Ouch.

On Monday I told you about a sore heart. Today I need to confess sore muscles! Last night I went to the gym for the first time in about 3 months. Ouch.

When I realized I had been overtraining for my marathon, I dropped my weight training, and just walked. Now I’m well-recovered, having taken a full month off (yes, today is my 1-month anniversary of walking the marathon!) and yesterday I started back in at the gym.

I decided that this time around, I’d practice slow-cadence training that I first read about in the book In Praise of Slow I was intrigued by it then, but not enough to actually exert myself physically. Then I stumbled upon the “My Pod Bod” podcasts by Stin where she shows you exactly how to do the exercises either at home with your own body weight, or at the gym with machines.

But first, a little background to the method itself:

Here’s what Adam Zickerman, author of Power of 10: The Once-A-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution
has to say about it:

Power of 10 is based on the premise that eliminating momentum from an exercise forces the muscle to do all the work. Because the muscle is never able to rest, fatigue comes faster. When muscles are brought to failure during strength training, tiny tears occur, creating blood flow to the site, which helps build the muscle.

The protocol is to lift the weight with a 10-second cadence — 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down — “until you hit that wall,” says Zickerman. At this slow pace, muscles will “fail” somewhere between five and eight repetitions. When you cannot complete another repetition with perfect form, you’re finished.

A Power of 10 workout lasts 20-25 minutes; includes five to seven exercises hitting all the major muscle groups; and can be done using free weights or machines. . .

Wayne L. Westcott, PhD, fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Mass., was intrigued. He studied two of Hutchins’ groups. In each, 75 people tackled the SuperSlow program for eight weeks (in 1993) and 10 weeks (in 1999). Westcott compared the SuperSlow group with a group that did traditional weight training, lifting for two seconds and lowering for two. The SuperSlow group did only five repetitions, while the comparison group did 10. In both studies, the SuperSlow groups saw strength gains at least 50% greater than the group doing traditional weight training.

(From Lift Slow to Get Fit Fast? Can you get results in 20 minutes a week? Here’s what the experts say. By Barbara Russi Sarnataro)

Ok, so yesterday, off to the gym. I did three reps each, 20 seconds in total. That, my friends, is a workout. I promise you.

Ouch.

Darlene

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Tags: Slow Cadence weight training, strength training, weight lifting