Optimal Training Time: You’ve got about an hour…Music and cardio
Written on 16 July 2007 by Marty GallagherIf 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: for someone in reasonably good condition, after 45 to 60 minutes energy starts to nosedive and the point of diminishing returns set in. There are two types of resistance training; intense and effective and not so intense and not so effective. 99% of people who take up weight training fall into the later category. Not necessarily out of laziness or because theyre bad people but because they dont know any better. No one has ever taken them aside and said, Look unless you really press the limit in various exercises nothing of any real consequence is going to occur. Unfortunately going through the motions, i.e., using the same poundage in the same exercise for the same number of sets and repetitions is going to result in little if any change. Only by pushing the body to do that which is has not done before do we trigger the adaptive response. That makes sense. Just look around when you go to the gym: if simply doing what you are capable of, if simply performing the same number of reps using the same poundage in the same exercise triggered the adaptive response, the gym would be crawling with muscle monsters. The human body does not reconfigure itself in response to sameness. The body only grows muscle and becomes stronger as a result of being pushed into new territory. Those who go through the motions, staying within their respective comfort zone can train for a long time. Those who train intensely enough to trigger hypertrophy have about an hour before the sheer intensity of the effort causes them to run completely out of energy: physical energy and psychic energy. If they dont run out of gas after a solid hour of bust-ass weight training then theyre either a Lance Armstrong aerobic anomaly (doubtful since genetically gifted endurance athletes are one in 100,000) or a person thinks theyre giving 105%.
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