Conditioning Research

No time to post properly just now but I wanted to briefly mention a study I spotted this morning done at Heriot Watt university here in Edinburgh. Three 10 minute exercise sessions a week of very easy cycling with a couple of all out sprints thrown in had significant impacts on insulin sensitivity and vo2 max. That is 10 mins including warm up and cool down. The threshold for an effect from intervals gets lower and lower.... Of course I reckon they might well get a similar effect from an intense set of resistance exercise. Still tapping into the glycogen and all the same pathways and signals. Everyone can do a few hard efforts each week and get benefit.

how to walk......

Sorry that this blog is pretty quiet just now.  Three reasons for this: Work is quite busy My parents live 240 miles away and my Dad has dementia.  I am spending a lot of time trying to support them and sort out care from a distance.  That is taking a lot of mental energy I am drafting some ideas together into a short booklet on strength training for hillwalking. Overall I've not had much time or interest for searching for the normal stuff that goes up here, but normal service will be resumed

A few months ago I had an interview here with Drew Baye . There is a great new interview / podcast up now with Drew over on Jimmy Moore's blog.   Drew makes some great points about the nature of real exercise as opposed to activity or recreation.  Definitely worth listening to (although as with any Jimmy Moore interview I tend to fast forward through the first few minutes of commercials and folksy DJ stuff) Check it out here

It is interesting to watch how the elite warm up.  It is something I've been reading about for a while - static stretches for warm up are not helpful.  Rather they can harm performance.  Instead dynamic moves are best. via recover your stride That is not to say that there is no roel for static stretches of course, just not necesarily for warm up.

It looks really easy!  Nice to see him walk out with it too rather than the monolift thing.  via Martin Berkhan

A title like that is usually guaranteed to prompt outrage in the comments.  Whenever I've had things like that up here -  like this - before guys pile on with their assertions that explosive traiin has to make you explosive....look at Olympic lifters or something. The HIT school tends to say that the key is to get stronger and then learn to apply that strength explosively if that is what you sport requires.  Luke Carlson in my interview with him stated it like this: A last question – what about explosive training? This is another tactic that often comes up – “train explosively to improve speed and power”. So we see people doing Olympic lifts, bounding, doing depth jumps. Is this just a waste of energy or is there any real benefit? I think every athlete should train explosively; but this does not mean they should perform Olympic lifts, depth jumps, etc. Improvements in "explosiveness" are stimulated by the INTENT to move explosively; the outward demonstration of ...