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Hey all. Just curious, for you exercise fanatics, which one do you prefer? Or, do you like both equally.
I used to do a lot more with weights, but I've found I don't have much reason to try and bulk up big with muscle. First of all, I've noticed my anatemy won't allow me to grow big muscles, but rather the long lanky ones, which a lot of people said they wish they could have. And second, it may be more of a hinderance to my running ability. A lot of muscle will add too much bulk for me to run around with.
A bit of perspective from the paleo persuasion:
I know there are the crossfit and power lifters who really try and lift hundreds of pounds. Anymore, I try and align my own fitness goals with practicality. So, I use an exercise ball and a 20-lb weight. In your normal life, or in the course of you running, you won't really need to lift many hundreds of pounds on an ongoing basis. It is good, I think, to have part of your routine be bursts of exersion to max out and build muscle, but you don't even need huge weights to do this. Maxing out on your squats, planks, crunches, push-ups and wind sprints, plus doing freeweight exercises from a half squat position or sitting on an exercise ball will challenge you. The trick I find is to keep doing things differently.
If you think about how we exercise now, versus how people exercised before the Agricultural Revolution, the biggest difference was variety. Whether you were a farm laborer, a factory worker, or today you institutionaly exercise after work, it's usually repetition and ends up with a very specialized set of strengths. Your paleolithic ancestors, on the other hand, did a variety of activities from climbing to running to lifting varying amounts of weight in varying positions. So if you break up your exercise routine and cycle cardio and muscular fitness exercise, adding variety to how you do what you do, I firmly believe you end up with a better whole workout. Maybe not coming out like the picture perfect athlete, but you'll withstand more, do more, and go farther for longer.
In the end, to me anyway, that is what matters: fitness should make our bodies a better tool for whatever the job requires. Too many now are very specialized in their fitness, in my opinion.
Leo is right, but at the same time there is mor to the situation. Most people think there is just either bulking up, or working out. You either get big bulging muscles, or you get to run for miles and not get tired. It doesn't work that way.
Now yes, you can specialize and eventually get to where you can bench three hundred pounds and can't scratch your nose because your muscles get in the way, but that takes extreme specialization. For most people, the exercises you do both increase your muscle mass, and increase your ability to do work over long periods of time.
Let me see if I can illustrate this. The body, when you work out, doesn't just add on muscle, it replaces fat with muscle. Its like a car, you go fast, you burn more gas. You don't get to continue going fast without running out of gas. The body uses fat as gas, and then replaces that with built up muscle.
Now for running, its not true that building up muscle will slow you down. At huge levels, yes, it does, but that is huge levels. A massive guy is not going to be able to run as fast as a slimmer, more athletic guy. But again, that takes a lot of specialization to be huge. Plus,, a guy who does a lot of different exercises is going to be in better shape than someone who just runs and does nothing else. Even though some of those work outs he does is not going to help his running.
Also, people forget that running involves more than the legs. It involves your stomach and back muscles, your chest muscles and a host of other muscles. Working as many of those muscles as you can, and getting them stronger will help you run more efficiently. Maybe not faster, but more efficiently. Swimming is even more drastic in that respect, it involves practically every skeletal muscle in your body.
Lifting weights and running are the same thing. Bench pressing is just running for your chest and arm muscles. When you run, you are lifting you're entire body with your legs. When you bench press, or do pull ups, you are lifting weight with other muscles. You need to do all these things to have a good frame, and be healthy. You shouldn't just do one exercise. You should do all exercises.
I feel like that was really scattered, but there it is. Am I making sense here?
Yes both of you on on the mark.
I'll add that to build large muscles you'll need to eat and use some supplements, if you aren't a natural muscle person, to get them.
When you run lots you actually burn the muscle you built and that is why runners look as they do.
If you want to look muscled and also be fit you'll need to do as both here have suggested vary your exercises.
Also if you want muscle you'll need to eat to get muscle, and add things required to gain fat and burn it in to muscle.
Fat creates muscle when burned, or I should say muscle burns fat. A fat buy on the right program when finished will look great, but a thin guy has to stop burning his hard earned muscle, or eat to get them.
Check out articles on
www.bodybuilding.com
The site is accessible and has much for all types of body configurations.
Yeah, I get what you mean. I remember my coach said the same thing, that running involves more than just the legs and abs. That's what most of us Freshman, or in my case, Sophemore runners in high school thought. Once I strengthened my shoulders more, I was able to pump my arms harder and it felt as though I was using less energy doing this. I didn't realize, however, that it would take a lot of specialization to get too big, though.
I also try to do more than the basic body weight exercises, when I do them. For example, instead of always doing regular push ups, I change them up offten by doing wide and diamond push ups, and inclined and declined pushups, where I either put my hands on a bench or stairs, or my feet. That adds a great challenge. I also tend to change up the rate and speed of my exercises. When I do fast push ups or squats, I burn out completely until I can't do any more. When I do them slower, I pace myself in sets.
I think using weight and equipment improves the body faster, especially with the right workout. But since sets of those are too expensive and difficult to store, I usually just go for non-equipment workout from the P90X DVD such as Yoga X, Kenpo X, Plyometrics, Ab Ripper X and Cardio.
I wish there was such a thing as an adult-sized jungle gym. Remember as a kid how you'd hang from things, swing from bar to bar, pull yourself up and climb all over the jungle gyms? That was actually great exercise.
Many of the paleo persuasion will try and do as much natural exercise activity and as little institutionalized as possible. it's easy when you're going to school or work to try and do 3 sets of ten of these, 5 of those, 30 minutes of this, and so on. You're trying to make tat workout schedule fit your schedule, and trying to make the most of it. Nothing wrong with that.
But in a pre-agricultural time frame, which is a majority of human evolution, people exercised hard but sporadically, meaning they weren't constantly going like farmers. Their work days, according to modern hunter gatherer societies and skeletal finding from the archeological record, show pretty small work weeks, maybe 15 hours or so.
Many think the 10,000 years since agriculture means we must have now evolved to live a agricultural lifestyle. Not true: that time frame is really short on the scale of human evolution, and people who are living unimpeded in the hunter gatherer lifestyle are by and large healthier and suffer fewer ailments than we or our agricultural predecessors. Part of that is grains and othe ragricultural foods, but it's also how they exercise. The treadmill and similar are based on the agro-industrial concepts for generating produce, very different from how hunters and gatherers exercise.
I'm not advocating a return to hunter gatherer, nor is anyone else in the modern paleo movement that I know of: the idea is to bring forward the advantageous aspects into our 21st century lifestyle, bearing in mind that the human body is basically fit for such purposes.
Of late I've kind of fallen off the wagon since the daughter moved out but intending on fixing that.
Some gyms have what they call the bars Leo, but what's wrong with the one on the playbround? Smile. You to big to play? Lol
So along with running, I have taken along the challenge of doing 200 push ups, 300 crunches, and 50 pull ups 5 to 6 days a week. The results have been impressive. I have been doing this for about three weeks now, and most of my upper body has toned up a bit. I also noticed that after each week I was able to complete them with less sets. Yesterday I was able to do 70 push ups the first set and do the 200 in five sets total, and 16 pull ups the first set with six sets total. Interestingly I haven't gained much weight, but people (mainly family7 say they see a difference.