Climb Your Way To Fitness
Best Time To Train
Glycogen And Recovery
One Workout A Week
Stale Crazy After All These Years
Too Much Training
Focus On The Base First
On And Off-Season Training
Don't Forget To Warm Down
Aging and Strength
Pedaling Calories Away
How do scientists determine the amounts of nutrients healthy people
Scientists have determined the nutrient
needs of many species of animals and of humans by examining statistical
relationships between nutrient intake and disease, conducting short- and
long-term clinical studies, and studying cellular metabolism. The dietary
recommendations of many nation, as well as those of the World Health
Organization, are based on these research findings.
Who uses nutrient intake standards?
Nutrient intake standards were developed to help
professionals determine precise dietary needs of animals, including
humans. These standards then were used as the basis for the food intake
recommendations provided to consumers. In the United States, nutrition and
health professionals-who plan school lunch programs, design food
assistance programs, assess the nutritional content of processed foods,
and evaluate the nutritional adequacy of the nation?s food supply-all rely
on a nutrient intake standard known as the Recommended Dietary Allowances
(RDA). Healthy diets also are planned using such guidelines as the Dietary
Goals for the United States and the National Institute of Health (NIH)
recommendations on fiber.
The federal government in 1941 convened a scientific
committee to develop Recommended Dietary Allowances, or desirable nutrient
intake levels, for healthy individuals. The committee established separate
standards for men, women, infants, children, teenagers, young adults, and
older adults because some nutrient requirements vary with age and gender.
From age 11 on, separate RDA are given for males and females, reflecting
the gender-linked changes in nutrient requirements that occur at puberty.
In addition to providing for everyday needs, the RDA contains information
about desired nutrient intake during special metabolic conditions such as
pregnancy and lactation. The RDA are based on the best available
scientific data. Because new discoveries are constantly being made, the
tables are updated approximately every 5 to 10 years. The latest version,
published in 1989 contains recommendations for consumption of energy (kcalories),
protein, 13 vitamins, and 12 minerals. The RDA do not
give specific recommendations for carbohydrate or fat intake, on the
assumption that people will consume adequate quantities of these nutrients
in the process of meeting their energy needs.
NIH Recommendations for Fiber Intake
Prompted by mounting evidence that consuming greater
amounts of insoluble as well as soluble fiber can reduce the incidence of
colon cancer and decrease blood cholesterol levels, the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) issued recommendations for fiber intake.
Americans currently consume an average of 13 g of fiber per day. While
acknowledging that individuals require varying amounts of fiber to
maintain good gastrointestinal function, most experts agree that Americans
should strive to consume between 20 and 35 g of fiber each day from a
variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains. Any program to increase dietary
fiber intake should be undertaken gradually to prevent intestinal
CLIMB YOUR WAY TO FITNESS
EXERCISE HEART RATE
Exercise heart rate is a common measure of exercise intensity in endurance
activities. During aerobic exercise there is a linear relationship between
oxygen consumption and heart rate, where the increase in heart rate is
designed to supply adequate oxygen to the working muscles. Heart rate also
increases during weightlifting, which is due to an increased level of
adrenaline rather than an increased demand for oxygen.
While your heart rate and blood pressure are elevated during training,
there is no gain in cardiovascular fitness. Weight training has been shown
to improve short-term endurance, which is measured by performing exercise
to exhaustion for four to eight minutes. To improve your cardiovascular
fitness and long-term endurance, you must do prolonged aerobic exercise.
Although the increased heart rate and blood pressure that occur during
weight training do not help improve cardiovascular fitness, the response
does not appear to be detrimental.
Q: Is Ping-Pong an aerobic exercise? I love playing the game and wondered
how many calories I burn while playing it?
A: Any pastime in which you can maintain your activity, or exercise,
intensity for prolonged periods of time is considered aerobic. This means
that your aerobic metabolism supplies your body with energy, as opposed to
your anaerobic metabolism, which results in the buildup of lactic acid and
is there fore duration, or time, limited.
As long as you play continuously, you will burn, an average, between 350
and 450 calories per hour. This is about the same amount you'd burn by
walking briskly, playing doubles tennis or riding a bicycle for at six to
eight miles per hour. A fast fame also helps to improve your agility,
coordination, reflexes and flexibility. Research has shown that elite
Ping-Pong players maintain an average heart rate of 75 percent of maximum
during a game, a level that conditions your cardiovascular system. So by
all means continue to enjoy your passion and feel good about the benefits
to your body and heart.
TIME TO TRAIN
Is it better to train in the morning or at night? Morning people feel they
perform better earlier in the day and enjoy starting their day with
exercise. Night owls, on the other hand, prefer to train later, when their
bodies are awake.
