I have had a question that is interesting about the difference between different muscle fibers and tried to get a good answer. Here is the differences between fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers and the difference that they make to your workouts and fitness level.

One slightly confusing area of exercise is the idea that a muscle can do both push a lot of weight once or move many times. Look at the difference between doing a set of squats compared to running or the difference in the leg muscles of a bodybuilder compared to a triathlete.

All types of skeletal muscle are constructed from densely knit fibers. These muscle fibers can be looked at as Fast Twitch and Slow Twitch muscle fibers. Which kind are you looking for when you are doing weights? Which ones do you want to have when you are running distance? Read the rest of this entry »

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Gaining muscle can be difficult once you have hit a plateau, this is a state where no matter what you seem to be doing you are not getting any stronger and therefore you are not gaining any muscle. This is something that really sucks and I will try to address this is three different posts. First I will deal with your sets themselves, secondly deal with your workouts and thirdly deal with the stuff going on outside the gym.

So what can you do to gain muscle and break through the plateau? Shock your muscles in entirely new ways! There are a few ways within your sets. One thing to remember when you are doing sets is the intensity of the set itself.

Your muscles are very rarely using more than a few percent of the total number of muscle fibers to do an activity. Think of how your muscles are going to work if you are doing a marathon compared to how your muscles are going to work when you are running a 100 meter sprint, a big difference.

What we want to do when lifting weights is to push our muscle fibers all as hard as possible and use as many as possible. You will likely be more interested in having legs like a sprinter not legs like a marathon runner. A sprinter uses lots of muscle fibers per step, as many as possible while a marathon runner is using very few and the muscle alternates using them so that the person can run for a far longer time. simplistic example, but hey it works! Read the rest of this entry »