Everyone from chess and violin players to dancers and professional
athletes can benefit from training to become stronger. Lifting weights
to develop large strong muscles can improve coordination, make you
faster and more flexible as well as stronger. It will not interfere with
the coordination that you need for such fine muscle movements as playing
the piano or shooting a basketball or your softball swing. Weight
training will help allot if you play softball or baseball, cause this
will shorten up your swing and make you much faster.
Muscles are made up of two different types of fibers. The red,
slow-twitch fibers are used for endurance and the white, fast-twitch
fibers are used for strength and speed. When you strengthen a muscle,
you train the same fibers that also make you faster, so strength
training helps you to move faster. Coordination is controlled by the
ability of your brain to direct the more than 500 muscles in your body.
Strengthening a muscle does not hinder brain control of muscles.
Stronger muscles use fewer fibers for the same task and therefore are
easier to control.
Full length, range-of-motion strength training can also improve
flexibility. To make a muscle more flexible, you need to stretch it.
When you lift a heavy weight, your muscles stretch before the weight
starts to move. In addition to making you a better athlete, strength
training will also help you in everyday activities, such as opening
stuck doors, jars and faucets, and doing your household chores.
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How to Do the Most Pushups
If you want to be able to do 100 pushups like me in a row!... Do not try
to do as many pushups as possible every day. You'll probably injure
yourself and end up unable to do any pushups at all. Training for
competition requires an understanding of the stress- and-recover rule
and the interval-sets rule.
The best way to improve any athletic skill is to stress your body on one
day and then allow enough time for your body to recover before you
stress it again. On one day, take a hard workout. On the next morning,
your muscles feel sore. Take easy workouts until the soreness disappears
and then take a hard workout again.
For your hard workouts, you can do far more work by exercising in sets,
rather than continuously. If you can do six continuous pushups, you can
probably do ten sets of two with twenty second rests between each set.
Do repeat sets of two until your muscles feel sore. Try to take workouts
that are hard enough to make your muscles feel sore for no more than 48
hours. An ideal training program would consist of sets of three until
you feel sore on the first day, take off the second day, do sets of ten
on the third day until you feel soreness, and rest on the fourth day.
Repeat these four-day cycles, and you'll soon be ready to compete. With
ME!