Flight or Fight Means Fit Not Fat

by Michael Stefano

When you strength or resistance train, your body has no idea that you're exercising. The human body perceives the high level of exertion reached when lifting weights as an attack, an attack it must rise up to or run away from. This is also known as The Flight or Fight Response.

In order to minimize future perceived threats and enable you to either run faster or fight harder, your body wil increase its muscle mass. This will result in a stronger, more toned body. All of your body fat is burned by muscle. So the more muscle you have, the more fat you can burn -and not just while exercising, but 24 hours a day.

Exercise Intensity and Muscle Fatigue

We need to recreate the level of intensity encountered during this perceived attack safely, while going through exercises that mimic normal human movement. The exercise must also effectively work the targeted muscle or muscles to fatigue.

We define fatigue as the point in the set where some local discomfort is felt –not tremendous pain, just discomfort. You begin to get that slight burning sensation in the muscle. Resistance levels are adjusted to control the repetition range so as to hit muscle fatigue in 30 to 90 seconds (normally under 15 repetitions, depending upon the individual exercise).

There are numerous ways to increase or decrease resistance so that you'll experience the burn in this 30-second to minute-and-a-half window. Let's examine how this can be easily accomplished with a simple exercise that most of us are familiar with - the push up.

The Push Up
This is a great all around upper body exercise that can be done in dozens of ways. For our purposes here we'll consider two variations. The classic push up features the body held in a straight position with hands and feet on the floor (both slightly wider than hip distance apart), as you lower your chest to the floor then push up.

In the second and less intense variation , the modified push up, the knees are kept bent and come in contact with the floor (feet up), substantially reducing the resistance encountered when pushing against the floor.

This simple technique is a good example of how you can manipulate the system when strength training, so as to hit muscle fatigue at the correct repetition range, without using any equipment other than your own body weight, while still getting big results.

Michael Stefano: New York City firefighter and author of The Firefighter's Workout Book, The 30 Minute-a-day Train-for-life Program for Men and Women Special Offer: Lose weight and get in shape with the FREE Train For Life Newsletter Subscribe at: http://www.firefightersworkout.com Email:bravesst@optonline.net