In Western Hills and with training available also in downtown Newport, KY

May 25, 2009

Especially now that we've instituted the Makeover A'la Carte, the trainees working out on their own always want to know:

"How many should I do?"

They're asking about the appropriate number of repititions. They're also demonstrating a common misunderstanding.

Most people perform some activity of exertion and call it exercise. People who put up with me have heard my diatribe differentiating exercise from recreation, work, and even exertion.

Semantics matter. "Exercise," in my world, "is a strategy (or more precisely the actions that strategy dictates) to achieve a phsyiological improvement." It involves exertion but not all exertion creates a phsyiological improvement, and recreation is something you do for fun that may have some physiological benefit (or backlash) and work is a chore the performance of which may or may not benefit your body.

Purpose-Driven Workout

I mention this to introduce a new way of determing an effective number of reps and/or time under load (the duration of the repetitions). I call this a new way but actually there's somebody who has long recommended performing a set until you reach your target heart rate (and I've forgotten who that is).

Keep repping until your heart rate reaches its predicted target zone. You know what that is -- correct?

Your taget zone is 60 to 75 percent of your maximum heart rate. What's your max?

Run as hard as you can, and once you collapse, have somone count your heart beats for 15 seconds and then mulitply by four!

Or, apply one of the commonly accepted formulas for determining your predicted maximum heart rate and then by monitor during strenuous activites and adjust accordingly.

The accepted formulas are similar to each other.

Subtract your age from 220. Multiply by .6 and .75 to identify the target training zone.

The second formula incorporates your resting heart rate into the equation. Your resting heart rate is what you're beating before getting out of bed in the morning. So, you'll have to wake up and take your pulse.

The equation for this formula is:

No matter which formula you use, remember this is only a prediction. Your actual maximum heart rate -- and thus target zone -- could vary.

While I rely upon my perception of your effort during a supervised one-on-one session, your heart rate may be a better judge.

We didn’t have convenient heart-rate monitors when I started in 1987, and I’ve been slow to awaken to its helpfulness.

Now,  I want to encourage everyone to workout wearing a heart-rate monitor, and use your target zone as an indicator of effort. If you don't already own a monitor, expect to spend $50 to $300 for a monitor with a chest strap. The wrist-only monitors are used for placing your fingers to take your pulse on demand. They don't provide ongoing BPM count.

Other than that, I don't know much specifically about these monitors. But I've been to Youtube (and elsewhere) for help:

Here's a look at two products from the biggest manufacturer in the industry, Polar:

This is not a surprise. Research from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden says men with muscle have a 40 percent lower cancer rate – even if they’re fat. They tracked the lifestyles of 8,677 men for more than two decades, monitoring how many developed cancer and died from it. The men were between the ages of 20 and 82.

Their regular medical checkups included tests of muscular strength. Men who regularly worked out and had the highest muscle strength were 30 and 40 percent less likely to die from cancer.

In a report on their findings, the researchers stressed also keeping a healthy body weight, but added, “in light of these results, it is equally important to maintain healthy muscular strength levels.

“It’s possible to reduce cancer mortality rates in men by promoting resistance training involving the major muscle groups at least two days a week.”

I might also add that overall body strength is important as we age so that --- should the need arise and likely it will -- we can endure surgery. How many times have you heard of an elderly person who perhaps could have been saved by an operation but wasn’t strong enough to endure it?

Frailty is grossly unhealthy. Weakness doesn’t merely cut down on your activities; it prematurely end your life, as we so often see in our families.

Save $30 on 3-session Father's Day gift
Click on photo to download gift card for Father's Day (and you can even submit payment by clicking here:
With our A'la Carte program, Dad can do the trial workouts, then add 4 more one-on-one workouts for half price, a savings of $50. But he must enroll before June 15. He'll then have the remainder of 6 weeks for self-directed workouts. But hurry!

You situate yourself onto a MedX or Nautilis machine with one thing in mind: to make the weight stack rise, then lower, and rise again, as many times as possible.

Isn't that what strength training is all about? It's that simple, isn't it?

Not quite. There is some truth in your assumption, but a key point is missing.

Lifting the weight stack is mechanical work. More important is the metabolic work that is produced by your muscles involved in the exercise.

Your muscles produce force, and that's all they do. The force produced by muscle many times results in movement of a body part, and perhaps movement of something you're holding or pressing against (in this case a Nautilus machine, and thus a weight stack).

But the end result can also be affected by kinetic energy or momentum, which are not a part of metabolic work.

Metabolic work

Metabolic work is your goal on a Nautilus machine, and it often results in mechanical work. Muscle force may or may not result in perceptible movement.

