When your strength or resistance train, your body has no idea
that you're exercising. The human body perceives this high
level of exertion reached when lifting weights as an attack,
an attack it must rise up to or run away from.
The body, in its infinite wisdom, will adapt to any situation if
repeated often enough. This adaptation results in the involved
muscles getting stronger and more toned as they ready the
body for a repeat attack.
Exercise Intensity and Muscle Fatigue
We need to recreate the level of intensity encountered during
this perceived attack safely, while going through exercises that
mimic normal human movement. The exercise must also effectively
work the targeted muscle or muscles to fatigue.
We define fatigue as the point in the set where some local
discomfort is felt -not tremendous pain, just discomfort.
You begin to get that slight burning sensation in the muscle.
Resistance levels are adjusted to control the repetition range
so as to hit muscle fatigue in 30 to 90 seconds (normally under
15 repetitions, depending upon the individual exercise).
There are numerous ways to increase or decrease resistance
so that you'll experience the burn in this
30-second to minute-and-a-half window. Let's examine how this
can be easily accomplished with a simple exercise that most of us
are familiar with - the push up.
The Push Up
This is a great all around upper body exercise that can be done in
dozens of ways. For our purposes here we'll consider two variations.
The classic push up features the body held in a straight position
with hands and feet on the floor (both slightly wider than hip
distance apart), as you lower your chest to the floor then push up.
In the second and less intense variation , the modified push up, the
knees are kept bent and come in contact with the floor (feet up),
substantially reducing the resistance encountered when pushing
against the floor.
This simple technique is a good example of how you can manipulate
the system when strength training, so as to hit muscle fatigue at the
correct repetition range, without using any equipment other than
your own body weight -and still get big results
Michael Stefano: New York City firefighter and author of
The Firefighter's Workout Book, The 30 Minute-a-day
Train-for-life Program for Men and Women
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