Amino

Yesterday I suggested that those of us who are getting older (which is all of us, unless we happen to be dead…) might need to eat a bit more protein in order to maintain our muscle mass.  There is a certain amount of evidence that focusing on the amino acid leucine might be particularly beneficial.

I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t have an amino acid sensor that lets me look at a food and know that it’s a good source of any particular one.  Fortunately, we have the internet.

 

Leucine-rich foods for vegetarians include chickpeas, brown rice, soybeans, peanuts, and tree nuts like Brazil nuts, almonds, and cashews.  Eggs are also a good source for those who eat them.  Fish lovers can get leucine in salmon and the omnivores can find it in beef.  There you go:  an ingredient list for weight-day dinner!

Use it.

There are plenty of good things about getting older (I can buy as many books as I want, for one!), but then there’s the other stuff.  One of the less good things about getting older is that we lose muscle mass.

Over time, our muscle units remodel.  That’s a normal process in the body, but with aging, some of those remodels are essentially tear-downs.  We lose mostly fast-twitch motor units, which are responsible for strength and power.  Slight bright side:  our endurance motor units enlarge a bit to compensate, so we lose endurance more slowly than straight strength.

 

In the same way, our muscles are constantly breaking down and rebuilding as part of the general maintenance processes of our bodies.  As we get older, though, we don’t replace all the muscle proteins that we break down.  Some of this has to do with how we process dietary protein.  To some extent, we get less results from our resistance training.  We have to lift heavy to overcome this effect.

 

Then there are the hormones.  We all experience a rise in cortisol as we age, as well as an increase in inflammation.  Both of those contribute to the breakdown of muscle tissue.  Women, additionally, experience the hormonal shifts of menopause, which are not the kindest to our muscle tissue.

 

Pretty tempting just to give up and hold down the couch, right?  Nope.  Physical inactivity makes the whole enchilada worse.  In fact, we need to focus on more high-intensity, low-volume work than we did when we were younger in order to keep the muscle-eaters at bay.

 

So:  eat your protein and lift your iron.  Then get some sleep to solidify the gains.

Monday Workout: Adaptable

This is an adaptable workout.  Feeling like the weight bearing on the arms is too much?  Sub regular jacks.  Knees hurt?  Just do twists without the lunges.  As always, this needs to work for where we are today.  Three rounds.

 

woodchoppers	30
good mornings	20
skullcrushers	10
squat to leg lift	30
bench press	20
lateral raise	10
plank jacks	30
(lunge) twist	20
brains	10

The Amazing Stickie and Side Banana

The Amazing Stickie is working her abdominals today with Side Banana (which also reminds her to eat her fruits and vegetables).

She begins lying on her side.  From there, she lifts her head and her legs up toward the ceiling.  Then she lowers them back down.  A set of ten on one side and then the other is good.

Lift Weights, Get Smart

Yesterday we talked about anatomy.  Today:  physics!  I know a lot less about physics than I do about anatomy, so maybe I’ll be brief?  We can hope.

Force, as we all recall from physics, is mass multiplied by acceleration.  When we do strength training, we are essentially doing a physics lab on ourselves.  How cool is that?  No dorky lab coat required, unless you want to wear one, in which case, do you!

 

In this instance, the mass part is the easy bit.  It’s right there, on the dumbbell rack.  Whichever one we choose, it will remain constant throughout our endeavor.  (Unless we approach light speed.  Then the workout will probably become irrelevant.)  The other two parts of the equation will vary.  When we lift the weight, we have to accelerate it from a standstill into motion.  That initial acceleration against gravity results in a different amount of force than, say, at the top of the motion when we want to slow the movement down, stop it, and start the descent.  As the acceleration of the motion changes, so does the amount of force we use.

 

The good news is that we don’t actually have to do the math on this.  We have very smart bodies and brains that do the work for us.  Motor units, the functional groups that do the work for us, consist of motor neurons and their muscle fibers.  Those are plugged in to the central nervous system.

 

Bottom line:  strength and strength training are a function of the central nervous system.  It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that we get smarter when we lift weights.

 

Go play.

You Lousy Metronome, You!

Let’s talk anatomy for a moment or two.  In the classical conception, we have muscles that attach to bones via tendons.  (Nowadays, we talk about the myofascial system and it’s a lot more connected than previously thought, but for the current purpose, the old way works well enough.)  Tendons are thick pieces of connective tissue and they are less elastic than our muscles.  When we do weight training, we are of course strengthening our muscles, but we can also strengthen our tendons.

 

Why would we want to do that?  Hypermobile people need strong tendons to keep their bodies together.  The rest of us also need our muscles to stay attached.

 

The People Who Do Research have done some and what they learned is that isokinetic exercises are great for strengthening tendons.  That five-dollar word there?  It means exercises in which the movement takes place with an even cadence over the same distance.  What we need in order to do this work is a simple metronome app, or an actual metronome if one happens to be lying around from the days when we took music lessons.

 

(In theory, we could just count evenly as we did our reps.  It turns out that we all make lousy metronomes and it is worth getting a free app and letting it handle that for us.)

 

Even if we’re not super excited about the idea of getting strong tendons, it’s a new way to play with our exercises, and who doesn’t want that? 

Monday Workout: Everything

This week we’ve got a little of everything.  We’re working in multiple planes.  We have some whole body stuff and some stuff that will help us refine our movements.  Three rounds.

 

step ups	30
gorilla row	20
bench dips	10
clean and press	30
flies	20
hip rotations	10
side hops/side lunges	30
deadlifts	20
pretty princesses	10