Lifting weights better….Today's post:  Thursday, 12-21-2017 

We’ve posted often that effective strength training adds bone and muscle instead of having both of them shrink every year.

This has many benefits.  It helps with fat loss.  And it is essential to keeping off the fat you lose.

You can eat more and be less hungry while you are losing fat.

Best of all, you don’t have to eat less every year to stay trim and become frail as you get older.

Last week we posted that while these things are true for men, they are even more the case for women!  And, we posted on a couple ways that work that women can learn to do effective strength training.

What if there was a way to do this so it works better and is safer to do at the same time?

There IS one.

It’s certainly surprising to most people and very little known.

I had read that this technique made doing heavy lifting with your legs and buttocks and lower back work enough better to help you get stronger and add the bone and muscle to best aid fat loss. 

(Using weights that are a bit challenging to you and becoming stronger and lifting more over time with these large muscles is what works best to cause & support fat loss.)

It’s safer than you might think as Mike explains.  And, when you keep doing it, it’s like getting fit, your body gets better at it so it becomes safer. 

You can read Mike’s article at this URL:

It’s called the Valsalva maneuver.

There’s good news in Mike's article!  You can get better at it and I add how to make it even safer to do

https://www.muscleforlife.com/valsalva-maneuver/

1.  By giving your body pressure from inside, doing the Valsalva Maneuver enables you to lift more in exercises that you want to maximize your lower back strength while doing them. 

This is most true for one rep max or the last of 2 to 6 reps with the heaviest weights that cause muscle growth.

Just like wearing a weight lifting belt, compressing the air inside you and tensing your abdominal muscles in front during the lift, gives the muscles in your upper back support which enables them to lift more. 

Mike uses the example of a soft drink can.  With nothing in it, it collapses easily.  But unopened and containing water, it’s extremely strong.

The Valsalva technique does that for your middle so you lift more and succeed with a weight you might not have lifted.  THAT causes progress and the recovery makes you stronger when lifting less would give you less progress and results.

(You can work with weights closer to 95% of your maximum when you are doing the lifts for health and fat loss.  Unlike power lifters who work closer to 98 to 100%, that’s not necessary.)

If you do 5 or 6 repetitions until you can do 6 reliably and then jump the weight just a bit and do 2 and then 3 etc until you again can do 6 reliably you’ll make progress.  You can do the Valsalva partially by tensing your abs and releasing just a bit of air during the first few; but when you make a very strong effort to do the last one or two, doing the Valsalva technique completely can enable you to do that last rep or even two!

2.  But by doing it just before taking blood pressure twice each day and several times a week when strength training, your body improves how efficient it is in doing this.  That means you get less super high blood pressure spikes when doing a max lift.  

This was not in Mike’s article.  If found it online separately.  I now do it every day when I take my blood pressure.

Doing this by taking a big inbreath and strongly tensing the muscles in your abdomen and tensing your larger muscles and then releasing the tension and breathing out through your nose as long and slowly as you can does three things. 

It slows your heart rate and, oddly enough, slightly lowers your blood pressure. AND, it boosts the training effect to make doing it during heavy lifts safer and more effective.

Mike makes the point that just doing it when you do weight lifting two or three times a week produces a training effect.

I believe you can get a faster training effect and make the technique even safer by doing this practice twice each morning besides doing the technique on your heaviest, hardest reps two or three times a week.

I do it when I take my blood pressure.  But just doing it twice will work without doing that too even if you don’t take your blood pressure too.

Then you still get improved performance; but you do so without excessively high BP spikes!

3.  You also can eat the foods and take the supplements that cause your blood vessels to be so flexible and strong so they can safely handle the higher blood pressure!

Collagen, hyaluronic acid, glycine, proline, and vitamin C & fruit flavonoids all do this.

Using K2 to remove calcium from your blood vessel lining and knowing NOT to take proton pump inhibitors and avoiding high levels of excess salt also help!

Bulletproof makes a couple of collagen products from grass fed cows.  A company called Dr’s Best makes a capsule supplement with both the kind of collagen Mike says is effective in a separate article AND hyaluronic acid. 

Taking TMG, trimethyl glycine and lysine has been shown to help add muscle.  And the glycine builds bones.  Taking lysine & proline and enough vitamin C has been shown to reduce the process that causes cardiovascular disease.  AND, proline also builds bone!

Vitamin C and fruit flavonoids and these amino acids all make your blood vessels stronger AND more flexible.

Taking vitamin K2 also ensures that your body builds bone with the calcium you eat and it has been shown to REMOVE it from your blood vessels.  So taking it also makes your blood vessels stronger and more flexible and ADDS to the bone building that aids fat loss!

So, this information will enable you to lift more, get stronger, add bone and muscle and NOT lose it.

And that will give you fat loss support and desirable effects!

[Eating enough high quality protein helps both keep your appetite under control and enables you to build more muscle when you recover from these strength training workouts too. But that’s a topic for another time.]