Kansas State University

Myth # 1: Cardio prevents muscle gain – don’t do it!

This claim is FALSE!

Well…mostly, a study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning by Wilson et al. titled Concurrent training: a meta-analysis examining interference of aerobic and resistance exercises determined that strength and muscle gain interference from endurance training is depends on the frequency, duration, and kind of training being done. This study determined that concurrent strength and running training reduced strength and size gains moderately, but that bodyfat % reductions we’re greatest in individuals who did both endurance and strength training in the same program.

 

Myth # 2: Lifting weights will make women big and bulky.

FALSE

Lifting weights will not cause your quads to hulk style shred those super cute fabletics tights you just ordered, in fact the “toning up” that most gals are after will happen faster and more efficiently with diligent weightlifting pursuits than it will from spending hours on a treadmill. Women’s muscle is just as powerful as men’s unit for unit, but because of lower testosterone levels women do not pack on lean mass at the same rate as men which means that, unless you’re looking to become a pro-bodybuilder or a professional strongwoman, you’re not going to put on significant size (Faigenbaum, 2008)

Unfortunately, many women aren’t introduced to lifting through sport during high-school the way many men are, lack of experience and education early on can make the weight room intimidating; If you’re curious to learn how to lift – visit our personal training page or swing by the office to apply for a trainer to get you comfortable in the weight room!

Myth # 3: “I’m too old to start exercising”

FALSE

 

Exercise benefits EVERYONE in fact, a new study from Penn State University found that older adults who participated in strength training 2x a week significantly reduced their all cause mortality by 46%, cardiac death risk by 41%, and cancer death risk by 19%.

The Department of Health and Human Services recommends older adults (65 and up) accumulate 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity a week and strength 2 or more times per week. You can visit health.gov here to learn more. 

Myth # 4: Strength training is dangerous!

FALSE

Strength training is very safe, in fact resistance training improves muscle and tendon strength and size as well as bone density. Training unilaterally (one sided movements, lunges, single arm presses, rows) to correct imbalances can reduce injury risk even further (Faibenbaum 2009).

 

Review

To rehash some essentials from pt 1:

Strength: The ability to generate maximum external force on an object

Speed: Velocity of body motion

Power: Force produced x velocity of the movement

(power can also be defined as the rate of performing work)

Peak Power =  happens at around 1/3 maximum velocity

(The peak power of a muscle fiber typically occurs around 15% to 30% of that muscle fiber’s maximal force capacity. )

Power is important because its expression is essential to success in many sports: throwing, punching, jumping, sprinting, changing directions, etc all require power output, and typically the more you’re able to produce the better you’ll perform.

An athlete’s Rate of Force Development is a way to refer to their capacity for producing power.

Training adaptation is specific to the stress imposed on the athlete. This is the SAID principle, Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. So if we want a powerful punch or a powerful jump we will need to train the body-part(s), skills, and movement specifically. We need to train the energy systems, tissues (strength, endurance, and volume tolerance), and nervous system at the proper dosages to elicit power gains.

Training To Improve Power

Now that we’ve reviewed our definitions and refreshed our memory regarding physiology, stress, and adaptation we can dive right in on how to train to improve power output.

Training to improve power requires that we bring into consideration the training experience and performance level of the client (or ourselves for that matter). For example, if I’m training middle school basketball players I likely will not need to use the volume and intensity that I need to use with more developed college aged athletes. The less trained an individual is, the easier it is to make gains with simple exercises performed well and with sufficient frequency.

For the purposes of this article we’re going to aim right down the center on training experience. If you’re brand new to training, improving your power can likely be done with simple exercises, if you’re very experienced this article may also fall outside of your needs as you may need a more complex program to gain power.

First Things First

In order to know if our training is effective we must first establish a baseline. Professional strength coaches have many ($$$ costly!) ways of measuring and assessing the power, force, and velocity profiles of individual athletes but mean power, peak power, velocity of a movement, and force of a movement are some of the most commonly measured variables.

