 1/4 acre plots in some subdivision with your whole 3 feet of space between your house and your neighbor with 1 whole tree growing next to your drive way or something.

More like this:

But wet, rotting and condensed so not nearly as high. Probably several thousand pounds of foliage. They claim that pile is 20k lbs, not sure if accurate.

Here's what it would look like if I did it in the fall (when the leaves were fresh light and fluffy and not compacted and rotting after a long winter with several snows)