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Light and fast
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Light-weight training helps even the elderly in gaining limb strength.
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WANT TO build muscular strength? Start weight training. A few weeks of escalating weight stress will force your muscles to hypertrophy and build strength. Your progress will be slow but sure and will depend on the weight you can lift and muscle size. So goes conventional fitness wisdom, and it is right for the most part.
But an increase in strength does not always require an increase in muscle size. Muscle strength increases rapidly over days, rather than weeks or months, with weight-training exercises done quickly and with light-weights. Muscles grow noticeably over weeks and not days, so clearly something other than hypertrophy is at work here.
So how do muscles become stronger without becoming bigger first? The answer is neural adaptation, which is a form of learning. Simply put, the brain gets better at planning and executing movement, and muscle cells get better at contracting at a higher velocity. Better coordination leads to increased power. Increased neural skill in harnessing muscles leads to increased strength without requiring a prior increase in muscle size.
Bodybuilders who practise lifting light-weights fast before moving on to heavier weights get the most out of their current muscular strength. In fact, short-term high velocity training with a light load can improve muscle strength by up to 20 per cent without increasing muscle size. Even if such training does not increase muscle strength, it increases limb velocity and the speed at which the limb attains its maximum force.
High velocity light-weight training is not just for bodybuilders. The elderly can improve limb strength, coordination limb velocity without having to lift heavy weights.
There is an inverse relationship between the force generated when the foot touches on and off the ground and the speed of walking. Slow walking, as surprising as this may sound, requires greater force output at ground contact. An elderly person's muscles may be too weak to achieve this force, and fall and stumbles occur. High velocity light-weight training reduces the chances of falls and stumbles associated with slow walking that requires high force at ground contact.
Light-weight training also improves muscle performance of those who lift heavy loads at work.
So the next time you are lifting weights and feel comfortable enough with the load and want to move on to the next level, do a few sets with the current weight really fast. You will be surprised at how smoothly you progress to the next level.
RAJIV. M
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