Because most trainees don’t have access to an elite training facility and the equipment to measure these variables, they can establish base line numbers from indirect tests and some simple math. The vertical jump alone does not render us a number that directly represents power so we can utilize the Sayers Power Equation to calculate power output in watts.This way if our body mass changes over the program we can still understand power gains or losses – provided the way we measure vertical jump height is consistent.

PAPw(Watts) = 60.7 x jump height (cm) + 45.3 x Body Mass (kg) – 2055

(keep in mind the equation uses the metric system – google will convert numbers for you! )

For our upper body we can easily indirectly measure power with a medicine ball chest pass by measuring distance. Keep in mind, the mass of the ball and our body position must be consistent across test and retest for this to be accurate.

Developing a plan of attack

Going back to the first article, we touched on a few necessary components to power which were as follows; muscle size, neuromuscular capacity for power and max strength, and the SAID (specific adaptation to imposed demands) principle. When we train we need to keep these three things in mind when we organize our training cycle.

If you’re a strength or single event athlete prepping for a competition your training will look different than if you’re an athlete with a pre/on/post/off season organization. Regardless, we want to train so that we are able to express our power at the time of the year we most need it for our sport. (If you’re a general fitness enthusiast, I would encourage you to set goals and train specifically for them even if you aren’t interested in competition as it provides structure and direction.)

The nitty gritty details regarding organization of sports training are outside the scope of this article but to give us a loose context, training can be organized into the following structure:

Macrocycle:

• generally your entire training year, this focuses on improving performance for the peaking before a major event, or getting a broad overview of your sport season. Because a year is so long there are typically adjustments along the way, but understanding what skills you need to train when, how well you might be prepared to recover, and how much competitive work you’ll be doing is important.

Mesocycle:

• This is usually a several week chunk of time, one example might be a 4 week training phase focusing on peaking for a powerlifting competetion. There are many mesocycles in a macrocycle.

Microcycle:

 

• Most training plans keep the microcycle within the confines of a 7 day week, this encompasses the workouts for the week.

There are many kinds of programming, most utilize periodization of exercises in either a linear (increasing intensity/ & reducing volume), block (one skill at a time rotating in sequence), undulating (varying volume/intensity in waves over time), conjugate (concurrent training of multiple skills at once), or combination of the methods above format.

For now, we are going to simply focus on building one mesocycle with 4 x 1 week microcycles that prioritizes power but still maintains our strength and some of our capacity for volume (concurrent training).

The Exercises

• Primary Power Exercises:

These exercises typically require a higher skill level and are rather fatiguing. We usually place them at the beginning of a session after our soft tissue and dynamic warmups. These exercises impact the nervous system significantly and cover the neuromuscular power component of our three priorities.

• Olympic lifts such as the clean, snatch, jerk and their variations
• Very explosive KB swings
• Jumps and loaded jumps
• Ballistic movements such as those done explosively with bands or chain
• Medicine ball throws

Typically we keep the rep range relatively low (1-5) for power exercises as it is important to maintain the coordination and speed of the movements. Excessive fatigue from high reps limits how much power gain we can achieve. This is why very high rep olympic lifts and very high rep jumps make little sense as we may be detraining our capacity for power in the name of conditioning. There are many better ways to build conditioning that don’t limit our power on big movements!

Total sets are typically slightly higher when reps are very low with 4×5, 6×3, and 8×2 all being popular set/rep schemes.

Our intensity will also be relatively low likely starting out around 30% of maximum force capacity. For example, 30lbs for speed squats if our max squat is 100lbs.

Strength Exercises:

These exercises are programmed to maintain the strength and muscle mass to generate power throughout the program. They are typically done as a secondary primary exercise after our primary power exercise. These exercises cover both the neuromuscular strength component and to a slightly lesser degree the size component.

