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.

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.

So I’m at the gym today and what do I see but three girls “working out” in the shortest shorts ever, talking and laughing like it’s the most fun they’ve had in their lives. Now, why did I just put “working out” in quotes? Because there’s a difference between actually working out and just hanging out in the gym and thinking you’re working out, and apparently a lot of people don’t realize this.

If you’re in the middle of a set and talking to the person next to you, you’re not working out. If you’re looking across the room and checking out some girl stretching, you’re not working out. And if you feel exactly the same at the end of a set as you did at the beginning, you damn sure aren’t working out.

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.

Have you ever seen people attempting to do pull ups by swinging their legs and throwing themselves up? What about people who perform bicep curls by squatting down and then throwing their arm up as hard as they can? And let’s not forget those who struggle to do such heavy weights that they squirm and twist their body around until they finally realize they’ve picked up about a hundred pounds more than they could ever do. This isn’t the circus, leave the acrobatics at home. When you perform a lift, it is ESSENTIAL to have correct form. Good form = good lifts and good lifts will produce good benefits. Bad form = a bad lift and increased risk of possible injury, as well as looking like a total amateur. If you can’t perform a lift with good form, drop down to a weight you are more comfortable with. You’ll feel a better burn and see much greater gains in the long run. If the problem is you just do not know how to do a certain exercise properly, do not feel embarrassed about asking someone in the gym. We will begin building a video database of exercises categorized by targeted muscle showing step by step how to complete repetitions with proper form. Stay tuned.

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^ example of what NOT to do :/

Here is a routine I drew up that can be done in your bedroom without the need for any weights, dumbbells, or accessories. It is a full body workout and is not as easy as you may think. You should do the exercises in a circuit (no rest between exercises) in the order given, and once you have completed all of them, rest for 2 minutes and repeat the circuit twice.

- Wide grip push ups: These are performed like regular push ups but rather than placing your hands at shoulder width, take them out about 6 inches further. This will help to work your chest a lot more, rather than straining your triceps and shoulders. Perform 18-30 reps.

- Calf raises: Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart, facing forward, and raise yourself onto your toes. Keep your legs straight and do not bend your knees as you come up. Perform 18 reps. If these are too easy, stand on 1 leg at a time and do them, and then switch.

- Door frame pull ups: Open your door to about a 45 degree angle and have your roommate hold it steady. Grip the top of the door and pull yourself up, keeping your back flexed. Try to concentrate on using your back and DO NOT use momentum to throw yourself up. Perform 8 reps. If this is too easy, close the door and grip the top of the door frame. This will help work on finger strength and forearms because it is a lot harder to hold yourself up.