Functional Training: How to Train your Body
People often continue doing the same training/workouts the same way over and over again and expect to continue seeing results, or to produce an adaptation from their training. Not everyone has the same goals, but it is usually to become more lean or to gain more muscle. In order to gain muscle, the primary goal should be to lift more weight. To become more lean, there's many factors at play, but it is essential to train your body how to use it's energy effectively. We will briefly discuss this in this article.
Muscle training
If someone wants to build more muscle, it is usually most effective to train to lift more weight. Not all at once, but go through different phases of training that produce more strength. Body builders usually lift with very high reps, > 12. This will produce good results at first, then you plateau and maybe become bored that you stop for a while. What experts have found, is that it takes as long to fully realize the muscle built from a high-rep phase of training as the length of the training.
So if you do 6 weeks of high-rep training, it will take 6 weeks for the muscle growth to fully catch up. That is the reason people will vary from high-rep training to low-rep training. When we use high-reps, the weight is typically lighter. When we use low-reps, the weight is typically heavier. Volume is the term we use to describe how many reps we are using, Intensity is describing the amount of weight. So high-volume = high-reps; High-intensity = high/heavy weight.
VOLUME and INTENSITY are typically inverse in relationship. If we have high-volume, we'll be using lower weight. If low-volume, higher weight. It is useful in training to switch back-and-forth from high-volume training to low-volume training to allow for the ADAPTATION of muscle growth, and for increase in muscle strength. The most simple way is to do 3-6 weeks of high-volume training, the the same amount of time for low-volume after.
There are many different opinions on this topic and how to train 'right'. However, we would argue there is not one 'right' way to train. For the purposes of this article, we are simplifying it. There are technically other phases you can do in your training, but if you stick to high-volume and then low-volume you will get most of the benefits. More info can be found in this article, click here.
Becoming Lean
To become more lean, there are other factors than just your training - sleep, diet, stress, activity level the rest of your day, we could keep adding to this list. To make our training to become more lean, we will simply call this our ENERGY SYSTEM TRAINING. Different activities will make us use our food/ENERGY in our body differently, and we will identify 3 different energy characters:
- Football player -> Short duration, high-effort burst of energy. < 30 seconds
- Soccer player -> Short-to-medium duration, moderate-to-high effort bursts of energy. 30 seconds - 1.5 minutes
- Marathon runner -> long duration, low-moderate sustained level of effort. > 5 minutes +
The Football player uses mostly energy stored in their muscle that is most readily available, so their body can work as hard as possible. This person's muscle is taking all of that energy and using it. If you look at a football player, they have lots of muscle, but are not always super lean. They can be lean, but it's because they have so much muscle to use the energy in their body. Click here for more info.
The Soccer player uses up more energy that is being produced quickly in their body, we will call it the medium-length energy system. This allows them to run and perform for up to over a minute at a high-effort before fatiguing. Soccer players are usually pretty lean but also have a good amount of muscle. The medium-duration efforts help them keep less fat on their bodies from using lots of energy, without sacrificing too much muscle. Click here for more info.
The Marathon runner uses up lots of energy over a long period of time, they utilize the long-duration energy system, which takes several minutes of activity to even kick in. Marathon runners are very lean, but usually don't have that much muscle either. Using the energy system they do, they sacrifice a lot of muscle because it's more efficient for their body to use more energy for their activity than use it to build more muscle. Click here for more info.
It is important to consider the different activity types when deciding what type of energy-system training you want to do. The different types of training sacrifice muscle growth more than others. The football player will build muscle the easiest, while the marathon runner will have the most difficulty building muscle. Building a training program for our energy system is not complicated. Using intervals we can utilize the energy in our body differently if we use 30-second intervals vs. 60-second intervals.
The purpose of this article is to briefly explain how our body reacts to our training but also introduce the main principles at play when discussing training/working out to produce desired results. If our readers want more information about this, we may release more articles in the future diving into more depth on how to more specifically structure training. I have personally found it very fun playing with the different ways to train and to feel the effects of the training. I believe everyone should enjoy exercise and be motivated to push themselves to feel the change in their own body, not just aesthetically but with more strength and energy.
If you want more information, or wonder what it is we do at BYLT Physical Therapy, please reach out to use via email at byltpt@gmail.com or visit our website at www.byltpt.com - Go to our contact page and reach out there in our contact form. We look forward to hearing from you!
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