working out - challenge your body before it challenges you.
WHO WE ARE:
I wrote this August 26 2007 and updated it when my work out buddy Dianne got hurt in the gym in jan 2008. Dianne has since moved to Calgary and will be back this weekend for a visit (and a workout) so here are some thoughts on exercise based on what I wrote three years ago.
Hajnal is my phsyio therapist.
Gloria is Kweenredline here
My mother, 96 now lives with me.
Chelsea is my daughter. In 2010 she discovered martial arts training. I don’t want to get in an argument with her.
Back in 07:
"Yesterday Dianne hurt herself( lower back muscles spasm with pain in the right leg, doing squats with low weight on a 2/4 second rep cycle, about 30 seconds (3 or 4 reps in) into the second set of barbell squats at 65 lbs. I noted to her that she was rotating the barbell counterclockwise as she descended, and she was trying to correct that rotation.
Coincidentally yesterday, Hajnal suffered for no reason, from a back/right leg muscle spasm most of the day…
Gloria: since cutting out all additional salt, has lost significantly excess fat in the tricep area, stomach etc.
Chelsea: switched back to Curves to workout (she actually trained folks at the local Curves in Port Perry for some years) and is doing better than ever, see the update martial arts kick boxking skip rope sparring ugh!.
John: bigger, stronger happier (with his workouts) than ever.
So that’s where we are; lets see what I said in August 2007!
“Talking to Dianne in the gym today it is clear to me that we all have different points of view and issues. For those of us addicted to the gym maybe overtraining is a potential problem.
• For some of us, it may be nutrition
• Or it may be not exercising enough or at all.
Here are some points I would like to pass along to all this small group of friends. Lets check in with who they are:
My mother was living on her own in early 07, and I had a professional personal training specialist guide her through basic exercise. Soon after that she was hospitalized and in July 07 moved down to live with me. Bottom line? Not enough food / she got sick. Now with the correct food in 2010/11 she sees a doctor every six months and is off all her heart meds; her alzheimers has slowed its advance. Short term memory is not improving but she is fully independent and able to do most anything including sweeping snow off the porch.
Dianne, Gloria, Chelsea Hajnal and myself – hit the gym at different levels – Dianne totally almost every day, me 5 out of 7, Gloria 4 out of 7 and Chelsea consistently three times a week. Hajnal twice a week.
Now lets check in on nutrition and hydration first:
It is different things - too much, or not enough food, or not often enough with meals, or maybe junk food, and maybe not enough hydration. At this point I am convinced that if you don’t track the calories consumed, it is virtually impossible to be sure you are eating enough or too much. I have noticed that myself I think I have eaten well - five meals (3 full meals plus snacks of fruit or whatever) but its only 1500 calories when I need 2100. The analysis shows grade A, but its just not enough food! I urge all of you to google caloriecount.com and check it out. You need 1.5 litres of water to be healthy. Cut out pop, fast food etc. Read the labels on food. 1500 mg of sodium is your max daily requirement. Salt and sugar added are deadly to health. Without good nutrition all is lost.
Then there is the actual training. Whatever you do, with weights or not, you have to challenge the body or your body will challenge you! After age 25 or so you can no longer burn your body up without damage.
• High Intensity training HIT: (work out at a weight and exercise within the repetition range selected so you cannot do anymore reps with good form)
• Consistent: You gotta work out or go to the gym regularly. Whatever your exercise frequency you got to do it! But be consistently irregular!
• Irregular: keep changing your exercise routine. Monthly is probably best, but that speaks to the exercise range. The actual exercises, (machine, free weights whatever) need to change, probably with each workout. We all have our favorite machines and exercises that we like generally because they are the ones we can lift the most weight, and look the best doing it! But your muscles have a memory for this and to hypertrophy properly they need to be hit different ways.
• Stretching: after each group of exercise, and after warming up, and if you can deep tissue massage therapy with a professional.
