Today I was prompted by my student who reported that he had gotten in a heated argument with a trainer, who trains using workouts from a certain website that instructs you to do as many 3-4 intense exercises with certain form and weight in a determined period of time. This website, and others like it, has been recently the latest craze of fun and innovative ways to perform exercises and build lean muscle. Meanwhile, poor guys like me continue to preach the boring stability and postural exercises that I do.
I wanted to tell you all. Websites like these, KEEP ME IN BUSINESS AS A PHYSICAL THERAPIST.
While many of you don’t question this latest craze, I will. Although I am not an opponent to doing fun innovative exercises with jumps and twists, I realize there is a time and a place for those tasks.
Why is it so successful? Well, the premise is to get you active and tire you out after 20-30 minutes of circuit typetraining, which makes the average person feel like they have gotten a great workout.
What is circuit training? It’s a type of training that works on expending energy quickly with different exercises and little rest. It’s meant to increase endurance and work on decreasing fatigue over time, as well as build lean muscle mass.
Sounds pretty good right? Like I said, there is a time and a place for these exercises.
What ’s the downside? Fatigue usually yields poor stabilization to moving joints. Poor stabilization usually yields injury. Also, being sore for 2-3 days isn’t a good thing. See The "Sore" Truth blog entry.
If I want to build muscle and strength quickly, will this circuit training help? Of course, if you pass the initial risk of injury and get through with decent form, you’ll gain lean muscle mass. Heed my warning, muscle strength and mass adapt and change more quickly than your tendons. Give your tendons time to grow.
What can happen if you build muscle too quickly? Well, the end result is muscle failure, where the stress is much more than tendons can handle. Tendonitis and even worse a muscle or tendon tear can result.
Now I am going to assume that many of you haven’t trained correctly to get yourself to ready for these intense exercise regiments. What’s that mean for you? INJURY can result and then you would have to continue doing those exercises I have always recommended that you start with, for a much longer period of time. You will also be sidelined and out of fun life activities because of these seemingly fun new innovative short workouts.
Your #1 Fan,
Justin