Category Archives: Exercise

She won’t be at your home gym

I am a huge advocate of weight training (aka resistance or strength training).

Folks new to weight training, or simply thinking about starting a program, are often intimidated by the jargon and contradictory information available. P.D. Mangan clears up a lot of the confusion in a brief article.

I quote:

“Misconceptions and wrong ideas abound in weight training, probably because so many enthusiastic amateurs are involved in it. In this article, I’ll try to clear up some of the misconceptions with a look at at science-based weight training.

In recent articles, we saw that brief workouts, at 15 minutes, done infrequently, at twice a week, can produce significant strength gains. We saw that compound lifts, not isolation lifts, are the most effective strength exercises, and are essential for the serious strength trainer. And we saw that hard weight lifting causes muscle damage, which necessitates recovery time.

Here I’ll focus on what science has to say about additional aspects of weight lifting (resistance training). These come from “Evidence-Based Resistance Training Recommendations” by Fisher et al.”

Source: Science-Based Weight Training – Rogue Health and Fitness

I’ve never played soccer but I bet it’s great for aerobic fitness

You’re not surprised, are you?

See NY Daily News for the details:

“Cue the sad trombone. America’s kids ranked 47 out of 50 countries measuring aerobic fitness — a key factor for overall health — in a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. By comparison, Tanzania, Iceland, Estonia, Norway and Japan raced away with the top five slots. The least fit country: Mexico.”

Source: Oh no! U.S. kids among least fit in the world – NY Daily News

Canadians were in the middle of the pack.

And he’s right. RTWT:

“Many people seem to have the wrong idea about weight training.

Whether you are in the gym for overall conditioning, for building muscle to prevent aging, or to become an actual bodybuilder, the process should involve working all of the skeletal muscles.

It appears to me — and this is a guess — that many people look at muscular men and see big arms to the exclusion of anything else. They then proceed to do isolation exercises, like biceps curls and triceps pull downs, to the exclusion of most other things.If your goal is health, work on all of your muscles.

If your goal is size and strength, work on all of your muscles.”

Source: Why Compound Lifts Are Essential – Rogue Health and Fitness

“One more rep then I’m outa here!”

You don’t need to spend lots of time a the gym to gain the benefits. Depending on your goals, 30 minutes a week may be enough.

From P.D. Mangan:

“Bodybuilders, gyms, and most publications devoted to it advocate that you train often, as frequently as five times a week. Is this necessary, and is this optimal?

The fitness industry has an obvious conflict of interest here: it wants you to use their products as much as possible in order for them to earn more money. If you are told to workout more often, you will be more likely to renew your gym membership, buy more supplements and equipment and magazines, and just generally to order your life so it revolves around weight lifting and fitness.

Others, more scientifically oriented, claim that you don’t need to train as often to maximize muscle gains, not that you need to do more than one set of each exercise. In the very informative book Body by Science, Doug McGuff, M.D. advocates once weekly workouts, a far cry from the three to five a week often advocated elsewhere. McGuff bases his recommendation on a number of things, most importantly the speed at which muscle recovers and grows from an intense workout, which is much slower than most people think.”

Source: Brief Workouts Produce Significant Strength Gains – Rogue Health and Fitness

Lowering the dumbbell is the eccentric component

I think it was Jane Fonda who, decades ago, popularized the phrase, “No pain, no gain.”

Did you know that the muscle soreness that follows a weight training session is caused only by the eccentric component of the exercise you do? “Eccentric” in this context isn’t easy for me to explain.

But here’s a simple try. You lift a barbell over your head with your arms; gradually lowering the barbell to its starting position is the eccentric component.

Learn more about exercise-related muscle soreness from Mark Rippetoe:

“Productive training entails some soreness, and everybody that trains gets used to the idea that getting stronger over time is accompanied by soreness – not the debilitating, crippling kind that makes normal movement difficult, but the mild soreness that accompanies a PR squat. To the extent that PRs are enjoyable, this soreness is welcome. It is possible to train for months and double your squat without being terribly sore at any point in the process.

But doing stupid workouts that cannot make you stronger and have not made you anything but sore indicates that you either don’t know what you’re doing, or that your priorities are other than getting stronger. If I were you, I’d reevaluate my priorities.”

Source: Soreness | Mark Rippetoe