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Thursday, February 11. 2016

An older gent discusses fitness

I think this guy is exactly right about cardio and endurance. 30-second heart rate peaks are the efficient way to go. He is right that all of those people doing routine, monotonous aerobics for 40 minutes are wasting their time.


Dr. Mercola is also good on muscle-maintenance, but has a bit too much emphasis on machines instead of free weight work. Our theory is that the machines are only to help us build up to more complex, multi-muscle group functional strength exercises we have listed in past posts. It's the latter that are most life-useful.


Overall, though, a good message. No pain, no gain.





Posted by Bird Dog in Physical Fitness at 14:49 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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I've used free weights for over 30 years. If you want to get very good strength and growth then training to fail gets the best results.

Put simply, lift a weight that you will fail to lift when you get to somewhere between the 4th and 6th rep. You also need to adjust your technique to do this. So for example, with a barbell curl you need to get your back into it to get the weight up.

Train two muscle groups a session, and keep the session to 45 minutes max. Allow 1 minute recovery between reps.

Purists hate this, I've had guys the world over coming up to me in the gym to tell me I'm doing it wrong. But the results are excellent.
#1 Adam (Link) on 2016-02-11 14:56 (Reply)
I always train to fail. Often, I do drop sets at that point. Burn burn burn it,
#1.1 Bird Dog on 2016-02-11 15:28 (Reply)
Hey Adam, do you need to fail on every set, or just the last one of the series?
#1.2 Dave on 2016-02-12 15:01 (Reply)
There was a premier swimmer that attended my old HS a few years ago. After being MVP of state meet (and invited to olympic trials) he burned out. Got sick of it all.

But then a couple of years later he discovered a new training method wh/ was lots of quick sprints thru the water, not the long, tedious hours in the pool. Reinvigorated him, and he's enthusiastic about swimming again, and will represent a Caribean country in the upcoming Olympics.
#2 DrTorch on 2016-02-11 19:09 (Reply)

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