Explosivelyfit Strength Training

Adding simple to do exercises into your daily routine

In this age of instant gratification we are bombarded with all sorts of commercials telling us the path to physical fitness is easy if we just buy this or that piece of exercise apparatus. In some cases, you hardly have to do anything at all to get fit; the machine does it for you. You just ride and smile away the fat while at the same time gaining more lean muscle and getting those ripped abs.

Professional fitness trainers all know this is nonsense. These machines will rarely make you look like the demonstration models. Proven methods to a healthier body do actually exist and four of the most basic, such as walking, strength, flexibility, and cardio training are all right under your nose.

Walking is the easiest to begin with; you just have to do is step out your door and get going. Of course having a decent pair of shoes will prevent foot problems from developing so invest a bit of money in a good pair.

Try to get in 10,000 steps a day or at least thirty minutes of time in walking. Ten-minute segments are effective if you can’t do it all at once. Building up your stamina makes your body more receptive to the effects of the other three parts of the program.

Be safe and walk facing the traffic so you know what’s coming your way. Walk quickly. An increase in your walking pace builds up your cardiovascular capabilities and improves your heart and respiratory systems ability to more efficiently utilize and deliver the oxygen to your organs.

Strength training is easier if your heart and lungs are functioning at a high level. The stronger your muscles are the less effort needed for daily tasks. Do ten to twenty push ups, squats, good mornings, sit ups, leg raises, back raises, planks, supine rows, dips, calf raises… the list is endless every other day.

Strength training, if done correctly, will increase and maintain your flexibility…if you do full range of motion exercising.

Don’t be falling for a trainer telling you to go part way by just doing partial reps in an exercise. The exception would be if your doctor has cautioned you about working out in the full range then follow their advice.

A classic example is the misguided advice about not squatting all the way down “because it’s bad for your knees.” If it’s bad then billions of Asians would have bad knees and they don’t.

Develop the muscles throughout their full functioning. Flexibility comes from exercising the right way and that is full range of motion.

Good flexibility is a preventive measure for protecting your joints from injury. Stretching through the full range keeps them strong and able to withstand the activities of your life. Stretch; don’t bounce, only to a point of mild tension in the muscles.

Start out with moderate goals until you’ve formed the exercise habit and then move on from there.

The sleep debt; almost as bad as the national debt on your health

Sleep deprivation takes its toll on your health in a variety of ways. Irregular and constant sleep loss result in greater susceptibility to colds, memory impairment, and high blood pressure. A lack of adequate sleep also decreases the ability of your immune system to resist virus and bacterial attacks, which lead to illness. Additional negative effects include an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and even some kinds of cancer.

If this isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of getting enough sleep each night then consider this; if you’re an athlete your sport performance will be adversely affected both physiologically and mentally. Your mind doesn’t efficiently process the surrounding auditory, visual, and other sensory cues when you are in a sleep deficit condition.

Visual reaction times are slower, as are the rest of your motor functions such as coordination and agility on the field. Tremors and blurred vision become a factor in how well or how bad you play when sleepy. In fact, reaction times have been shown to be equal to that of individuals who are legally drunk! Along with a diminishment in motor abilities, your mental functioning simultaneously begins to falter as you start to forget things supposedly learned in the preceding days before.

Keeping up with the team gets harder as your cardiovascular system struggles to maintain the vigorous pace required by the coaches and the sport. A lack of sleep can cause as much as an eleven percent reduction in your cardiovascular performance. Can you really afford to give away eleven percent of your physical ability to your team and teammates?

Not only will your heart and lungs be less efficient, but equally affected is your ability to store glucose-the fuel required by your muscles to function. A lack of glucose means you get tired sooner.

Being tired opens up a whole new set of problems, the biggest being the heightened potential for an injury to occur. Knowing, and feeling these physiological sensations leads us into the psychological effects of sleep deficit spectrum.

Even if you are able to do the physical tasks necessary to perform at a high level your perception of the difficulty of exertion will be higher. This leads to feeling tired, which in many cases means you will give up sooner.

A lack of sleep has a negative affect on your mood. You’ll become grouchier sooner, more irritable and harder to get along with amongst your friends and teammates.

If you have been keeping a workout diary these psychological indicators will show up as overtraining clues before any physiological signs appear. This could lead your coach to back off on the intensity and volume of your training program leaving you behind your teammates in the training room.

Attacking the sticking points

The speed of the bar is vital to lifting success. Rapidly pushing past the sticking point in the lift with a fast traveling bar can contribute to a higher total load. Yes, I am talking momentum here. To get this blazing speed, train using your known strengths to develop it. Of course, you will still have to work on your weaker areas but not exclusively. If you are not training fast, you are missing the boat.

Dr. Fred Hatfield calls the process of increasing the speed throughout the movement ‘compensatory acceleration training’. It is the continual firing of the muscle fibers throughout the full range of movement (ROM) brought about by attempting to accelerate the load so “that maximal force is being delivered throughout the movement”. Of course, the braking at the end of the ROM will have to take place or the joint will be destroyed. As an aside note, there are some fascinating studies going on now regarding moving this braking effect later on into the stage of the lift. This implies more (as in time duration) lasting power can be put into the lift before it has to be slowed down at the end position.

Each time a particular load is moved quicker, more power is displayed. Recall the power formula where ‘P’ represents Power, ‘F’ represents force, ‘D’ means distance and ‘T’ is representative of time. Putting these components together we have P = (F x D) ÷ T. Now if we are able to move a specific load over a measured distance in an exact amount of time, we produce a quantifiable measure of power, also known as explosiveness or explosive strength i.e. the ability to rapidly increase force [4]. Take the same example and move the same load the same distance in a shorter amount of time and you have increased your explosiveness. This is exactly what we are trying to accomplish by speeding up the bar travel during the lifts, more power, more explosiveness and greater results on the score board.

Remember the mind-muscle connections.