To Your Health
May, 2011 (Vol. 05, Issue 05) |
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Since the deadlift recruits many muscles, your smaller and weaker muscles tend to fatigue before your larger, stronger muscles. If your weaker muscles are giving out and you keep pulling for more reps, you could be setting yourself up for injury.
So keep your repetition range to around six in the beginning and go slowly, staying true to the quality of the movement.
How can you start to include deadlifts in your current exercise program? Simple – just start doing them one to two times a week. If you are a beginner, then deadlifting twice a week could be the way to go; that way, your body can start to adapt to the movement pattern, and your strength levels will increase at a fast rate.
Keeping It Simple
Despite our willingness to blame ourselves, our genetics or our hectic schedules, when fitness or weight-loss failure arises, it's often the result of flawed information destroying achievement potential. It's misinformation swallowing up the fitness hopes of someone with good intentions. Most of the mistakes we make when trying to get in shape involve actions (or a lack of action) that neglect the importance of the critical relationship between eating like an athlete, exercising aerobically in moderation, and challenging muscle. All three elements are crucial if the goal is a long-term positive physical change. Once you learn to apply these strategies in a manner that fits comfortably into your life, you'll find the payoff for the time you invest in exercise to be significant and extremely rewarding. When you implement these strategies, fitness failure will no longer be an option!
Muscle: The True Fat-Burning Machine
While aerobic exercise does increase short-term metabolism, it is a mistake to believe it is the secret to fat loss. Muscle is metabolically active tissue. When fat is burned, it actually has to be released into the bloodstream and shuttled into a muscle cell, where it is burned as fuel. Muscle, therefore, is the true fat-burning machine. If you increase muscle mass, even slightly, you increase caloric burn, not only while you exercise, but also while you eat, sleep and think.
Slow and Steady: Remember to Rest
As I've said before, one of the primary reasons people fail in their attempt to lose weight and get in shape is that they try to accomplish too much too soon. They are so inspired to exercise that they usually end up overtraining by working out too much. Another word for overtraining is burnout! Doing a massive volume of sets, reps, and days of training without adequate time to rest and recover is the quickest way to sabotage your progress. Muscles grow when you're resting them, not working them.
One of the little-known secrets of getting into shape is more rest between workouts. In the fitness industry, rest is known as the silent workout. Working out breaks muscles down; resting allows the body to regenerate and build more lean muscle. The simple workout principle is get in, train smart, get out, rest, and eat properly.
The biggest obstacle to more rest is your own mindset. We tend to think that if we don't go 150 percent, we are slacking off. It is a struggle in the beginning to follow this principle, but if you stick with it for just one month, you will see enormous positive changes in your body. Extreme training follows a vicious cycle in breaking down the body. When you train hard and don't see progress, your first instinct is to go even harder. Keep in mind that's the exact opposite of what you should do.
Perry Nickelston, DC, is clinical director of the Pain Laser Center in Ramsey, N.J., where he focuses on performance enhancement, corrective exercise and metabolic fitness nutrition To learn more about Dr. Nickelston, visit www.painlasercenter.com/Our_Practice.html.
