Filed under: Anti-Aging For Men
Exercises for Strength, Part 2
Strength training can do more than protect your joints. Any injury to a large muscle group, such as your hamstrings or quadriceps, can often be overcome and very likely repaired by high-repetition, low-weight exercises specific to the injured muscles and those around them. This seems like such a novel, almost contradictory conceptthat frequent contraction and then relaxation of an injured muscle can actually work to repair it. By doing low-weight, high-repetition exercises, you can actually strengthen those muscle fibrils that are still intact and not injured. Meanwhile, you can improve blood supply and oxygenation to injured muscles, thus helping to repair them.
Muscular strength is the amount of force a muscle can exert against any given resistance. There are plenty of ways to increase muscular strength. You can strengthen a muscle by overloading itthat is, by forcing it to work at greater loads than usual. Or you can do lighter work at increased repetitions. Some muscle groups respond better to one technique than to the other, and each method is good for specific types of muscular conditioning. Your arms and legs, for example, respond well to overload training; your abdominals and pectorals respond best to low-resistance, high-repetition exercise.
If you’re looking for the most rapid gains in strength, you can exercise a particular muscle group at 80 to 100 percent of maximum. However, because there’s a lot to be said for going “slow and low” to help avoid unnecessary injuries, remember that you can still develop strength with exercise intensities of 60 percent of maximum. Using this approach lessens your possibility of “bulking up.”
Muscular endurance, on the other hand, requires exercising muscle groups at lower intensities and higher repetitions to the point of fatigue. As they say, “no pain, no gain.”
An important concept is the “overload” principle, which states that the amount of weight must increase as the muscle gets strongerthe “progressive resistance” theory. This is the basis for weight training programs and why lifters so frequently boast about the amount of weight they can lift, press, or squat. “Gosh, I can bench press my grandmother plus 150 pounds. How much can you lift?” It’s their measure of how well they’re doing. Weight training is also extremely versatile. Done properly (ideally with expert supervision), there is a great deal of specificityof your contraction, your training intensity, your training velocity, and the pattern of your movements. Let’s call it an art form.
The methods of developing muscular strength are categorized according to types of muscular contraction regimens: isometric, isotonic (concentric or eccentric), and isokinetic training. free sample anti aging
Filed under: Anti-Aging For Men
Exercises for Strength, Part 1
Once you’ve decided to get into shapeor that you’re going to retain the shape you’re already in, assuming it’s pretty goodthe object is to design a fitness program that you can stick with, one that will provide maximum benefit for the time you spend at it. Your regimen should be enjoyable and give you benefits for your mind as well as your bodythat old Greek ideal again.
Here’s how you do it.
Strength training can do a number of things for you that tend to get forgotten in this age of aerobic mania. Ubiquitous health clubs everywhere promote cardiovascular fitness that, without question, has been the watchword to the exercise set. Yet strength training, too, especially now and at later stages of your life, must not be forgotten. There are good reasons for this.
First, strength training, as much as stretching for your warm-up and especially your cooldown, is a critical element in preventing injury. By conditioning opposing muscle groups (e.g., quads versus hamstrings, triceps versus biceps), you can strengthen the maximal number of joints and tendons connected to those muscles. One way that well-conditioned muscles can protect joints is simply by preventing hyperextension. Hyperextension is what makes the delicate (and hard-to-heal) tendons and ligaments crack like dry spaghetti. For example, if you have weak knees, you should strengthen opposing leg muscles around the knee: quadriceps versus hamstrings, calf muscles opposing the muscles at the front of your legs (anterior tibialis) and the tendons around this crucial joint.
Have you ever had a shoulder separation? If so, I don’t need to tell you the wisdom of strengthening your arm, back, shoulders, or any of the rotator cuff muscles above or behind your shoulder. A systematic muscle-strengthening program can make the potentially unstable shoulder joint stronger.
Second, strength training can also increase your performance by making you more powerful. By carefully strengthening neglected muscles, you can protect muscle groups that are not necessarily sports specific for you.
Third, there’s vanity. Those in the bodybuilding trade jokingly refer to the process of strengthening your biceps as producing “curls for the girls,” because your biceps may have little significance athletically other than to enhance your physique and make you look better on a New Jersey beach. So Bruce Springsteen really does have a reason for lifting. anti aging botox treatment
Filed under: Anti-Aging For Men
VOmax
One convenient measure of aerobic fitness is called the VOmax. It is essentially a measurement of the maximum amount of oxygen a person can use per minute per kilogram of body weight. It typically declines 1 percent each year past age 25.
However, if the amount of physical activity and body composition is kept constant, the decline can be minimized to less than 0.05 percent a year. Keeping in mind that mind and body are interrelated, a decline in VOmax is not just age related, but influenced by other factors, such as age at onset of training, how much you train, any history of illness, or your genetic profilethe parents you didn’t choose.
Effective training can prove effective time and again in maintaining and improving physical fitness. A 1987 evaluation of 24 male track athletes ages 50 to 82 reported the effect of age in training on VOmax over 10 years. Those who remained active maintained a 10 percent higher VOmax than their noncompetitive cohorts even though each group showed the same decline in maximum heart rate (there are certain things over which we have no control).
Keep in mind that the majority of the general population wouldn’t run for a bus. Most aging men must accept that they are, unfortunately, slowing down in a few more ways than one. But you don’t have to let the reality of your aging affect you all that drastically. Sure, you may lose speed, but you don’t have to lose endurance. So, all in all, as we cruise through our forties and into our fifties, we have to expect some decline in strength, and an expected decline in the speed we are capable of achieving. Adaptation is the message here. That there seems to be less decline in endurance activities explains why older athletes can achieve some impressive results in endurance events.
Most loss in aerobic capacity fortunately is something that can be controlled by an act of will (mind and body again). You can will yourself to stay physically fit and make that conscious decision part of your daily regimen. But although the Olympics may be out of the question, statistics confirm you can maintain body (and mind?) if you exercise reasonably and remain fit. Rather than sprinting into your forties only to fizzle out at this critical turning point, the idea, I believe, is to keep at it for the rest of your life. Albeit, as you motor along, you’re ultimately gonna be shuffling along. But that’s really OK. facts about anti aging vitamins and supplements
