Cardio - Indoors or Outdoors?

   You see it at every fitness club. Men and women churning out miles and miles on the treadmills. Others use steppers or cross trainers. Not as many use the stationary bikes. Fewer still use the rowing machines. They walk, they run, they step - usually very slow in what they have been told is the
fat burning zone. 
   Others go hard or do anaerobic interval sessions that leave them drenched with effort. Group exercise classes are most often (but not always) held in an indoor environment. I have heard of marathon racers doing all of their training on a treadmill because they can more accurately gauge their effort and pace.
   My preference leans towards doing my endurance work outdoors. I have a mental tolerance on indoor cardiovascular apparatus such as treadmills, exercise bikes, step machines and cross trainers of about 5 minutes maximum. After that my brain gives up the ghost. I can't continue the task without
feeling the boredom set in.
    I am an outdoor cardio animal. I can't run anymore because of a hip injury but outdoors my capacity for bicycling , skating or cross country skiing is dependent on my pace and my fitness levels.
I prefer fresh air and green forest trails. I can escape when I am outside. I think back to my high school days. I would come off of wrestling season and start running track and field outside in the spring. As soon as I started running outside I felt refreshed and free!

   So is it better to do your cardiovascular workouts inside or outside? It is mostly a matter of preference or comfort. Many people do both and make their choices according to weather conditions and convenience.
     There are positives to indoor cardio most of them related to safety:

• No traffic to worry about
• No exhaust fumes
• Rain, snow, sleet, ice or sunburn are taken out of the equation except for the commute to the fitness center. Since Canada has just gone through 2 consecutive brutal winters, weather is a MAJOR factor!
• No thugs lurking in back alleys as you run, bike or roller blade
• Less likelihood of turning an ankle or blowing out a knee by tripping or hitting uneven terrain
• Stable environment for monitoring physiological improvements with built in monitoring devices on cardio machines
• No worry about nasty dogs, coyotes, or skunks

    For the outdoor cardio argument we have:

• Fresh air - maybe.  (Pollution can be an issue in many urban centers.)
• The sense of freedom of being outside.
• Sunlight. (Unless you lived in Canada the last 2 winters.)  
• Scenery. Trees, parks, rivers, lakes and green spaces.
• Supposedly trees can give off natural chemicals that are healthy to breathe in while exercising. 

    There is no right or wrong answer in this case. Every person has their own comfort zone.
Any exercise is usually better than being inactive.

This athletic couple prefers to do their cardiovascular training in the great outdoors.
The  setting is the Rideau Canal in Ottawa Canada -
The world's longest skating rink!

Until Next Time

Keep Fit!


Little Bobby Strong











Links
schwabe27.uwmfatloss.hop.clickbank
AudienceBuilder.ca
www.fitnwell.com
www.rabbitview/rabbitview-crossfit

Pro Bodybuilding: Great Entertainment ! - Poor Fitness Model !

   When I was 15 years old my life changed forever!  At Christmas one of the presents from my Dad was a box containing a pair of grippers for increasing wrist and hand strength. The grippers were compliments of the Weider brothers, Joe and Ben. The Weiders were Canadian born fitness and strength equipment entrepreneurs. The packaging for the grippers contained an ad for a muscle magazine. I sent away and became an instant fan of the wonderful  and wacky world of bodybuilding.
   Suddenly a scrawny teenager had hope to become a monument to manly muscularity. All you had to do was get access to a set of weights (preferably Weider brand) and blitz and bomb your stubborn muscles until they had no choice but to grow.   Skinny biceps could become the Guns of Navarone!
   Bodybuilding is but one discipline of lifting weights. The goal of bodybuilding is to cause hypertrophy.  Hypertrophy is when the skeletal muscle cells react to external stress
(such as lifting weights) by increasing in size. Bodybuilders can be strong but their main goal is usually to build larger muscles.They will lift less than the maximal weight multiple times for multiple sets.  Powerlifters and Olympic weight lifting practitioners work towards building strength and power. Therefore they tend to be stronger than bodybuilders without the same exaggerated size increases. They will lift heavier weights fewer times in training. In competition they try for one maximal lift.
  The popularity of bodybuilder turned actor Arnold Schwarzenegger helped fuel the growth of the fitness boom. This also led to the embryonic beginnings of the Personal Fitness Trainer industry.   Many early Fitness Trainers were gym rat bodybuilders that began training clients who wanted bigger biceps. Often the only credentials of the gym rats were their muscular torsos. Still, the demand for muscular gurus was there and started to grow.  We owe them for that.
Bodybuilding begat Fitness Training!