Recent evidence suggests that there is no difference in terms of
performance, health benefits or stress reduction whether you train early
in the day or late at night. While researchers thought that training later
improvement in mood, they found no difference. In fact, from the research
it appears that exercise performed at any time will help improve your body
and mind. Whether you're a morning person or a night person, the most
important factor in terms of when you should train is time-whenever your
schedule permits. Morning or night, exercise will work it's magic.
ADEQUATE GLYCONGEN STORES
Muscle glycogen is utilized as both a short-term and long-term energy
source. If you don't maintain adequate glycogen stores, your workouts will
be impaired, you'll feel fatigue, and you may end up becoming overtrained.
To keep glycogen stores high most athletes eat a diet consisting of 70
percent carbohydrates. Even so, the majority of them don't realize how
long it takes for their glycogen stores to return to normal levels once
they've been depleted.
While the length of time this process takes depends on numerous factors,
including the intensity of exercise and the duration of the workout, most
of the resynthesis of muscle glycogen occurs during the first few hours
following exercise-provided the athlete ingests adequate amounts of
For endurance athletes, who must recover from prolonged, continuous
exercise, muscle glycogen replenishment is complete within 46 hours. About
60 percent of the stores are replaced in the first 10 hours of recovery.
The replenishment of glycogen stores following a gym workout-that is,
short-term, high-intensity, intermittent exercise-is complete within 24
hours. In this case 45 percent of the stores are replaced in the first few
hours of recovery.
When you consider how long recovery takes, you can understand the
rationale for allowing at least one recovery day between hard, intense
ONE WORKOUT A WEEK
ADEQUATE TO MAINTAIN
Many Athletes use resistance training in the off-season to improve their
strength and power. Once the season begins, however, both their time and
recuperative abilities become limited, and so they generally curtail their
nonspecific resistance training, which is exactly what they should do. One
workout per week is the weight-training guideline for athletes during
their competitive seasons.
Once you have attained your desired strength level during the off-season,
once-a-week weight training should be adequate to maintain it, and the
stress imposed on the sports-specific muscles during the competitive
season will aid in that effort. Training more frequently during the
on-season will likely result in overtraining and chronic fatigue; so while
you're training intensely for another sport, once-per-week resistance
training is plenty.
Stale Crazy After All These Years
Optimally, we'd all like to be able to train hard all the time. The
pleasure we get from intense workouts is difficult to describe, but it's a
feeling that keeps us coming back time an again. We all want to hit a
peak, so we generally taper our workouts to avoid overtraining.
Eventually, however, we all experience stale periods.
While no one knows for sure what happens when we get stale, it's probably
related to-or caused by chronic fatigue. Pushing your limits continuously
without adequate recovery time between intense workouts is a sure way to
put yourself in this condition.
As we began training and our condition improves, we want to keep pushing
ourselves more and more. Sooner or later, however, without adequate
planning and cycling of workouts we're likely to experience feelings of
overtraining and staleness. Other causes of staleness are probably related
to psychological factors, including boredom, depression and lack of
interest. Varying your workouts, maintaining an adequate diet and
carbohydrate intake and, most important, paying as much attention to your
rest and recovery as you do to your training should help you avoid feeling
stale and overtrained.
Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) is a form of stretching
and flexibility training that involves the combination of muscle
contraction and relaxation/stretch. While there are several recognized
types of stretching-including static, ballistic and PNF-PNF has become a
favorite among therapists and trainers for rehabilitating injured athletes
and correcting flexibility limitations and imbalance.
PNF technique involves passively stretching a muscle to the point of
tension, then isometrically contracting it. The contraction is then
released, and the muscle is stretched even further as it relaxes. While
studies suggest that PNF may be more effective than the other two forms of
stretching, PNF methods are more difficult and require more instruction
and assistance than the simple static method.
The question also arises as to how strong a contraction is necessary
during PNF flexibility training. Research shows that isometric
contractions of 50 percent intensity yield results similar to those
elicited by 100 percent contractions. Therefore, it's not necessary to go
full blast on the contractions to get the desired results.
Despite the current preference for PNF among some training authorities,
all three basic stretching methods are effective, all can be varied, and
they can all be used in combination. Whatever form of stretching you
choose, you should make flexibility training an important part of data
suggests that more-flexible athletes achieve better performances and that
proper stretching and flexibility training may prevent injury.
The mentality of most athletes is that "more is better," but if
you can control your obsessiveness about training you'll have a healthier
life and make faster gains. It's important to look at training in the long
term. If you avoid staleness, injury and overtraining, you'll ultimately
achieve the best results possible. Working out should be a healthy, fun
activity, not one that forces you to train out of guilt, obsession or fear
that you won't make progress.
