AITank: Fitness Explained

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ever wondered why it is we get tired, sometimes to the point where we can no longer even move our limbs. Muscle fatigue is a topic of intense research and study as biochemists and biophysicists seek to explain what exactly occurs in our bodies that leads to such exhaustion. The 100 year old theory that fatigue is due solely to lactic acid buildup in the muscle cells has recently been contested as two newly discovered factors now are seen as playing roles in muscle exhaustion.Let me start off by saying that this is going to be a technical article, not terribly so, but more than you might be used to. Do not be afraid though, by understanding what is going on in our bodies we can then train in more efficient ways.

The lactate model of muscle fatigue can be summed up by saying that after partial depletion of our bodies glycogen stores, glycogen phosphorylase (the fight-or-flight enzyme) steps in to convert the now depleted glycogen stores into glucose, the basic energy unit for all cellular functions. This process is called glycogenolysis; after this occurs the resulting glucose is then converted to ATP or adenosine triphosphate, the basic energy unit for all metabolic processes. This is as far in detail as we need to go but what is important to know is that this production of ATP via the degradation of glycogen is very inefficient and the faster rate of the oxidation of glucose versus absorption of lactate results in excess lactate production.