Ok, I know it’s a poster study and as such I’m aware of its limitations, yet it’s great to see “slow” training validated (can’t wait to see the actual data).

Slow Exercise (Not Fast) Is Better For Menopausal Women.

Summary: Groups of menopausal women (45-55 yrs old) were trained “standard style” (normal speed), or SuperSlow (10 secs up, 10 secs down). When groups were compared (via muscle biopsies) the SuperSlow group gained more muscle.

Moral: Move slower, not faster, for better results. But wait! There’s more to it than that.

While you don’t have to move as slowly as the women in the study did, moving slowly is better. The key, however - the weight you choose should dictate your speed. Here’s what I mean:

When the weight you select feels “light”, it means you have ample strength with which to lift it. However, as the weight gets heavier and heavier, it becomes more difficult to lift. At some point (when the weight approaches the maximum you can handle without rupturing something), the weight feels so heavy that just budging it requires a great deal of effort. An appropriately heavy weight is tough to move at all, and nearly impossible to move fast (unless you employ body english or jerk the weight).

So, amended: Move slower, because you’re moving heavier things, for better results.

Ken (a very spry 70 year old) asked me, “How does strength training increase bone density?”

Well, the basic mechanism is very simple: Think of your skeleton as the framework of the body, the base upon which the body is built. Load up that framework with weight, and the body, being that dynamic organism it is, makes the framework stronger. Certainly an explanation you’ve heard before from your doctor, your trainer, or your media talking head of choice.

Here’s the implied but rarely mentioned “twist” that makes this all possible: Your bones are alive.

Not in a Night of the Living Dead creepy sort of way, but alive just like the rest of your body’s cells are (save hair and some skin cells). Bone isn’t some inorganic matter like the 2 X 4s in your bed frame or the piping under your kitchen sink. It’s a dynamic, ever-changing organ, constantly building and breaking itself down.

Cells called osteoblasts and osteoclasts work 24-7 at reshaping and remodeling your bone structure (even after you reach full adulthood). Load a bone with a heavy weight, and osteoblasts lay down new bone tissue to reinforce the points of stress, much like a young beach-going lad would add more sand and water to reinforce a wall of his sand castle. Repetitively load a bone in the same way, and you make that bone stronger by stimulating osteoblast activity, over and over again. Over time, these osteoblasts lay down so much new bone tissue that they trap themselves in it, becoming osteocytes (which always remind me of this). Not to worry for our osteocytes, however; they continue to chug away and do their job of reinforcing bone in a less…mobile…fashion.

Osteoclasts have a less celebrated but equally important role: They break down bone tissue by acidifying the bone matrix, releasing its constituent minerals into the bloodstream. Now, why would a fine, upstanding cell like an osteoclast want to do something like break down bone tissue? Well, low levels of calcium ions (one of the main minerals in bone) would be one reason. Calcium ions feature heavily in intracellular function, from DNA transcription, neurotransmitter release, and (most importantly for our discussion) muscular contraction. If you don’t have enough calcium available, the body simply draws from its calcium stores, and the largest calcium stores in the body? You guessed it: Bone.

(Aside: Why are osteoclasts always depicted in mechanism diagrams as goofy-looking Metroids?)

Without going into the ridiculously complex and numerous mechanisms for osteoporosis, let’s just say for brevity’s sake that you want to stimulate osteoblast activity, not osteoclast activity. And strength training just happens to be a fantastic tool for doing just that.

And now, you know why.

There’s almost nothing quite as frustrating or annoying as feeling as though you’re making progress, then getting sick. Worst part is, if you try and force the issue, it’s all too easy to make yourself even more sick and lengthening your infirm time, setting you back even further.

Here’s a multi-part plan for you to get back into action.

1. Wait till you’re at 90%.

The easiest way to make sure you don’t relapse into illness or make your current illness worse is to wait it out. Wait until you feel better, roughly 90% of your full capacity. Want an easier way to judge? If you’ve got any symptoms from the neck down (aches, chills, etc.) or a fever, don’t exercise; you’ll likely make things worse. Having symptoms from the neck up only (congestion, sore throat, etc.) generally indicate that you’re on the mend, but you should still be cautious.

The best rule of thumb is to wait, if you’ve any doubt in your mind. It’s better to push your workout back one day than set yourself back an entire week or two because your illness relapsed.

2. During your first workout back, decrease weights by 10%.

Being that your body has been busy fighting off whatever pathogen’s been festering in it, you’ll likely not be at full strength. It’s better to ease back into exercising as opposed to jumping right back into the fray.

Use the 10% rule as a guide but not a hard and fast rule per se. If you feel you need to, it’s okay to reduce your weights even further.

