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
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