• Front squats
• Back squats
• Bench, flat, incline, etc
• Barbell rows
• etc….

Rep ranges here will still be relatively low similar to our power exercises (3-6 reps), however our total sets will most likely start at 3 sets and our beginning intensity will start around 70%.

Accessory/Volume Exercises

These are the exercises we use to maintain core strength, local muscular endurance and overall capacity for volume. Think lighter barbell movements, dumbbells, bodyweight, etc with lighter loads and higher reps for moderate sets. 2-4 exercises should be sufficient and exercise selection will generally be based on supporting the main lifts and bringing up any individual weaknesses. These focus in part on the size component, keep up some lower intensity volume, let us keep certain body parts healthy/balanced (think postural exercises, bird dogs, band pull-aparts, etc), and let us bring weak parts up.

This part could be as simple as a leg day being followed by a tri-set of walking lunges, side planks, and hip thrusters, a kettlebell complex, or a bodyweight exercise circuit finisher.

Putting it all together (finally!)

Let’s imagine for a moment that Suzie has just graduated college, she was a competitive NCAA soccer athlete for her entire time in school, and now that she’s in the big kid world of full time jobs, loan payments, and being on her own insurance she doesn’t have much time to train. She figures that she can really only train 3 days a week for about an hour at a time. Her old vertical jump height was about 16 inches which, according the the NSCA’s is about average for a college female soccer player. Currently she weighs 130lbs.

Her jump in cm = 40.64 cm

her mass in kg = 58.97

Her peak anaerobic power output =

PAPw(Watts) = (60.7 x 40.64) + (45.3 x 58.97) – 2055

= 3,083.19 Watts

With 3 days a week to train Suzie can organize her training as follows:

Day 1: Highest intensity day of the week, moderate volume

Day 2: Lowest intensity day of the week, moderate volume

Day 3: Mid-High intensity, moderate volume

Finally, she comes up with the program below:

After 8 weeks of following her program, Suzie retests her vertical jump!

She jumps 17 inches after the program and has gained some lean mass over the course of it too. Now she weighs 134 lbs instead of 130.

Her new height in cm = 43.18

Her new weight in kg = 60.78

PAPw(Watts) = (60.7 x 43.18) + (45.3 x 60.78) – 2055

Her new peak power output is:

3319.36 Watts

Her gain = (3319.36 Watts – 3,083.19 Watts) = 236.17 Watts!

Program? = SUCCESS!

Sources

1.
Bondarchuk, A. P.,
& Yessis, M. (2007). Transfer of training in sports. Michigan:
Ultimate Athlete Concepts.

2.
Boyle, M.
(2016). New functional training for sports. Champaign, IL: Human
Kinetics.

3.
Hoffman, J. R.
(2012). NSCAs guide to program design. Champaign, IL: Human
Kinetics.

4.
NSCA -National
Strength & Conditioning Association. (2017). Developing Power.
Human Kinetics Publishers.

5.
Parker, J., Miller,
A., Panariello, R., & Hall, J. (2018). The system: Soviet
Periodization adapted for the American strength coach. Aptos, CA: On Target
Publications.

6.
Zatsiorsky, V. M.,
& Kraemer, W. J. (2006). Science and Practice of Strength Training.
Champaign, ILL.: Human Kinetics.

First things first

For starters, let’s lay down a few definitions. Within the context of sport science, speed, power, and strength are defined slightly different. Furthermore, for the sake of this article we will discuss iso-kinetic movements, where our joint angles change (a sprint, a bicep curl, etc). We will not be discussing iso-metric exercises where no joint positions change (a plank, a wall sit, etc).

Strength: The ability to generate maximum external force on an object

Speed: Velocity of body motion

Power: Force produced x velocity of the movement

Internal Force: Force produced by one part of the body on another part, this is not considered in the definition of strength.

