Hand weights while walking? NOT.

I have tweeted and blogged about walking while carrying hand weights. I guess my voice isn't loud enough! In the last couple of days I have seen at least three people out walking while carrying hand weights. It just makes no sense. If you are carrying a weight that is heavy enough to make the muscles work in a regular strength exercise, the weight is too heavy for walking. It will compromise your gait and increase your risk for injury dramatically. Even light weights can compromise your gait and they are not useful for strength training moves, if you want to stop to execute those type of moves during your walk.

If you want research to read on this, here is a great link.

http://www.scientificjournals.org/journals2007/articles/1004.htm

My best suggestion for increasing the cardio intensity of your walk is to try speed intervals and hill incline repeats. If you want to add strength training moves, carry a resistance training band (they are easy to hang off a waist pack). Check out the newsletter archives for ideas on strength training moves.

More on Compression Socks

I’ve been watching the profusion of race participants wearing compression socks over the past year with some interest. As always when the numbers participating in a new trend are low, the trend looks geeky. As the numbers increase, we assume the trend is valid. So, I’ve been wondering about these compression socks. You may have noticed an earlier blog entry where I pondered their efficacy. At that time, my only source of information was compression sock packaging and the odd article in running magazines.

Recently I was able to discover a couple of research articles reviewing recent experiments done with compression socks and athletes. Back in 2007 an article was published in The Journal of Sports Science that concluded that the most important effect of wearing compression socks was to reduce delayed-onset muscle soreness.

Here are the conclusions quoted from the study by A. Ali; M. P. Caine ; B. G. Snow, titled “Graduated compression stockings: Physiological and perceptual responses
during and after exercise” as it appeared in the Journal of Sports Sciences.

"In summary, wearing graduated compression
stockings during fast-paced, continuous road running
reduces muscular soreness of the lower limbs
after exercise. The mechanism by which this reduction
is achieved remains uncertain, although a
reduction in muscle soreness may result from
reduced structural damage and/or reduced localized
ischaemia. In physically active young men, at least,
graduated compression stockings are perceived to be
comfortable to wear and heighten perceptual feelings
during and after exercise. We were unable to confirm
whether there was an improved venous return during
exercise, although a trend towards reduced heart rate
during continuous road running suggests that this is
possible and thus warrants further research. Furthermore,
there is a need for research investigating
whether graduated compression stockings can benefit
other user groups including untrained participants,
female and older athletes."

Let me know if you have heard anything else!

Training harder not longer

Our national newspaper had an article last week extolling the virtues of working out harder, not longer, as we age. Interestingly, this nugget of wisdom has been revealed to be true even for younger athletes (although technically we're all aging, even if we're 10 years old). Physiology research has shown for some time that intensity work is the "right stuff" as far as exercise goes: it's the hard work that makes real changes to key fitness indicators like resting heart rate, resting metabolic rate, production of mitochondria and capillaries.

That's why, in class, we focus on interval speed work. For those of you who love the speed work, it's usually because the endorphin high kicks in quickly. For those of you who don't like it, you seem resigned to the fact that it does make a difference.

Many of us are training for marathons and half marathons, so training for longer is an essential part of our training tool kit. Still, it's good to know that if we stuck to interval training once a week and set our sights on 5k events, we'd stay in great shape and still have fun.

Also, if your long training walks can't happen for some reason, it's reassuring to know that fitness levels can be sustained by intensity work - exercising where your exertion feels like 8 or 9 on a scale of 10.

So go blast out a few intervals and let us know how it feels.

Muscle mass, mitochondria, and aging

It's always news if someone finds a way to reverse the aging process. So it is that several newspaper articles published this week highlighted an interesting finding coming out of a study conducted at McMaster University: resistance training can reverse the aging process in skeletal muscles. Resistance training is another term for strength training. Study participants were asked to lift weights for just two hours per week. The result was a 50% increase in strength. Well, this doesn't seem like that much news to me.

However, the other interesting tidbit discovered in this study was that the participants actually increased the number of mitochondria in that increased muscle mass. Well, this caught my attention. I get pretty excited reading anything about mitochondria. These babies are neat.

The mitochondria exist at the cellular level in our bodies to convert stored carbohydrates into adenosine triphospate (ATP). ATP is the fuel your muscles need to contract. If you have more mitochondria in your body, they are able to convert more stored carbohydrate to ATP to allow muscle contraction. More mitochondria, better calorie consumption - even at rest! In other words you are altering your resting metabolic rate which is the rate at which you burn off calories when resting. It's a thing of beauty.

I've read studies where the authors discovered that the intensity of exercise performed is the key workout ingredient for mitochondrial production. Scientists know that if a person works at an intense level, 17-19 on the Borg Scale of Rate of Perceived Exertion ( a scale that goes from 6-20), they will increase the mitochondria in their body.

It would appear that we have two ways to increase mitochondria in our body: resistance training and intense cardiovascular training. The next question is whether endurance training, such as marathon walking, affects mitochondrial production.

It has always been our focus at WoW Power Walking to work on intensity. As well, we encourage strength training (which we are now doing in our Walk Circuit classes!). So, we're pretty much covering the whole mitochondria production thing here. If they find out that endurance workouts also increase mitochondria, we might be doing so much reverse aging, we'll have to go back to kindergarten!