The Sunday News
Simon Gama
With strength training a person can eat more, thus its key to take in more of the nutrients vital to good health without gaining unnecessary fat.
Strength training
Strength training allows you to walk faster, do heavier chores and engage in more activities that may have been curtailed with advancing years.
But there is more. Strength training raises the body metabolic rate, the calories it burns to fuel basic functions like thinking and breathing.
Also the increased muscle mass requires more calories to sustain itself than the body fat most people put on as they get older.
The advantage is that a person can eat more, take in more of the nutrients vital to good health without gaining unnecessary fat.
The greater the muscle mass, the less insulin needed to carry blood sugar to the tissues, meaning the less likely the body will run out of it and develop diabetes. Strength training increases bone density thus reducing the risk of developing osteoporosis.
It improves the ration of good HDL (high density lipoprotein) cholesterol to bad LDL (low density lipoprotein) cholesterol.
It often eases the pain of bursitis and forms of arthritis. Start bodybuilding regardless of your age and experience the benefits.
Bodybuilding lingo
1 Anabolic steroids; These are synthetic drugs used to enhance protein retention in muscles, but more importantly to help many medical conditions.
Every drug has a side effect and in the case of steroids, these drugs have many dangerous side effects.
2 Balance; in physique terms means good overall proportion in your body. All your muscle groups are evenly developed.
3 Burns; a mild discomfort in the muscle after it has been pushed to its limit. It’s not harmful and merely means the nerves around the muscles are sore as the accumulation of fatigue products and that the muscle is starting to demand oxygen.
4 Cheating; enlisting the aid of muscles other than the ones you are directly working.
5 Cutting up; losing body fat to bring out muscular details.
6 Definition; having muscles that are highly visible and devoid of excess fat.
7 Contractions; this refers to the muscle shortening against resistance. When you do a curl your biceps contract.
8 Density; the hardness thickness and heaviness of our muscle.
9 Hypertrophy; muscle enlargement from training. Synonymous with muscle growth.
10 Groove; the best path that a bar or dumbell takes during an exercise.
11 Flexion; a word that usually means bringing a distant part of the body toward the centre of the body.
12 Flush; pumping blood into a muscle through high repetition exercise to produce a temporary engagement of the muscle.
13 Extensions; the opposite of flexion’s action moves the distant body part away from the centre of the body.
14 Intensity; how hard you are working energy applied.
15 Lean; body mass, a term for the percentage or amount of pure muscles.
16 Mass; the size of your muscles.
17 Muscularity; the combination of mass and detonation.
18 Overload; progressively working your muscles harder and harder. Usually achieved by gradually adding more weight.
19 Mind-muscle link; refers to extreme concentration and getting a mental picture of your muscles contracting.
20 Peak; getting your muscles to flex so well and hard that you actually can influence the height of the contraction such as peaking your biceps.
21 Proportion; how well developed one muscle is in comparison to another such as biceps to triceps.
22 Pump; getting muscle full of blood so they look bigger.
23 Repetition; doing an exercise from starting point (full extension to full contraction) one time is one rep. A series of reps is a set.
24 Rest; pause. Weider training technique perform one maximum, rest for 10-20 seconds and then perform another maximum repetition.
25 Rest time; the time of relaxation between sets of exercises.
26 Ripped; the same as cut up.
27 Routine; the complete you do for the day.
28 Set; a series or grouping of a number of reps.
29 Spotter; someone who helps you push or go through your sets.
30 Stick up; point in an exercise movement where gravity and unfavourable external leverage makes the movement the hardest.
31 Symmetry; how well shaped your bone structure and muscle mass are.
32 Training; to failure doing a set of reps until it is impossible to finish one complete rep.
33 Vascularity; how full your veins and capillaries are of blood. How well perfused your muscles are.
Additional information from Online sources.
– The writer, Simon Gama is a fitness trainer at Body Works Gym in Bulawayo.
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