Re: recovery question
- From: Chris Malcolm <cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 8 Nov 2008 03:03:57 GMT
Steve Freides <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Keiron (number6)" <pop07kfk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:PMiJk.14296$KL7.3218@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Many thanks all. In general what i hoped to hear.
I'm curious about what you're saying with strength gains tho Steve.
Strength is my ultimate aim at the moment and my workouts have been
replaced
by fewer reps per set and ample rest between sets for this purpose but
what
about the frequency of training?? Will strength improve with
exercising
everyday?? Won't this result in over training?
There are many ways to get stronger. Most people, for reasons I
honestly don't understand, choose to work towards a combination of
improved skill and increased muscle size. If your approach is pure
strength, then the motto is to train as heavy as possible, as often as
possible, while remaining as fresh as possible. People go so far as
Pavel's "Grease The Groove" approach, performing anywhere from 5 to 20
sets of an exercise per day, spread throughout the day. Obviously not
all exercises lend themselves to this, and you can't do it effectively
for more than one or two movements but it does work.
Being 65 with aging joints I'm not interested in adding any weight,
just in getting stronger. I'll accept some muscle mass increase if it
goes along with losing at least the same weight of fat.
I was annoyed to discover that almost all the training research is
focussed on increasing muscle mass, and there's not much about muscles
as old as mine. So I decided to experiment on my own muscles and
develop a mathematical model of their response to training. One of the
things I've discovered is that the fastest route to increased strength
for me is several reps spread throughout a day of one single
repetition to failure, every day for about a week, and then a day's
rest. The rate of strength increase is so fast the rest of my old body
(such as tendons) simply can't take it and I injure myself.
What seems to work well when starting with a new unexercised muscle is
to do one rep to failure once a week, and once that's stopped
producing muscle soreness that lasts longer than a day to increase
frequency until I'm doing two a day spaced several hours apart. The
widest spacing is important because fatigue reduces the reps you can
manage and that reduces the strengthening effect.
An interesting feature of my model is that it predicts that if I
followed the usual kind of muscle mass increasing exercise regimes
recommended in the gyms, that I'd get quite rapid gains for a month or
few (depending on intensity of the workouts), followed by a few months
of so of static or gradually falling performance, followed by a much
slower but continuous rate of increase. The reason seems to be that
the first gains are due to neuromuscular training of existing
muscle. When this nears the ceiling of existing muscle mass there is a
pause or drop in performance until the much slower growth of muscle
mass catches up and moves the ceiling further out. The subsequent
slower rate of growth is due to a parallel development of new muscle
and the training of it.
The model predicts that doing reps to complete failure in the
strengthening range more than once a day every day, and widely spaced,
avoids that knee in the strength growth curve. But I haven't yet
collected enough data in the muscle growth regions yet to be sure of
these conclusions in that area. And since I'm aiming at increasing
strength with minimal increase in muscle mass perhaps I never will :-)
--
Chris Malcolm
.
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