External Force: Forced produced by the body on an external object

Resistance: External load, drag (such as water in rowing), inertia, friction, gravity, etc

Force Velocity Curve

According to the force velocity curve, it is not possible to exert maximum force and maximum velocity simultaneously. For example, our maximum force is exerted in a 1 rep max deadlift, but the velocity of the lift is relatively slow. On the other hand, we can do an extremely fast snatch or clean with an empty bar though we aren’t creating much force due to the light load. If we want to be stronger and faster simultaneously, we have to shift the force-velocity curve to the right. This means that our maximum force capacity would have to happen at a higher velocity (curve shifts right).

Because peak power happens at around 1/3 maximum velocity, and because power = force * velocity, a right shifted curve allows peak power to increase which means we can tackle harder, jump higher, and lift more faster.

The phenomenon of producing more force more quickly is referred to as Rate of Force Development. Improving RFD is a critical component to living up the the daft punk song. The unfortunate thing here is that the skills of being very fast and very strong are reasonably specific; meaning that powerlifters produce tons of force but they’re not necessarily very fast and that sprinters are very fast but they aren’t going to compete with powerlifters for max strength. Thus, training to improve power (the combo of force and speed) requires that we train both skills in an organized manner as part of our training program otherwise we might wind up super strong but not very fast or pretty fast but only a little bit stronger.

The Physiology of Being a Powerhouse

1) In order to contract, our muscles form cross bridges within a specialized cell called a sarcomere. Contraction happens at a tiny level that accumulates to a big effect because one muscle is made of many many sarcomeres. Though contraction happens pretty quickly, it still takes time.

2) Sliding filaments in the muscle overlap slightly and bond to each other when they receive a nerve impulse, this starts a chemical cascade in the cells. As bonds form between myosin and actin (the thick and thin filaments respectively), they pull the filaments into each-other in a dense overlapping pattern. The more cross bridges that form in the muscle cell, the more force the muscle can produce. You see, each myosin filament has little “heads” that grab onto the actin, after they grab on they produce a cocking action that yanks the actin into the center with force. The more heads that latch on the more force produced and the stronger the contraction.

3) Because high velocity movements happen so fast, less cross bridges form when compared to the quantity that are allowed to form with longer duration high force demanding movements.

4) There are fast twitch fibers (IIX and IIB) and slow twitch fibers (IIA). Fast twitch favor explosive force and strength production but they fatigue relatively quickly, while slow twitch fibers favor endurance and fatigue more slowly. This has to do with differentiation in metabolism and energy use in the cell as well as the motor unit innervating the fibers. Our brain senses what we are trying to accomplish and recruits the fiber types for the job. With only a few exceptions, we recruit type I first and if the task is challenging enough our body recruits more fibers to do the work. This is called Henneman’s Size Principle.

5) The capacity to create force with muscle tissue depends in part on the cross sectional area, i.e. if your bicep is as big as your head it is most likely capable of producing more force than if you’re flexing a string bean. Furthermore, type IIX and IIB muscle tissues tend to have larger cross sectional areas than IIA. Thus, strongmen are bigger around than marathon runners.

6) We tend to improve at movements patterns we train but improving one doesn’t necessarily improve another. Meaning that even if I get really strong at leg press I may not improve my squat or my jump very much even though they look similar.

This is a loose analogy, but picture velcro; if you slide two fuzz and hook layers of velcro on eachother and get them to attach, the attachment will be stronger if more hooks grab the loops than if less hooks grab loops. Muscles are similar, but rather than being pressed onto eachother like velcro, they bond and pull to create a sliding action to create the contraction.

How do we use strength and speed to improve power?

Now that we know the underlying machinery and now that we understand the relationship between force and velocity, we have to understand how that cellular machinery relates to the curve.

When we train we are creating stress to drive adaptation in the body, this stress happens at many levels (neurologic, metabolic, etc). Furthermore, this stress is specific and the adaptation is specific in response. This is called the SAID principle, or specific adaptations to imposed demands.

