Building Your Best Body - The Intensity Factor
exercise, lifting, reps, effort, intensity
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Ever feel like all the work you put into attaining your 'best body' just is not cutting it? Here you are dragging yourself to the gym, running on the treadmill, slaving away with dumbbells, barbells and machines that resemble some sort of medieval torture device and none of it is working. You can't seem to lose any more body-fat, build any more muscle or increase your strength beyond what it's been for the past few years.
You ask yourself, "how could this be, I train hard...don't I?" How hard--or more appropriately--how intensely you exercise, is the biggest determinant of your success. If you are truly training hard (intensely) then you will, without question see some substantial improvements in your physique, your strength and the way you feel. The trouble is most people measure 'how hard' they are training by 'how much' work they are performing.
Just because you exercises 6 days a week for an hour and a half each time does not necessarily mean you are training hard. In fact if training this much or something close to this much you are probably not training hard at all.
Intensity (as defined by the International Association of Resistance Trainers) is" the possible percentage of momentary muscular and volitional effort exerted." Basically, intensity refers to how strenuous an exercise is at any given moment during a set.
The only problem is that a person's percentage of effort can only be measured accurately at two specific moments. When they are exerting no effort at all (zero) or when they are exerting all their effort (one-hundred percent). A person's intensity is at one-hundred percent when they've reached momentary muscular failure or fatigue. This is when another repetition can not be completed through its full range of motion and with good form despite all of the physical and mental effort the person puts forth.
It should be noted that it is not known precisely how much intensity is actually r... read entire entry
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on 3/29/2008
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