Remember that rest is an important component of any training program, one
that is all too often overlooked. Many athletes don't get a lot of rest in
general, and they apply this same attitude to their training. Always allow
sore and injured bodyparts enough time to heal. Most experts recommend a
few light workouts each week as well as days off. In fact, skipping a
workout every so often may help improve your performance more than
BUILDING A BASE
When it come to training, always concentrate on building a base before you
do any sport-specific work. For an endurance athlete this means running
long, steady miles to build an endurance base before progressing to
interval training. For a power athlete it means building a strength
foundation before performing explosive, power exercises. For a bodybuilder
it means building a solid foundation before graduating to work that
By periodizing, or cycling, your training intensity, you'll enjoy
sustained progress and avoid injury. If you don't build a proper base,
your body will both mentally and physically be unable to withstand the
rigors of specificity training. If you do have that base, however, intense
specificity training will subject your body to less stress and trauma.
There are no shortcuts.
You often hear about professional bodybuilders who train twice a day on
what is called a double-split routine. While this regimen may work for
some, it most likely won't work for you. Present evidence indicates that
it's not necessarily more productive to train more than once a day. While
ultra-endurance athletes such as runners, cyclist, swimmers and
triathletes often must train twice a day in order to accommodate their
rather large volume of training, this is generally not required for power
or strength athletes. Remember that too many training sessions-in whatever
combination-will increase the risk of chronic fatigue.
One major reason that bodybuilders shouldn't train too frequently is that
unlike endurance training, where athletes mix "easy," or
less-intense, workouts with "hard," or more-intense, ones,
weight training must generally be high intensity for it to be effective.
This means that the body requires a longer time between sessions for
ON AND OFF-SEASON TRAINING
Many athletes follow a weight-training program during the off-season to
increase their strength and power. Research has shown that both power and
endurance athletes benefit from this kind of regimen. By training with
weights in the off-season, they enhance performance and reduce fatigue
during the competitive season. The optimum type of training for this
purpose is isokinetic, although free-weights and most machines, which is
what these athletes generally use, involve isotonic resistance.
Whether you should train with weights during your competitive season
depends on your level of strength and the importance o strength as a
limiting factor in your sport. If you're losing strength or need to gain
strength during the season, you should work out with weights at least
twice a week; however, if you've already attained your desired strength
level through you off-season program, then you'll only need one workout
per week for strength maintenance. Just before major competitions or while
tapering to reach a peak is the time to abstain completely.
Many bodybuilders ride a stationary bike for 10 minutes or do light sets
of an exercise as a warm-up before training. The benefits of a proper
warm-up are well documented. A proper warm-down, however, may be just as
Perhaps the single most significant effect of a warm-down, or cool-down,
as it's also called, is the removal of lactic acid from the muscles and
the blood. Without a warm-down lactic acid removal can take twice as long.
Rapid removal of lactic acid may help reduce subsequent soreness and
stiffness. A warm-down involves light movement and/or stretching, which
helps keep the lactic acid and blood from pooling in any given region.
STRENGTH REACHES A PEAK
Strength reaches a peak in the early 20s and declines slowly until age 35
or so, when the decline becomes more rapid. This is what current research
tells us, yet most of these studies were performed on moderately trained
or sedentary individuals.
While strength losses do generally accelerate after the mid-30s, they
don't have to. When a person uses his or her strength, it hardly declines
at all, even into that person's 60s. Many athletes who have continued to
train throughout their lives are stronger in their 50s and 60s than
sedentary people who are half their age, and world-class weightlifters
have achieved personal records in their 40s.
Training before puberty leads to improvements that are due mostly to
changes in the nervous system. Training after puberty combines nervous
system changes with changes in the muscle tissue; however, when
testosterone declines with old age, senior citizens may be limited to
neurogenic changes. Even so, training at any age improves or maintains
strength. So either start today or keep up with your training to maintain
you strength as you get older.
PEDALING CALORIES AWAY
Most gyms have stationary bicycles that help burn fat and calories when
you're on a weight-loss program. Many of the computerized machines tell
you your heart rate, work load and caloric expenditure, most of which
information is pretty accurate. For example, you get accurate readings on
the distance you ride and your speed, pace and work load, but don't count
on these machines for a correct measure of the calories you burn. Most
models base their findings on norms for average expenditures for a given
time or distance of riding. The latest research shows, however, that
bodyweight and body composition are also important in calculation how many
calories an individual burns.
It is generally assumed that energy expenditure during cycling is
independent of bodyweight, since you are supported on the seat throughout
the exercise session. The equations used to determine calorie expenditure
are based on that assumption. From these new studies, we now know that a
heavier person will burn more calories than a lighter person during
similar exercise sessions even though the machine reports the same caloric
expenditure. Prefigured tables are no more helpful than machines, since
most current tables don't take bodyweight into consideration either.
Don't let this less-than-accurate measurement keep you off the bicycle,
however. Although you won't know your exact caloric expenditure, the value
will give you a goal to meet or exceed during subsequent rides.