Exercise Duration, Training Tools, Reality TV
9 March 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Youve got about an hour: I have a lot of folks ask how long an exercise session should last. Experience and science both converge on this one and for someone in reasonably good condition after 45 to 60 minutes energy starts to nosedive and the point of diminishing returns set in. Ever notice how exercises done at the end of a long session suffer in terms of performance compared to those exercises done at the beginning or middle of a session? This is why I always advise getting the big, sweeping, compound multi-joint progressive resistance exercises out of the way do them at the beginning of the session. Save the dink-oid exercises done sitting down, lying down or on a machine for the ass-end of the session. How about cardio? This is a different kettle of fish and so much depends on the mode, intensity, complexity of the movement and if it is steady-state or interval (burst) style cardio. Exercise of any type generally has three benchmarks: intensity, duration and frequency. A good rule of thumb is if you train and train hard (the only type of training that yields results) energy is going to start heading south at about the forty minute mark. Elite athletes can go longer and out of shape folks will peter out sooner. Do the important stuff first.
Invaluable Training Tool #1 The WalkMan: I love to listen to music when I train. I can get more focused and find I am able to invoke what Schwarzenegger called, The Heightened Arousal Zone. I can a little more psyched-up on those all important top sets when Im in the music zone. I carry an ever-changing selection of CDs and will rotate them freely and often. This applies to both progressive resistance training and cardio. Those who know me know that 80% of my aerobic activity consists of power-walking up and down the steep fire trails that crisscross the Catoctin Mountains. I can literally walk to the mountains from my house and my usual procedure is to listen to music while I take nature power walks. I wear my heart rate monitor and shoot for 75-85% of age-related heart rate maximum and a 10-15 calorie-per-minute oxidation rate. I get my best thinking done on these high intensity backwoods walks while listening to anything from Big Pink to Coltrane, bebop to hip-hop, Bach to Hendrix and all musical points between. I am hoping to make the move to the IPOD in the next few months.
Reality TV Konnichi wa Bitches! I love the new Ultimate Fighter reality show on Spike TV. I have been a mixed martial arts fan from day one and wrote about the UFC in a series of articles for MILO way back in the sports infancy. In the reality TV show they stuff a dozen young up-and-comers into a Las Vegas luxury house and pair them off in two teams: they then subject the squads to challenges and each episode ends in a UFC-style fight between two members of the opposing squads. Great stuff; plus you see the intense day-to-day training they fellows are subjected to. Eventually the show will be whittled down to two athletes and each will receive a contract to fight at the UFC. As you can imagine, filling a house full of young fighters 24-7 for three months is bound to result in conflicts. Last week they decided the boys were deserving of a break and took them out to dinner and free drinks. The diner part was fine but the free drinks part ended up with a bunch of inebriated fighters engaging in over-the-line high-jinks. One poor guy ended up falling asleep on the lawn and getting drenched with a garden hose while unconscious. He got up, put his hand through a plate glass window and knocked a door clean off the hinges faster than you could say, call the cops. Great stuff.
Tags:Popularity: 1% [?]
Related Posts:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
