Exercises for Strength, Part 2
Pagina: 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.
