AITank: Fitness Explained

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?

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.

Seeing as how our legs make up the base of our body and are one the core units of our everyday movement, I wonder, why do people avoid leg day at the gym. No one ever misses chest or arm days so what is the difference? If I had to pick a reason I would say it’s due to the fact that people do not notice your legs, at least not like they notice a well developed set of arms or a thick chest. Well do yourself a favor, develop a part of your body that you actually use everyday and reap the benefits of a sturdy fortress.

Being able to see the three main heads of the quadricep (the rectus femoris is kind of overlapped by the vastus intermedius so you cannot really see it) is definitely an ego boost, and it should be. It means you care about your functional physique and are not in the gym just for show. Working your legs often targets your transverse abdominals, the ab muscles that few people work and are responsible for sucking your stomach in and creating those Spartan like channels between each of the rectus abdominus heads (what we see as a six pack). Exercises like squats demolish everything from your lower back, to your trunk (abdominal region) and then of course every muscle that frames our legs. People will say, oh but squats can hurt me… So can this keyboard I am writing with.

Proper form is a critical part of any lift.

Step into a gym and what do you notice first? The big guys right. What some people can transform their bodies into amazes all of us at some point or another. Men who look like descendants of Hercules himself. It is only natural for us to want to try and imitate these icons of strength and fitness, but before you set about training to be nothing but huge, ask yourself this. Do you just want to be able to move weight around, or be strong and immensely quick, explosive as I like to call it. The difference is this, being able to jump higher, run faster and exert force in general faster versus being able to pick up a tree or car real slow, but able to. Ridiculous examples but I think you get the point. The mechanical difference is the types of muscle fibers we recruit to perform certain tasks.

There are two types of muscle fibers, fast-twitch and slow-twitch or TypeII and TypeI. Within the TypeII class there are fast-oxidative-glycolytic TypeIIa and fast-glycolytic TypeIIb fibers. Contrary to what some people believe, both exert the same amount of force, it is simply the rate at which they do so that varies. TypeIIb fibers, as their name implies, are primarily anaerobic by nature possessing larger stores of glycogen and the enzymes necessary for anaerobic respiration, meaning they operate without oxygen. Adding to their architecture they have few mitochondria, the primary structure that is utilized for aerobic respiration.

Here at AITank we like free stuff and think you do to. So we have put together a contest for a Everlast weighted jump rope to get you your daily cardio anywhere fix and everywhere. Jump rope on the roof, in an alley, upside down, in space, we do not really care as long as you DO. Jump roping is great for your calves, quads and glutes, the weighted handles will also work your forearms and shoulders; it is like a portable full body workout machine! On top of that you will also get Everlast push up handles so you can mix up your grip to attack your triceps, pecs, or shoulders more intensely. To get started, lets first talk details, what will you get?!

• 8 or 9.5 foot Everlast Weighted Jump rope, your choice
• Push Up handles from Everlast
• A 20 minute cardio burn workout one week before we post it on the front page

What do you have to do? It is easy. One of two things, again your choice!

1. Post a comment on any of our articles and at the end of your comment copy the permalink to this contest article so we know you are entering.
2. Post a comment on this article with an idea for a new article that you would like for us to feature.

How will we choose?

I am sure you have heard the term antioxidant thrown about everywhere from the back of your yogurt cup, to the tea you drink and the vegetables you eat, but do you really know what this class of nutrients does. Think of it this way, your body is a war zone and the soldiers at the front line are antioxidants.

What is fighting what you ask? Antioxidants are trying to rid your body of excessive amounts of free radicals before they start a chain reaction. This chain reaction, if unchecked, could cause a buildup of free radicals, leaving your healthy cells and tissue at the risk of being prematurely oxidized. Oxidation is cell death or in a worst case scenario a mutation. It occurs when a molecule in our body splits, leaving an atom with an unpaired electron. Bah I hate chemistry you say, well this is easy stuff to understand, and the effect is what we are seeking to understand. So now we have this rogue molecule wanting to steal electrons from other compounds… and well, it does. This electron stealing mayhem is oxidation, and the compound that was robbed then itself becomes a free radical. Now we see how this may be a problem so how do we stop it?

Well you will never eliminate all free radicals from your body, actually your body makes its own to help it break down complex bonds within certain nutrients. These are ok, it is the unchecked radicals we seek to destroy and for this we need Antioxidants.