Bodybuilding versus Sarcopenia

 What most people call training with heavy weights is resting — and the results show it. What a person really benefits from is actually moving — rather than not moving 95% of the time. That is the major reason people training with lighter weights achieve superior results — because they are exercising most of their gym time, rather than resting 99% of the time to justify lifting a heavier weight. But the heavier weight NOT being lifted produces predictably no results. If a person uses a maximum weight, they will fail not because of true muscle failure — but because of cardiopulmonary failure as the struggle to breathe becomes paramount and overriding . I’ve never seen anybody override that failure — while mistaking it for true muscle failure.

The only way to ensure coming close to true muscle failure, is to use a lighter weight to allow for the fullest relaxation as well as the alternating fullest contraction — which is the pumping effect, just as the ultimate pump of the body works. While the heart always works in that manner — alternating the fullest contraction with the fullest relaxation, the skeletal (voluntary) muscles of the body can effect varying states of contraction and/or relaxation, and unfortunately, most people aren’t aware of these extremes unless instructed, or trained on a Nautilus machine designed expressly to achieve that alternating range — around a single axis of rotation (focus). But even then, the fullest range of that articulation, is achieved by using a weight light enough to accommodate the relaxation phase and not the heaviest weight one can handle in the contraction — which is how the Nautilus machines defeated the purpose of its own design.

In using a heavy weight, the muscle never really relaxes — or is allowed to relax as an essential part of the movement. Instead, it always maintains a certain degree of contraction — even as the relaxation, and as such, there is very limited change in the muscular state — limiting the blood flow. The same is true of the other extreme, of relaxing — but never contracting, or only limited so — which is the reason certain activities can be sustained indefinitely — or risk failure at an inopportune moment. Under such circumstances, failing at that moment could risk injury — or worse. But nobody in their right mind would train to that limit each and every time — unless they could not avoid it. That would be the life or death situation actually requiring it — while not tempting fate unnecessarily, and familiarizing oneself with those limits —as the margin for safety.

However, that does not prevent the most zealous from testing those limits too often — with prematurely shortened lifespans for such abuses — as seen in the enlarged hearts of people thought to be in the best of health otherwise. The heart is the critical failure — and not meant to be pushed over the limits as though it has infinite ability to adapt. It is in every case, the limiting factor of that body — and the last thing that needs to be push to its limits. Meanwhile, most of the other muscles of the contemporary sedentary body is underused and underutilized — and that is what needs to be exercised. The heart can take care of itself — and the rest of the body, but not so all the other muscles of the body. Those have to be deliberately and intentionally programmed and exercised (conditioned) to maintain and increase their health — because that is not automatic, and the reason some are more successful than others at maintaining their health as they age.

That very few people do over time, is an indication not that something is wrong with their age — as it is their lifestyle and behaviors. If they are not getting better and healthier, they are obviously not doing what they need to do to change that to produce more favorable results — even if it is doing something different than what is producing poor results for everyone unfailingly. Just continuing to do what is not working is obviously not going to work. One has to do things differently — to work.

Bodybuilding could be done with or without weights. The critical feature is the understanding of the importance of the differing muscular states and how it is effected — by the movement itself. There is a position in which a muscle is fully relaxed, and a position in which a muscle is fully contracted — and it is the fullest expression of that difference that is the power — to maintain health, development, functioning — and not magical equipment or supplements. One needs to first have the most basic understanding of why everything could be beneficial — and not that magical thinking gets results because one believes it enough.