Recruiting momentum to create movement is not effective for overloading the muscle and thus stimulating growth. It's only good for making the weight stack move. It can also be dangerous. Jerking, lunging, and stabbing – slamming and banging – will damage connective tissue. Even if that damage is not apparent at the time, sooner or later the damage will take its toll.

Keep the muscle force flowing, whether or not the weight stack is moving. Keep it flowing steadily and smoothly. When it becomes darn near impossible to make the weight stack rise, just keep breathing and keep pressing into it. The weight stack may not be moving, but the muscles are working; they're producing force. If you back off and stab, which is a release of tension in the muscle, using the stretch reflex to get a little bounce (momentum) to move through a sticking point, your exercise benefit will be reduced.

Here are two examples to make this point:

If your front automobile tires are resting against a speed bump, and you step on the accelerator to go over it, you have to depress it pretty far to muster the umph to get over the bump.

Your engine was producing more force attempting to get over the bump from the dead stop, than if you had backed up, picked up some momentum and then gone over.

If your goal is merely to surmount the speed bump, then backing up and recruiting momentum is the wisest course of action. But if your goal had been to exercise your engine, to overload it, to stimulate growth, backing up would not have been effective.

Like riding a bike

A better example might be a bicycle at the base of a steep hill. Backing up to get a run at it will make it easier to pedal up the hill. But in exercise we're not looking to make it easier, we're looking to make it effective.

Had you tried to pedal up the hill from a dead stop at its base, it would have required far more metabolic work, although by the time you got to the top of the hill the mechanical work would have been the same in either scenario.

On a Nautilus machine, what your muscles are doing is far more important than the action of the weight stack.

Think in terms of metabolic work. When movement ceases, just keep pressing into it, breathe, concentrate, visualize it moving – and maybe you will get a couple more inches of movement.

Now, you have exercise

The exercise starts when movement stops, says Ken Hutchins, a Nautilus training expert. You are at the point of momentary muscular failure; your muscles are overloaded. This IS NOT the point where it becomes uncomfortable to keep going – that point passed a couple of repetitions earlier. This is where it is impossible. If a gun were stuck to your head with the instruction KEEP GOING, you couldn't; you'd have to be shot.

Give it 15 to 30 seconds of immovability. Keep pressing into it, and keep breathing. Every inch means a lot. Don't let the resistance drop; you're either raising it or holding steady, but do not let it lower.

This type of training produces the greatest benefit in the shortest amount of time. One study, in fact, showed it to be 59% more effective.

Slow down, you move too fast

The vast majority of people involved in strength training exercise are performing their repetitions at a speed of movement that is too fast. Slow down. It's safer, and more productive.

Lift the resistance (weight) in a smooth, controlled 4 to 8 seconds, turnaround smoothly at the top, lower in approximately 4 seconds, smoothly turnaround at the bottom and lift again in 4 to 8 seconds. That's @6 seconds up, @3 seconds down, with nice, smooth turnarounds at each end.

This is a much harder, more intense, type of training. You'll have to cut back the resistance you use by approximately 20%.

Here's why it's worth it

Slow repetitions rely more on muscular contraction and less on momentum. Conversely, the faster the repetition the more momentum you've recruited – and the less muscle you're using.

A high-velocity repetition involves a great thrust at the initial point of movement. Over the last half of the range of motion, however, momentum carries most of the load. The muscles are not being taxed.

Fast, jerky repetitions also do not effectively isolate individual muscle groups, and proper isolation is important in complete muscular development. Also, fast repetitions generate impact forces that reverberate in your joints and connective tissues. This is easy to understand.

Place your fist against a wall, and then push as hard as you can. The compression force on your knuckles is probably not painful. Now, pull your fist back six inches and push it forward as hard as you can. Ouch! That's about what happens inside your body – in joints and connective tissue– when you jerk, heave, sling, stab or move in any way that is not smooth, fluid and relatively slow.

Depending on the particular exercise, high-velocity repetitions may also produce a backlash effect. If you jerk mightily into torso rotation, for instance, reaching the end of the movement is like hitting a spring or rubber wall – you'll be zinged back in the opposite direction. This can result in being rammed beyond your point of comfortable stretch. Again, there is pain, and probable injury.

Move slower, never faster, if in doubt about the speed of movement. This is one of the basic Nautilus training principles, yet it is often violated because it is easier to move fast and jerkily than it is to move slowly and smoothly. Ten-second lifting repetitions soon become a painful, fatiguing experience. Painful, but productive. So slow down!

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