An active Marine who trained a lot once told me, "Whenever I do my personal best at bench press my running is way off, and whenever I am at my best at running my bench press suffers". Alan Page was a 260 pound defensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. Toward end of his career he had trained for and completed a marathon – the first active NFL player to do so. He lost a significant amount of muscle; so much so that he switched position to linebacker at 225 pounds. When you run great distances carting around more muscle is demanding. You can improve strength and endurance at the same time. Strength and endurance complement each other up to a point. At some point one is going to suffer at the expense of the other. It is best to seek a balance. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) for strength will increase both endurance and strength. At Austin Personal Trainingand New Orleans Fitness trainers the trainers can put you through a series of exercises with little rest that will have your heart racing and have your muscles exhausted. Rest, recover, improve, and come back next week stronger with more endurance.
High intensity interval training increases endurance
From this article, Scientists Discover Why High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) Can Match Endurance Training discussing HIIT:
“Short bursts of just a few minutes of exhausting physical activity can prepare muscles to work harder, boosting the production of new mitochondria (powerhouses of the cells, generating the energy that our cells need to do their tasks), which culminates endurance enhancement much like more time consuming endurance training. High-intensity exercise triggers the breakdown of calcium channels as a result of an increased production of free radicals.”
Calcium channel blockers preserve the cell growth capacity against free-radical damage.
Result: less free-radical damage, more mitochondria, and more muscular endurance with less time spent exercising. Additionally HIIT workouts burn more calories long after the workout is finished and the workouts will lower blood pressure and increase blood flow.
It is not necessary to spend hours in the gym to get results. At Austin Personal Training and at New Orleans Fitness Trainers we can show you how to perform HIIT workouts on our aerobic equipment or our full body strength training circuits.
More articles on HIIT here.
The six factors of fitness
The six commonly recognized factors of fitness are:
· Stronger bones
· Cardiovascular efficiency
· Flexibility
· Leanness
· Muscular size, strength, and endurance
· Resistance to injury
You have options for improving each of those factors:
1. You can opt to concentrate on one or two of the factors that you enjoy or that is particularly beneficial to your sport or active and ignore that other factors. You'll not attain as high a level of overall fitness.
2. You could do one consolidated workout that addresses all the factors of fitness.
3. You could do a combination of two more more different forms of exercise that in combination address all the factors. That might be very time consuming.
4. You could do one consolidated workout that addresses all the factors of fitness and supplement that with exercise beneficial to your chosen sport or activity.
For those who want to address all factors of fitness and get the most out of your time in the gym you might want to consider High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). No other single workout addresses all six factors of fitness in one complete workout - none.
A properly conducted HIIT regime will result in increases in bone density, resistance to injury, strength, muscle, flexibility, muscle tone, resting metabolism, and cardiovascular conditioning. You will feel and look better, and your life can be transformed in minutes a week. Runners and tri-athletes can spend less time in the gym and have more time to spend running or doing other forms of aerobic exercise. They will seeimprovements in their performance.
HIIT is the type of personal training we do at New Orleans Fitness Trainersat Austin Personal Trainers. People who start such a personal training program find that this is a program they can stick to..