LONDONER Wrote:As I've said in a previous post I have been losing (Mike, Mike!) weight. My plan is to go back to the gym for light, repetitive, weights. Unfortunately my schedule this coming year means a lot of flights to London so it doesn't look as if I will be able to keep up regular attendances at the gym.
Yeah, I know. But I was trying to ascertain whether the weight loss was muscle, fat or both. Loosing fat weight or even water weight isn't necessarily a bad thing. But loosing muscle is because its a downward spiral.
I'll just add (and then I'll leave you alone as it seems you don't want to discuss this) that IDK that regular gym attendance is required for muscle maintenance. For body building, sure. But "maintenance," not necessarily.
For example, there's a kind of training that uses super heavy static contractions set up inside a squat rack to prevent injury. Bench press: Put the bench inside the rack. Set up the safety rales so that when you put the barbell across them, it is near the top of your pressing height. Now, load up the bar with a lot of weight. Possibly more than you think you can lift. Get on the bench, press the bar up off the safety rales and hold for a few seconds. If it feels like you could do this for a long time, set it back down and add weight. Keep adding weight until you can barely get the bar off the rails. If you try this you'll see, it is far more weight than you could do in a regular bench press. Moreover, even if you were to fail and drop the bar, it can't hurt you.
If you want to further this technique. Unload the bar, lower the rales one notch, and repeat the exercise. Now you have a slightly fuller range of motion, beginning from the bottom of the rep. Again, load the bar to the point where you can barely get if off the rails. Push up and hold for a few seconds at the top then lower the weight.
You needn't do more than one or two repetitions.
What good is doing these high-weight partial reps? Well, it is called "potentiating". Forcing the muscles to do extreme work (safely) illicits a hormonal cascade that is neurological and subsequently muscular. It is possible to safely do this kind of high-weight, partial range of motion, low rep lifting for almost every muscle group. An entire workout could be done in a half hour. And it is advised that at least two weeks be allowed for recovery between such workouts.
My point is, there are ways to safely challenge, even "shock," the body into producing an adaptive response to neurological and muscle overload. This can be done in short duration and infrequently, slowing if not reversing muscle waisting.
The other side of this, of course, is that one has to feed the body proteins to rebuild the muscle and other connective tissues (not to mention fueling them with carbs) during the recovery phase between workouts. However, since this isn't a "body building" workout but more of a "body maintenance" workout, there needn't be a significant caloric increase.
Done.
Leo
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