   That does not mean that a fitness program centered around bodybuilding is the only path to fitness success. In some circumstances bodybuilding type training may be contraindicated:

• Athletes requiring greater strength may be better served by a powerlifting or an Olympic Weightlifting type of regime.
• Athletes with a goal of speed or greater explosive power should gravitate towards plyometric training and / or Olympic Weightliftng exercises. They want to train muscle movements rather than isolated muscle groups as in many (not all) bodybuilding techniques.
• Runners likely could do without the extra weight and muscle mass resulting from bodybuilding type weight training.
• Cyclists and swimmers may also be served by a more specific type of resistance training. 

   Bodybuilding type training can work wonders for all shapes of people wanting to improve their physique. This mode of exercise  definitely can enlarge muscle tissue and help reduce fat by speeding up the metabolism. The best competitive bodybuilders will come from the ranks of the mesomorphic body types with mostly fast twitch muscle fiber.

   The bodybuilders of the 1950's and 1960's were aesthetically shaped. By the 1970's the professional bodybuilders had discovered anabolic steroids. They looked to be just beyond natural. By the 1990's and into this century the pro bodybuilding stars were looking more and more freakish.  This is also why I think that pro bodybuilders are not the best fitness role models for those desiring health and vigour. It is no longer about health for many reasons:

• The new generation of pros are on multiple stacks of steroids for most or all of the year. Health consequences can range from baldness to infertility to heart disease.
• Non diabetic bodybuilders will take insulin for its anabolic properties. This can be fatal both short term or over time.
• Today's pro stars take synthetic Human Growth Hormone on a consistent basis. This can cause distended bellies and auto immune disorders.
• The paper thin skin with the grotesque veins that you see at professional competitions is attained by severe dieting and the use of diuretics.  Diuretics have killed many bodybuilders in the aftermath of a contest.
• The most hard core and insane bodybuilders have been known to inject synthol oil directly in a muscle to cause the muscle to swell in size. Side effects include absesses, infections and gangrene.
• Women pro bodybuilders have become so muscular and unnaturally freakish that there has been a backlash. Many pro contests have dropped the women's competition.
• Aspiring bodybuilders will try and follow a professional workout routine as outlined in a muscle magazine. If they aren't juiced they won't be able to get the results. There is little recovery time built in.
• Many of these enhancing substances can only be obtained unlawfully!
• Many pro bodybuilders drop dead relatively young.

   These muscle freaks should get some points for honesty. Baseball players, cyclists and track and field athletes implicated for Performance Enhancing Drugs give far fetched excuses, claim innocent trust in handlers, or espouse theories of sabotage. Pro bodybuilders admit they partake but downplay it as just one of many components of their training. 

 Don't get me wrong. Pro bodybuilding can be appealing entertainment for some people, just as professional wrestling is a major draw. I still get a kick out of reading muscle magazines.

It just no longer has anything to do with health and fitness!   

Hormonal manipulation and hard core bodybuilding!
Short term gains! Long term health and fitness - maybe not!

Until Next Time,....Keep Fit

Little Bobby Strong









Links
schwabe27.uwmfatloss.hop.clickbank
AudienceBuilder.ca
www.fitnwell.com
www.rabbitview/rabbitview-crossfit