AITank: Fitness Explained

redirect

iq1

First of all let me extend my best wishes to fellow contributor Chris aka Dr.Swoll, in his endeavor to complete the MS 150. It truly is worthy cause and your support is indeed very valuable to fund multiple sclerosis research. I started thinking about what it would take to complete 180 miles in the Texas hill country and one thing stood out above all the other things I could think about and that is having a strong mind.

There comes a point when all of us think we can not go anymore. Another step would kill us, turn of the pedal drain what little energy we have left, rep under the weight of a barbell. Well the truth is, you are thinking you can’t so how the hell could you possibly expect go any farther? No matter what you are doing, this point is what many of us like to call the wall.

Time stops, its a surreal moment actually, and you are given a choice. I mean this very literally — your body actually asks your mind if it wants it to go further even though it may hurt, even though our bodies think we are spent and have nothing left to give. Those of us with the courage to take the harder path will say no, I want you to keep on going; whatever happens after that I will deal with when the dust has settled.

I mean it is true isn’t it?

I’m riding in the MS150 next weekend, it’s a 180 mile bike ride from Houston to Austin. The goal is to raise $14 million to help people with multiple sclerosis, a disease that causes muscle weakness and leads to difficulty moving, as well as numerous other symptoms like loss of vision and chronic pain. If you’d like to help in the fight against this disease, please visit the link below and donate. Any amount is appreciated:

http://ms150.org/ms150/donate/donate.cfm?id=184247

Thanks!

Awesome exercise, try it! I love how he says, “How many repetitions should you do? Probably 5-6. I do 30.” What a badass. Here’s another angle so you can see his entire body in the view:

Workout with a spotter. Trust me, you will get so much more out of your workout you will wonder how you managed without one.

A spotter helps you get those last reps out of each set. You know the ones that usually threaten to crush you because you cannot push the weight anymore, well a finger or two from a spotter allows your good workout to become an absolutely mental one.

By getting those last reps out you push your body harder into an adaptive response which means your body will work harder to get stronger and bigger post workout. Your pumps will be massive and your muscles huge.

Take a friend with you, someone that is somewhere around your fitness level and help each other. Yell at each other under the weights because that is what we need every so often. Someone to yell at us and remind us that we haven’t quite got it yet, though we are most certainly working towards our goals.

So next workout push it that much harder with a proper spotter.

I have to tell everyone about this page because no matter who you are, it will help you make ridiculously easy and unbelievably good food. Mind you, CHEAP. The Pioneer Woman Cooks is brilliant! Their are countless recipes to choose from and everything is made so simple and easy to follow that you would have to be a little sore round the grey bits in your head to not produce what the recipes show.

Ree as the author calls herself, is a “desperate housewife. I love to cook delicious, abundant, satisfying food using the simplest of ingredients.” Where have you been all my life?!?! Everything from the lasagna to the chocolate sheet cake is superb. She provides amazing pictures for each step of the process so if something does not look right you will be able to figure it out soon enough. But really, take some time to browse around the offerings she has posted for us all. In college and need help keeping variety in your diet on a short wallet, this is your answer. Get home late and still need to whip something up for yourself before bed but do not want microwave tv dishes, this is your answer.

Nothing is overly flamboyant, there is no black truffles, no fruits from Rangoon or flour made in some small province in Italy. Just stuff you can find easily, make easily, and enjoy immensely.

Tell me what your favorite recipe is. Always looking to try new ones!

The question on when and how to stretch and warm up is one that comes up often. It is one of those, made to complicated because we think about it too much things. And from all this thinking have spawned several myths which we will talk about here later on. But what people fail to talk about or do much is dynamic warmups.

Dynamic warm ups are not exactly new, but they have yet to really go mainstream. What are they? Well its warming up your body by stretching through movement. Examples of this are lunges, side bends, high knees, back pedals, scorpions, side stepping, high knee skipping, Frankenstein walk and MORE! Descriptions will follow.

So what is the deal with old school static stretching. Well get on pubmed @ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/ and if you do a little research you will find numerous studies, all new that are all showing the same finding. That is, static stretching before an athletic event notably impairs the capability of our muscles to produce peak force output. It has been studied in specific sports, runners cannot sprint as fast, basketball players can’t jump as high, rugby players can’t push as hard, when they do a static stretching routine before these events.

Why? Well static stretching does not raise your core temperature at all, so your body is not becoming any more ready to go into full drive. You are stretching your muscles past their normal flexibility and this decreases the force capability of the contraction thereafter.

The past few years have been unkind to many of the world’s top athletes. Olympic hopefuls to MLB sluggers to Tour De France cyclists have all fallen prey to intense scrutiny as we seek to maintain the image of a pure natural athlete. I am not going to talk in specific about any one athlete in particular, but rather the culture of altering our bodies by way of non natural processes.

Everyone wants to be the best, be at the pinnacle of whatever sport or activity they may be participating in. We get it in our heads that to beat everyone else, we have to give ourselves a one up and this is where steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDS) enter into the equation. Sure there are side effects to their use, but they can be mitigated by incredibly careful, doctor assisted monitoring. What I mean is frequent blood work and hormone panels. 98% of PEDS users do not fit into this category. So why even decide to go that route? You are short changing yourself, determining that you will fail at achieving your goal without even trying.

Some will say, oh but I have peaked after one year of training. It has been a damn year you idiot. Even two or three still leaves you in the relative area of newness to lifting. You might know how to train better but as far as packing mass, you have not been doing it for all that long. If you are 6 foot 200 pounds, you have not peaked.

At one point or another, we all think our strength has plateaued. You know the feeling. Your bench has been going up for the past few months then all of a sudden you cannot move anymore weight. In fact you might be doing less reps of the same weight. If you have experienced this, your muscles have passed from their adaptation phase of growth and you are now experiencing the effects of over training.

I would suspect that 80 percent of the people that will read through this article are or have experienced the effects of over training in their workout regimen. “Love to lift” syndrome as I call it. Amateur and experienced lifters alike just think that being in the gym 7 days a week doing 20 sets per muscle group is the key to size. Well ask those people how long its taken them to get to whatever size they are. Likely answer is many years.

What everyone out there needs to understand is that our bodies get used to a routine. Their are specific neurological processes that I am referring to and will talk about in depth in a later article, but for now lets simplify the idea to, our bodies need to be confused if we want them to keep growing. This necessity for confusion is why all good routines offer variety in the exercises one can perform.

Think cycles. Optimally a workout cycle should last 7-9 weeks depending on your physiology. This means you workout for those 7 to 9 weeks then take a whole week off.

Don’t gulp down a huge meal right before a workout.

So it’s about 9 pm, and the gym closes at 10:30. I still haven’t eaten and my mom has cooked some sausages and she wants to know if I’d rather eat before or after my workout. They smelled so good that I decided to eat them before.

Let’s just say pausing multiple times in the middle of sets to burp isn’t exactly beneficial to your lifts.