Muscle Medicine: The Revolutionary Approach to Maintaining, Strengthening, and Repairing Your Muscles and Joints (10 page)

FREQUENCY, DURATION, INTENSITY

Let’s assume you’ve taken the first step, invariably the hardest one, and have begun to get your body moving in your everyday life. Maybe you’ve always been an active person, but you’ve put on some pounds in your middle years and realize that it’s time to invest more energy into your health and appearance. Either way, you’re ready to integrate exercise into your life in a more systematic way.

So we’ll provide you with a basic structure and some of our favorite exercises to help you get started. Pick and choose, and most definitely skip anything that is too demanding or stresses a vulnerable joint. (If you’re not sure where to start, talk

BUILDING EXERCISE INTO YOUR DAY

Take the stairs instead of the elevator. After you’ve mastered the basics, you can take two stairs at a time to work on the quads, hams, and glutes (thighs and butt).

Park your car at the farthest-away spot in the lot. If you use public transportation, get on or off one stop beyond your usual stop.

At the office, walk down the hall and talk to someone instead of always sending e-mails.

Do your own housework; wash and dry dishes by hand.

Go back to the pushmower. For large lawn owners, reserve one section for the pushmower. Or grow a garden.

Go dancing. If you have thick curtains, dance at home.

it over with a physical therapist or a physician.) In the hot-spot chapters that follow, we’ll tackle those physical vulnerabilities head-on. What we present here is a general framework for developing and maintaining lifelong fitness.

In the beginning, slow and steady wins every time. Consistency will get you greater fitness gains, with less chance of injury, than will a burst of activity one week and then none the next. You can’t make up for lost time by simply doing more—the body can only adapt to so much before it breaks down. Remember, strength and flexibility must be balanced. For example, if you’re flexible but your muscles aren’t strong, that increased range of motion won’t have much practical benefit and could lead to injury. By the same token, strength without flexibility is also of limited use. Some weight lifters can barely lift their arms over their head because they have failed to distribute that strength over a “functional” range of motion. All that strength, and they still can’t put a box of light cereal away on the top shelf.

Any exercise program boils down to what you do and how you do it. The what of our plan is a combination of warm-up/balance, strength, cardio. The how is measured by three variables: frequency, or how often you work out; duration, or how long you work out; and intensity, or how hard you work out. At the beginning,
be as consistent as you can be, four to six workouts a week if that’s possible. But as you get familiar with this new routine, we want you to become mindful of those three hows—frequency, duration, intensity—so you can adapt your workouts to the requirements of your body and the demands of your life. Maybe you’re feeling washed out at work. Then it’s time to reduce one or two of those variables. On the other hand, maybe your energy is good but you’ve got a tough week coming up at the office that will limit the time you can spend working out. That’s your cue to raise the intensity. If you can only spend twenty minutes in the gym or on the track, make them count, within the limits of safety and good sense.

With time and experience, you’ll mix up the variables of your workouts not just because you need to but because you want to challenge your body in different ways. An unvarying routine is the enemy of improvement and a sure way to get bored or even injured. For instance, if you’re a runner, instead of running the same medium-tempo five miles every day, you might want to devote one day a week to a longer run (duration), or one day to some sprints (intensity). If you do squats as a part of your strength-training regimen, one day you can do fewer repetitions with a heavier weight, and on another you can do a greater number of body-weight squats. Whether you’re working on cardio, strength, or flexibility, don’t overload your body in too many ways at once.

EXERCISE ON A TIME BUDGET

Even if you have limited time, you can still manage a concise, varied, successful exercise program, with both cardio and strength components. For instance, five minutes of warm-up/dynamic stretch, twenty minutes of cardio, twenty minutes of strength, and ten minutes of cooldown and dynamic or movement stretching. With just three to four days a week, for forty-five minutes to an hour, you can make some real progress. However, when you combine cardio and strength, you should do both with moderate intensity (55–70 percent of your maximum effort, for example). In an ideal world it is better to separate cardio and strength. Especially if you have specific performance goals, it may be harder to reach them with the intensity/duration limitations of a combined program. But you can definitely achieve overall fitness and balance.

THE ALL-PURPOSE FITNESS PLAN

Getting Started:
Warm-up/stretching/balance/skill drills, five to twenty minutes, every day or as often as you can manage, and always before strength or cardio workouts.

Warm-up

Remember the time-honored advice to stretch before working out. Well, scratch that. What’s more important is a five- to ten-minute warm-up to get the blood pumping to the muscles and to warm up the entire musculoskeletal system. As your body begins to generate heat, your connective tissue softens and becomes more pliable and less prone to strain, sprain, or tear. Outdoors, a brisk walk or a slow jog is a good option. At the gym, keeping a low intensity on the treadmill, elliptical trainer, or stationary bike all work just fine.

