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Been saying this since the 90’s.

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STRENGTH EXERCISE PRO-TIPS

Here are some game changers that only pros pay attention to.

1. Make a point of relaxing your jaw and neck when you lift. It is a natural tendency to contort your face and over strain your neck when working with heavy weight. Doing so is protective in nature but in a workout it detracts. Put the tension into the specific targeted muscles of each exercise.

2. Breathe out as you lift the weight and in as you lower it not the other way around. Do not hold your breath, feed those working muscles with oxygen!

3. Do not excessively squeeze your grip. Only grip as hard as as needed. In most cases a relaxed grip is fine and a hard grip wastes effort and redirects the tension to your forearms.

4. Use agonist/antagonist training. This means moving back and forth between opposing muscle groups. That is push and pull like pressing and rowing. This action helps you relax the opposing musculature and better focus on the working muscles.

5. Start each repetition thinking that the weight is super heavy. Avoid rushing and trying to just cheat through another rep. Use the mindset that the weight is very heavy and will require full commitment to each rep.

Be well, be strong,

Andrew and Tierney

STRENGTH AND STRESS

How does being strong take the sting out of stress? Certainly the act of exercising reduces the feelings of stress by helping you remove the stress hormone ‘cortisol’ http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037 and relaxing you in general but there is far more to it.

If your exercise significantly strengthens your body your strength becomes protective. It makes every physical action require less effort and at the end of your day you are much less drained. Every physical movement you make finds you more stable and balanced. All your countless daily movements add up and create micro damage and strength protects against this.

Your strength that comes from having plenty of lean muscle gives you interesting abilities you may not have considered. More muscle means more draw on your entire system (organs, nervous system etc). More muscle means the rest of you must fuel those engines. The end result is greater creation and use of hormones, nutrients , water and oxygen. In other words, your strength stimulates your metabolism and prompts your entire body to function at a higher level.

Finally we must also consider ‘good’ stress, stress that is enjoyable and exciting (think play). The stronger you are the more of this you tend to put in your life. Good stress and all the positive chemistry involved counters the drag of bad stress. A strong body allows you to flush your system easily.

While mental/emotional points of view are important in stress management we firmly urge you to let strength fill that half-full/empty glass right to the top and let it overflow!

Be well, be strong,

Andrew and Tierney

Chronic stress puts your health at risk Your body's stress reaction was meant to protect you. But when it's always on alert, your health can pay the price.

Most people have no idea how long it actually takes to build muscle after a workout. The biology runs on a much slower clock than many realize.

A single resistance session raises muscle protein synthesis fast, and synthesis is the process that lays down new contractile protein. MacDougall measured it directly: it climbed about 50 percent by 4 hours after exercise and peaked near 109 percent above baseline at 24 hours. Phillips found the same arc, still elevated at 48 hours before returning to rest. The response is large, it is brief, and within 36 to 48 hours the muscle is back to baseline. That is one full cycle from a single workout.

Damas and colleagues tracked untrained men through ten weeks and measured synthesis and muscle damage at the same time points. In week one the synthesis response was highest, but so was muscle damage, the structural disruption that unaccustomed training causes. Early synthesis was being spent repairing that damage rather than adding new tissue, and the magnitude of the early response did not predict who gained the most muscle later.

By around week three the damage response had attenuated, and by week ten, with damage minimal, synthesis finally correlated with actual hypertrophy. The same group showed that the apparent size increase in the first few sessions is largely swelling and edema, not growth. Durable muscle is built over months, not hours.

What you measure should follow that timeline. The acute spike is necessary but not sufficient, so a supplement or technique that raises synthesis acutely has not demonstrated it builds muscle. Judge a program or a product by the trend across two to three months, not by how the session felt or what the scale did the next morning. The first weeks of scale weight overstate real tissue because some of it is water, so do not over-read it when it moves. The synthesis response is the fast part. Adding muscle is the slow part, and it only shows up with consistency.

References: MacDougall et al., Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, 1995 Phillips et al., American Journal of Physiology, 1997 Damas et al., Journal of Physiology, 2016 Damas et al., European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2018