Doable new way to build muscle and strength....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 8-16-2012

1.  Some of you of course already strength train and would like to know anything safe and legal that works to do it better and make more progress.

2. In case you don’t strength train yet, do consider it because it does many things for you and this new method can make it work better and faster for you.

Strength training can help you avoid or turn down insulin resistance and high blood sugar. 

Most people would like to look good and people with more muscle and less fat look better.  (Effective strength training builds muscle which burns more calories than fat. And strength training when done well causes you to burn more calories for hours after you do it – not just while you do it.)

And, it’s good for your self image to feel strong and capable because you actually are due to the strength training you are doing.

As you get older there is even evidence that strength training can keep you sharp or sharper mentally and completely avoid your becoming a frail and dependent older person.

So what is this new method?

There are several parts to it.  But they all rest on this fact.  When you lower a weight you can safely and effectively lower about twice as much weight as you can lift up. 

A friend who strength trains looks for useful articles on doing so and found this:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/why-you-should-lift-and-lower-heavy-things/#axzz23a1jpnLI

It’s a bit technical and hard to read even  -- more than what I write gets at times.  But the key discovery this article describes has several important implications and ways to use it.

Among those are these.

It makes it safer to try to lift more weight because it allows you to use more weight lowering it than you could lift up safely and/or you can use it to get MUCH more strengthening using lighter weights than you would otherwise need to attempt to use and it enables you to get far more effective exercise than you would otherwise be strong enough now to do.

It also is a way to solve a problem I ran into when I first began to strength train.  At first, I would simply use a bit heavier weight every time I went in to the gym.

This was because I was actually stronger than I thought I was when I first started.  So I was just gradually learning to exert close to all the force I could instead of just part of it.  Then too, early strength gains do come more quickly.

The problem was that once I did that, I wanted to keep getting stronger but found I couldn’t make my muscles do more.

One of the huge advantages of this new discovery is that it enables you to exercise now with the weight you can lift now but get stronger as if you could already lift more!.

For example, you want to do 8 and then 9 and then 10 repetitions instead of the 7 you already can do.  Or you want to lift a larger weight than you have been using 7 times just like you do now with the lighter weight. Now, instead of getting extremely frustrated when you find you can’t do it, there are several ways to work your muscles harder is as if they already could do this for you.  AND, better yet, they get bigger and stronger as if they already were stronger because of the extra work that you CAN do by using this principle.

1. The article states that you can lift a weight that you can lift with two hand or two legs and then you can lower it slowly with each arm or leg in turn.

That could work for you if you are experienced enough to know how to do it safely because if you aren’t experienced and you do this with the much heavier weight you could do it wrong and hurt yourself.

It also would be MUCH easier to do this in a gym that already has a large set of heavier weights.

2.  Tim Ferris, who wrote the book Four Body, found that using a weight he could lift 10 to 12 times and doing just 5 repetitions but raising the weight so slowly he was able to count to five and lowering it the same way produced very fast gains in size and strength. 

I tried that and found it was more work than I was up to doing at my age because I was about 40 years older when I tried it than he was when he first did it.

He did find and say that this worked his muscles so hard and effectively he could only do it once a week and be recovered by his next session.  This article also makes that point about the once a week use of working your muscles that hard because you need the whole following week to recover.

THAT part is true no matter which style you use to put this discovery to work for you.  But it has a wonderful benefit with several parts.

You only have to work that hard once a week which is psychologically much easier and possible to do and keep doing.

And, if you need a gym to have access to the heavier weights, you only need to go there and add the extra travel time to your workout once a week!

I was already using Tim Ferris’s idea on a very limited basis. 

And, I have been only working with extra weight once a week as he suggested.

But with this new information, instead of only doing slow up and down for the one repetition as I have been doing,  I just tried doing that and then doing a few repetitions where I went up at the normal speed and then down that slow.

It DID cause my muscles to work much more than I had been but not so much more that I can’t keep doing it.

I’ve already planned to get back to my local gym one evening a week to use heavier weights than I can at home.

Now when I manage to do it, I’ll be stronger when I do than I would have been by then.

AND, I can begin to try the lift with two hands or legs and lower with one on several exercises that work my larger muscles.

My current plan is to keep working out at home two other days a week with lighter weights and normal speed to get in the daily exercise I need and to keep only working harder with heavier weights and less repetitions once a week.

The other way I just found works is when I do my slow up and slow down repetitions at the point where the up is a bit much, instead of getting irritated, I just move the weight up at normal speed or even cheat it up some way but then lower it slowly.

Here again, I’m able to exercise my muscle as if it was already stronger even before it actually is.

Now I won’t get stuck with a plateau where I’m not getting stronger at that point.  Because I can get my muscle more exercise anyway, I’ll keep getting stronger!

For people new to strength training, knowing to do this likely will enable many who would have quit in frustration, as I once did, to keep working out and get stronger and get stronger faster!

As I’ll cover more next Monday in my monthly fat loss report, this also will work to add more muscle to me and cause my belly fat to shrink!

So, for me, it is extremely good news.

As I said, I tried it and found it worked to get my muscles more work and is quite doable.

Given the findings in this study, I believe I’ll begin now to add the muscle I need to shrink my belly fat even before I’m able to get back to the gym once a week.

Since other people want to be stronger and less fat, and this apparently is proven to work, I thought it important to do a post on it.