Because peak power happens at around 1/3 maximum velocity, we are going to focus on strength training as our primary way to improve power and speed work as our secondary way to improve power. Why? Well…

When we train for force production we improve hypertrophy (growth) of the muscle tissue meaning we improve our cross sectional area and our capacity for force production and thus power (remember power = force * velocity). If we are training with heavy weights, a lot of this growth happens in IIX and IIB fibers (the fast ones!), but some occurs in IIA too. This growth is caused by many hormonal, metabolic, enzymatic, etc adaptations but we won’t go into those for now. All we need to know is getting bigger can help us create force and give us more tissue that is capable of moving fast, and once we have that tissue we can train it to move even more quickly in order to improve overall power. Research indicates that speed work alone doesn’t generate as much hypertrophy as we need, but that when used with strength based work it can certainly up our gains so we need to train both.

In part 2 of “So ya wanna be stronger, faster, and move powerful?” we will learn about how to select exercises and plan training in order to maximize power gains.

Today starts the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week here at K-State!

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Week, let’s explore the benefits that exercise and physical activity have on mental health!

 

 

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly 20% of Adults in the United States live with mental illness – thats 46.6 million people! In other words, if you live with mental illness or struggle with your mental wellbeing, you are not alone! If we’re looking at the average college aged individual who falls between 18 and 25 years old that number jumps to 25.8% of individuals living with mental illness.

According to the article Exercise for Mental Health by Sharma et al., “Exercise improves mental health by reducing anxiety, depression, and negative mood and by improving self-esteem and cognitive function.”

Exercise can help us:

• Reduce feelings of depression and anxiety
• Help us cope with stress better
• Increase our energy levels, mood, self esteem, and self confidence
• Improve our cognitive function, well being, and quality of sleep

If you’ve just started exercising, are new to the campus, or simply new to the rec center there are heaps of options for you to begin your journey with physical activity:

1. You can check out our fall group fitness schedule by clicking here
2. The second session of Cat Fit, a fun cross training class that involves weightlifting, HIIT, and strength and conditioning begins on October 21st! To sign up, you can register at the rec services office.
3. The Rec is offering FREE (you read that right) intro to lifting courses on the 27th of October and the 17th of November and you can register by following this link .
4. Looking for one on one or individualized instruction with a buddy? Check our our personal training services here.
5. Intramural sports are an excellent way to build community and get active on a regular basis and learn something new – check ’em out here! 

In addition to the rec center, there’s lots of awesome events being put on around campus this week through PAWS (Peer Advocates for Mental Wellness and Success).

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental wellness on campus, visit the K-State Counseling Services located in Lafene Health Center.

From the Counseling Services Website:

If you are in immediate crisis and one of the following applies to you:

• You feel you are in immediate danger of harming yourself
• You feel you are in immediate danger of harming someone else

Call:

• 911 and ask for help
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)
• The Trevor Lifeline (Suicide Prevention for LGBTQ Youth) 866-4-U-TREVOR (1-866-488-7386)

Text a national crisis text line:

• START to 741-741
• STEVE to 741741 (Crisis support for young people of color)

Go to the local Emergency Room (In Manhattan, KS, Ascension Via Christi Hospital is located at 1823 College Avenue).

CRISIS RESOURCES:

On and off campus resources

Off-campus in Manhattan, KS

• Hospital – Ascension Via Christi 1823 College Avenue
• Housing-Manhattan Emergency Shelter 785-537-3113
• Mental Health- Pawnee Mental Health 24 hour Crisis 800-609-2002
• Police –Riley County Police Department 785-537-2112 (non-crisis) & 911 (crisis)

On-campus

• K-State Police 785-532-6412
• Other resources

Sexual Assault Resources
National Sexual Assault Hotline; 1-800-656-HOPE (1-800-656-4673)

Helping a friend who has been sexually assaulted