On Friday just to do something different and mindful of a personal trainers comments that you don’t necessarily need weight to make a difference, I tried body weight ball squats ( large ball in the small of your back, leaning against a wall, and then simply squat down and up in a 2 second down 2 second up repetition. WOW! Next day my quadriceps were screaming. Gloria reports that she had to crawl out of bed in the a.m., and I went to Mosport and walked corner to corner on Saturday just to loosen up.
On Sunday back to the gym after a day off, I ran into Dianne doing probably 45 minutes of cardio on the treadmill, the stepper and the elliptical. I think she was due for a day off but she told me she has a hard time not working out every day; that’s the addictive part of all this. Not a bad addiction to have, but give cause to ponder, why is it addictive?
Of course I have an answer. Here is what I read; It’s a question of aerobic and anaerobic exercise. Dianne is a junkie for oxygen!
Point 1: Strictly speaking, the terms "aerobic" and "anaerobic" refer to the presence and absence of oxygen, respectively. Most of our cells prefer to get their energy by using oxygen to fuel metabolism. During exercise with adequate fuel and oxygen (i.e., aerobic), muscle cells can contract repeatedly without fatigue. During anaerobic or non-oxygen conditions (i.e., higher intensity exercise), muscle cells must rely on other reactions that do not require oxygen to fuel muscle contraction.
Point 2. The problem with the terms "aerobic" and "anaerobic" when applied to exercise is that we actually never switch from total aerobic to total anaerobic metabolic conditions. In reality, the more intensely we exercise, the greater the need for anaerobic energy production. Consequently, it is best to view the terms aerobic and anaerobic as transitions in metabolism, where the proportion between aerobic and anaerobic metabolism changes depending on exercise intensity.
Point 3. However, as exercise intensity increases, the need for energy release eventually exceeds that which can be supplied by aerobic metabolism. Our muscles simply need more reactions to support the energy demand. Therefore, anaerobic contribution to metabolism increases. When this happens, we refer to this change in metabolism as a metabolic threshold. This metabolic threshold represents the exercise intensity where we start to produce those waste products of anaerobic metabolism that can eventually lead to fatigue. You see this all the time when watching endurance Olympic events, such as a long distance running race. The athletes run at a pace that hovers around their metabolic threshold, and they can only afford to run faster than this pace near the end of the race. If they increase their pace too early in the race, then they fatigue too early and need to slow down to below their metabolic threshold to recover from the fatigue inducing waste products. This would result in poor performance.
And now back to Dianne. I am thinking that as she is very fit, and lean, that the long periods of cardio activity on whatever elliptical machine she chooses, is causing an oxygen rush that sustains her and makes feel good. Note that she is so fit, she really doesn’t fatigue much, and that oxygen rush feels good, so she does it a lot.
So what’s the problem with this?
I think you can hurt yourself, and run yourself down through an imbalance – too much cardio in this case, and then making errors lifting weights; it may not happen right away, but it can and probably will, happen when you least expect it!
Point 4. reading another article it is suggested that “The best way to incorporate cardio into your training is to do it in a completely different session then your weight training. If you plan on doing both weights and cardio in the same session, do the weights first.
There are two major reasons for this:
• First, doing cardio before weights will pre-fatigue your muscles, limiting your weight training. Doing cardio after weights will not. (my note: I believe a cardio warm up for five minutes does not qualify as pre-fatiguing muscles)
• Second, weight training will serve as a sort of pre-exhaust for cardio; lowering your blood sugar and allowing you to burn fat immediately after you start cardio. If you do cardio first, it will take about 20 minutes before you really start to burn fat ”
Notice that most of these web site articles reference fat burning. None of us in this group are really fat, but only two of us (Hajnal and Dianne) are really lean. I am not far off and my Mum while not fat needs to get the whole body working and Gloria and Chelsea are running at the higher end of their ideal body mass index.
So rest is good. Nutrition is good. Some intense exercise at least twice a week is essential. 7 days a week is too much. 3 – 4 days a week I think is ideal."
That’s all I got for now.
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Originally Posted by Terminator