3. If you normally lift to failure, don’t.

There’s some evidence to suggest (and common sense would tell you) that exhaustive exercise precipitates infection. In other words, work out too hard and you risk getting sicker. There’s some truth to the notion that moderate exercise boosts immune function, so back off a little on the level of intensity (read: effort) you put into your workout. That means that you should stop a set with a rep or two still “in the tank.” Do too much too soon and you risk longer recovery (don’t forget that exercise is also a “stress” that your body will need to recover from).

4. Listen to your body.

Perhaps the soundest bit of workout advice I can give you is this: Listen to your body. If, in the middle of your workout, you start feeling unusally crappy, stop. If you find that you perform the first two exercises in your workout fine, then feel weak on your third (as in, you reduce it to 75% and struggle), stop. Your body is trying to tell you something. And it’s probably, “Knock it off, hero/shero.”

Aside from the workout, there are a couple of things you can do diet-wise to speed your recovery:

• Drink water - lots. Being fully hydrated improves the function of your lymphatic system (the “transporter” of your immune system), increasing its efficiency and efficacy.
• Keep it simple, as far as diet goes. Now’s not the time to sample the complex flavors of a seafood paella or to hunker down to something heavy, like Vaca Frita al Caballo. Keep your meals simple and easily digestible: hard-boiled eggs and fruit at breakfast, for example. Nuts and seeds are good as snacks.

Be smart and a tad cautious, and you’ll be back on your training in no time.

If you read the Harvard Women’s Health Watch, then chances are you’ve already caught wind of a study published in the January 2008 issue of the journal Arthritis Care and Research.  This small study compared the effectiveness of strength training and general fitness training on reducing chronic work-related neck pain.

Result: The group who participated in “general fitness training” (defined by the researchers as riding a bike 20 mins 3x a week) saw no decrease in pain.  The group who strength trained experienced a 75% decrease in pain symptoms both during the training period and 10 weeks post (during which no workouts were performed). 

There are some points that need to be addressed:

• The group size was small (48 participants) and was comprised exclusively of women. This limits the study’s applicability across all populations.
• The strength-trained group performed: dumbbell shrug, one-arm row, upright row, reverse fly, and lateral raise.  While these exercises do meaningfully engage the neck/shoulder muscles, one can’t help but wonder how the results might have been had the participants engaged in more direct neck work (say, manually-resisted neck flexion or extension).
• The participants suffered from overuse pain in the trapezius, likely a result of work-related factors.  This means that the study findings may not apply to those looking for relief from a more acute neck trauma; say, a blow to the head (of course, if you ask me, I’d wager that it would). 

Strength training isn’t some sort of miracle cure-all, but it does help in relieving chronic muscle pain.

One fear that clients (particularly older individuals) have regarding strength training is the integrity of their joints:  “Won’t I hurt my back (or knee/elbow/shoulder) lifting weights?” 

If you’re concerned at all about joint integrity on a resistance training program, don’t be.  Assuming you choose weights that are appropriately heavy, your joints should get stronger.  Here’s why:

First, positive tissue remodeling occurs.  Positive tissue remodeling is a fancy way of saying that your connective tissue (tendons, ligaments, etc.) thickens, becoming stronger and more durable.  In very much the same process as muscle building, the stimulus of lifting a heavy weight stresses connective tissue, causing microtrauma (miniscule tears in the tissue fibers) and temporarily weakening the joint.  During recovery, your body goes to work, repairing these microtears and reinforcing them, creating a stronger joint.

It’s important to note here that positive tissue remodeling takes longer than muscle recovery.  It’s postulated that the reason you see so many muscle pulls in professional sports nowadays (especially baseball and football) is rampant steroid abuse - which affords a player faster muscle recovery time, but doesn’t affect positive tissue remodeling.  As a result, their muscle becomes stronger at a much faster rate than their tendons and ligaments, eventually culminating in a muscle tear where failure occurs at the musculotendinous junction - the point at which the muscle and tendon connect.  In other words, their tendon breaks because it is not strong enough to withstand the force the muscle generates.

Second, the muscles surrounding your joints get stronger.  In an earlier post, I alluded to the fact that muscles support bones and joints by acting as a suspension unit - they assist the joint capsule and connective tissue in holding a joint together by contracting.  As muscles get stronger, they are better able to reinforce your joints by literally holding them in place while you contract.

Your spine is a great example.  Look at this picture of a human spine and note its natural curves.  Without these curves, your spine would not be able to support nearly as much weight as it does (about 16x less, if you strip all the connective tissue and muscle away).  In order to maintain these curves, you have an extensive layering of connective tissue surrounding each intervertebral joint, as well as the entire spine.  Additionally, you’ve got layer upon layer of small muscles that surround the spine, reinforcing those curves and lending the spine greater stability.  It’s estimated they contribute more than 50% to spinal stability.  The stronger these small muscles get, the better they can stabilize and protect your spine. 

Through both these mechanisms, expect your joints to strengthen as a result of resistance training.  That is, if you don’t try to lift 500 lbs on your first try.