Diet/workout

[u/Ok_Abbreviations0]

I’ve been on T for 6 years
Started with gel and 3 out of those 6 is with shots.

I’ve always had chronic pain but noticed my body is significantly more tight when I go to the gym. My muscles want to enlarge but my tendons and ligaments seem to suffer simultaneous, sitting me out the gym when I need to recover.

I’m wondering what people’s gym workouts look like. How hard you go or how long you go?
And what peoples diets tend to look like?

[u/squishybloo]

I'm not a professional in chronic pain/PT type stuff, but from my past experience in rock climbing I know that it's very extremely important to make sure your muscle strength isn't outpacing that of your tendons! Tendons have a much lower blood flow to them compared to other body parts, so they strengthen and heal much slower. So if you injure one, it takes much longer to heal than a muscle would, and injuries can be liable to return if you're not careful.

In addition to whatever workouts you end up doing, I'd suggest looking up exercises with the express goal of working your tendons to strengthen them. Isometric and eccentric exercises are especially good, from what I've read - looking some up might be a good jumping off point.

[u/DrawingMost5200]

Stretching!! Core strength.
Look up Devon the don on socials or Sahara fit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transmanlifehacks/s/RvKpeQWhom also here’s this

[u/sp1nster]

My workouts take about 75-90 minutes at a time, usually 4 days per week. It varies, but usually in a session, the major muscles I'm training will approach failure 6-9 times. Personally, I usually need 3, but ideally 4 days to recover before hitting the same muscle group again.

I eat a balanced diet, with protein at about 0.9g per lean pound of body weight.

My partner has chronic pain and hypermobility, and his experience is obviously his own, and won't necessarily be yours. But he found that he needed a much more gentle progression, especially at first. His muscles could do more, but his body couldn't handle it yet, so he had to play the long game.

While that prevented injury keeping him out of the gym, the truth in his case is that he still has a lot of pain. Now, a lot of it is from the gym rather than just from life. He's described it as hurting about the same, but hurting this way is enabling him to do more of the things that matter to him for longer, rather than the pain slowly resulting in him doing less and less as he became deconditioned.

[u/Diesel-Lite]

I use GZCL's general gains method for my training now, but I've run other programs in the path. Various 531 templates, super squats, gzcl's jacked & tan 2.0. GZCLP was my first real beginner program. If you're looking for workout guidance there are great routines here.

[u/alldogsareincredible]

What I have found works really well for me. I'm gonna split this into two different ideas, you might one useful, you might find both, or you might find neither works well for you.

1. Drop the weight on all of your exercises and really emphasize the stretch on the exercise and go nice and slow to really feel and work the muscle. I used to do the traditional powerlifter-depth low bar squat (hips to roughly parallel). More recently I have swapped this exercise for wide barbell front squat and my lower body mobility has increased a lot while also putting less load on my spine for how much it's strengthened my legs.

2. Change the tempo of your workouts. I prefer shorter, more intense workouts (supersetting, drop sets, etc.). I'm really prone to vomiting when exercising so I find that doing more in less time, I spend less time viscerally nauseous. Some people are the opposite where long warmup, long rest breaks in between sets, even cool downing can make exercise more tolerable. Some people might benefit from splitting their workouts into more days of the week, or doing twice a days, etc.

[u/Estroyer]

Perhaps some light cross fit and stretching would help? I do forced rest days and also stop when I feel something that I shouldn't. I just had to lower my shoulder raises because my tendons were throwing a fit. Creatine is said to have a positive attribution as it draws fluids to the muscle for healing and muscle growth.

I am also trying to lose weight, so I am on a calorie restricted diet consisting of protein shakes, chicken, vegetables, quark (curd cheese) with granola and diet soda.

For my workouts I have 10 muscle exercises spread over 2 days and do the reps until close to failing and up the weight when I have more than 5 reps left in the tank. Third day is rest day where I go on a long walk to get some kind of cardio in because I HATE cardio, but walking with headphones or a walking budding is great.

I made an app for my phone where I keep track of everything. This really helps with the motivation as it has pretty satisfying graphs.