Stretching

As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, a lot of exercise experts have grown skeptical about the benefits of “static” stretching, where you hold a stretch for ten to thirty seconds. But “dynamic” stretching, where you incorporate movement, is a good way to stimulate the muscle to recover its full, natural range of motion. There is no one perfect time to stretch. Anytime after the warm-up is fine. Some runners may discover that they get more benefit from stretching after their run to relieve tightness in their calf muscles. Try some of these dynamic movements to see what works for you:

• Extend your arms sideways and move them around in a circle. Start with small, tight circles and expand. Switch to your legs. Balance on one leg, lift the other slightly in front of you, and rotate it as though you were trying to draw a circle with your foot. Change legs.

• Vigorously move your outstretched arms from the front to the side and back, crisscrossing the arms in front of the chest.

• Hold on to a table or a fence or a pole with your left arm and swing your right leg and right arm in the opposite direction, loose and easy. Change sides.

• Lie on the floor on your back, knees bent, feet flat on the ground. Keeping the knees together, lower them both to one side. Then, engaging the abs, swing the knees to the other side. Go back and forth in a continuous movement.

Balance

In bare feet, stand on one leg for twenty seconds, then switch to the other leg for twenty seconds. (If you start to lose your balance, stop and start over again; don’t wave your arms around to try to recover.) To make it more challenging, switch back to the original leg and balance for twenty seconds, this time with your eyes closed, then back to the other leg for twenty seconds, eyes closed. Not only are you working the postural muscles to keep you upright without the usual support (i.e., two legs), the eyes-closed portion trains mind and body to know where you are in space (i.e., proprioception), and to stay in balance without visual cues.

The single-leg toe touch is a great all-in-one exercise that strengthens the muscles of the entire body, including the core, as they help with balance and stabilization. If you’re not ready for it now, come back to it in a few weeks or months. Stand balanced on one foot, keeping the back and neck in a straight line. Keep your eyes fixed on a point on the floor about four feet in front of your foot. Bend at the waist, reaching for the supporting foot with the opposite hand. Bend the knee as much as necessary to balance and stay pain-free. Hold for a count of two. Do ten repetitions, held for no more than two seconds each. The goal is not to reach the foot but to stay steady. Remember to breathe and not clench the teeth. (See page 167.)

The yoga “sun salutation” is another excellent combination of balance, stretch, and strength. With twelve distinct movements in a sequence, the how-to is a little cumbersome, but you can Google the instructions or buy a beginner’s yoga book or, better yet, take a class. (You could think of it as a more “mindful” Eastern version of stretch, push-up, and squat-thrust rolled into one.) Five or ten sun salutations will prime the body for just about any workout.

Skill

The problem with out-of-condition recreational athletes is that too often they think they’re still young, conditioned athletes. That’s how they persuade themselves that it’s okay to jump back into a softball or basketball league, or a regular tennis routine, and not suffer any ill effects even though they’ve been out of the game for years or decades. If you’re serious about not hurting yourself, you should spend two to four weeks on conditioning and technique before you ever set foot on the court or in the batter’s box. Every workout should include ten to twenty minutes spent on technique and coordination. For instance, softball players need to spend
time in the batting cage and running the base paths. Basketball players might do a “hopping” drill like this: balance on the left leg and hop forward, landing on the right leg and balance for two seconds; hop back onto the left leg and repeat five to ten times. Runners should do lateral movement exercises (for instance, skip sideways without crossing your legs) to build up the muscles that running doesn’t develop. Tennis players and golfers should build in time for regular “touch-up” sessions with a teaching pro. Rarely do topflight tennis players and golfers suffer from tennis elbow and golfer’s elbow (see
chapter 10
for that discussion). These overuse injuries are usually the result of an amateur’s bad form, which can and should be corrected.

Strength: Fifteen to forty minutes, two to four times a week.

Building a Strength Program

Here, we provide a menu of exercises; you build a program that works for you. But some general rules do apply. Unless you’re working toward a specific goal with a personal trainer, there’s no need to do strength workouts more often than every other day. You’re stressing muscles that need time to rebuild and rebound. In general, we’d like you to do at least one exercise from each of the three groups— upper body, core, lower body—and an all-body exercise if you’re so inspired. Don’t push yourself to the point where your good form breaks down. That’s inviting injury, not protecting against it. A useful rule of thumb is, stop when you feel you’ve got two more repetitions left in you (e.g., if you could squeeze out seven push-ups, do five for one set). As for the number of sets per exercise, two or three sets would be ideal, but one set is a lot better than none. People’s goals will differ. Some people will want to reach a “base level” of fitness and maintain it from there. Others will want to continue to get stronger, which means, at some point, they’ll need a wider selection of exercises to stress the body in different ways. Find a good trainer!

Upper Body

In life, the one weight that we must be able to handle is our own body. That’s why we love the classic body-weight exercises for all-around fitness such as the push-up
and the pull-up. Forget how many you can do, perfect form is everything. Even if you have been doing these exercises for years, you can always reassess and tweak your form.