AmpedTraining Blog
2010 June 22 | 6 Comments »
By Matt
Solutions?
Anti-inflammatories. 400-800mg of ibuprofen taken immediately post-workout, on up to 6-8 hours later. I am absolutely loving this strategy. I train at 7am. I take 400mg at 10pm before bed.
Warm baths with epsom salts are nice and relaxing. Warming or lightly working (via stretching, light repetitive movements, etc) the muscles and relaxing mentally is a good idea in general.
If oral anti-oxidants were absorbed worth a damn, they might be worth consideration. Things like green tea, vitamin E, ginger, turmeric (the curcumin in it) and other neutraceuticals show promise and are cheap, but may not be absorbed enough to matter. I drink a lot of green tea and spice my foods anyway, because I enjoy the taste.
The body may eventually adapt to arbitrarily large training loads. It’s also possible that Broz and that Chaos and Pain guy are right and overtraining is something like a unicorn. We’ve been discussing this at Glenn Pendlay’s forum with Dr. Michael Hartman and others.
But there’s no denying that it can suck in the mean time, and there’s no use suffering when the process can be smoothed. I am not a fitness guru that places value on discomfort for the sake of discomfort.
2010 April 9 | 9 Comments »
By Matt
The title is a topic that’s come up a lot over the years, and it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve written about this quite a bit in the past, on forums and in some detail in Maximum Muscle, but I think this is something that could use some elaboration for my blog audience and those of you that aren’t familiar with my older writings.
I also want to scoop all these upstarts that think they’re on to something. What I want to do is define “CNS Fatigue” and talk a little about fatigue in general, as it relates to strength training and exercise in a broader sense.
Firstly, just so we’re all on the same page, CNS is short for Central Nervous System. That’s the brain and the spinal cord, for you bio-illiterates.
Fatigue, at least in exercise-science terms, is a reduction in your ability to express physical fitness for a given task. Fatigue is a temporary reduction in your ability to perform at some activity, in other words. Note also that fatigue is fairly specific, although like everything else it can overlap with other things. Get tired from lifting weights and you may still be able to go for a run, as an example.
Fatigue can be both slow-acting and fast-acting, depending on the activity and the rest time allowed. Doing singles with 10 minutes rest between each rep will generate less fatigue than doing sets of 10 with 60 second rests between each set. Work out every day and you’ll accumulate more fatigue than working out once a week.
Fatigue is largely a function of the work:rest ratio, in other words. More work and less rest yields higher fatigue.
CNS fatigue (also known as central fatigue) is therefore a reduction in performance attributed to factors in the CNS, as opposed to the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular system (peripheral fatigue; that is, the rest of the body besides the brain and spinal cord).
The question is, how much can you separate the two? It’s hard to distinguish central (CNS) action from peripheral (rest of the body) action because the CNS tends to influence everything, and is in turn influenced by everything. CNS fatigue will filter down through the rest of the body through hormonal feedback loops and similar mechanisms, so it’s not always so clear-cut.
Continue »
2009 February 27 | 1 Comment »
By Matt
For some reason people seem to have the idea that running will create fat loss. There’s two ideas that probably contribute to this: the best runners are usually very lean, and the 1980s obsession with aerobics. The latter especially created a tradition so that “everybody knows” you go run or do aerobics classes to get in shape. Right?
As usual, it’s not that easy. There is some truth to the fact that steady-state aerobic exercise does tend to preferentially use circulating triglycerides as a fuel source (body fat, effectively). However as the current fad towards interval training will quickly remind us, the fuel source isn’t the entire story. There’s something to be said for shorter, more intense exercise. I won’t go into the details because they aren’t terribly important here, but maximal activation of anaerobic metabolism tends to chew up more calories and do favorable things for nutrient partitioning: calories go to muscle instead of fat storage, and more fat ends up being burned over a 24-hour period.
Continue »
2009 February 17 | Comments Off
By Matt
I made this post on another forum, and it’s one of those things I tend to write off-the-cuff that tends to summarize things fairly well, so I thought I’d share. The context was a discussion about ‘overtraining’ and stress/fatigue in general.
Continue »
