technique for max. muscle mass?

[Mike M]

looks like it has several redeeming properties (including high in iron)

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4608886_spinach-help-build-muscles.html

[Nathan Hays]

You can develop a quite strenuous workout routine without weights. All of the lower body is easily stressed with lunges, calf raises on stairs and the like. For upper body you can go with TRX style equipment. Once you check out these nylon webbing straps, you'll find it costs next to nothing to just make your own. Plenty of results in web searches.

Use it or lose it.

[David Ure]

nm

[bill berklich]

It depends on what your objective is. 75%+ will build the fast twitch muscles which results in instantaneous lift capacity and bulk. Bands will induce growth in the long or slow twitch which supports endurance. You need both but you will rarely see bulky guys on the long trail.

[David Ure]

nm

[Nathan Hays]

I brought up the TRX straps (not bands) because Leslie grunted (I think ugh counts as a grunt) when weights were suggested. Her OP was on maintenance when not on the trail regularly. Not quite the same thing as muscle mass although closely related.

The three exercises for legs I think are best are lunges, calf raises (stairs are good), and ball curls (on your back, heels on a large gym ball, curl the ball toward your rear). It doesn't take much of any of these to get to a good burn – and that's when the maintenance is going to be stimulated.

Muscle mass for size sake isn't really the point, and I'm totally down with the right ways to really go for that. Light, long and slow one week; heavy, short, fast the next; protein asap, etc…

I think the important factors for maintenance (and training for that matter) are endurance, glycogen reserves, and neural tone. Endurance only comes from a gazillion reps. Glycogen reserves come from pushing the burn further into those reps and asap carb replacement. Neural tone is going to require stimulating the fast-twitch muscles. I maintain that pushing the endurance envelope forces the activation of the fast-twitch muscles as the enduro-fibers run out of glycogen and can't do the duty – essentially increasing the resistance for the rest of the muscle.

[David Ure]

nm

[Lynn Tramper]

Hi Leslie

I'm going to answer this as a chick, who was vegan for 20 years when this photo was taken, and who is also into backpacking.

For me, I basically lived on nothing but soy protein while dieting for my bodybuilding competitions. that, and lots of fresh veggies (try swiss chard if you can get it, it is far better than spinach), plus some whole grain rice, corn, oats and potatoes. They important thing really is lots of protein, and the source does not matter as long as you get plenty of it. Exercise is heavy weights of course, but also increasing amounts of low intensity endurance stuff, sprints, and stretching. The sprints are particularly interesting as they have been shown to promote the best aerobic endurance increases, as well as anaerobic, while promoting greater muscle gains. As a women, you can't really afford to increase calories too much. We are kinda screwed in that respect compared to men. If you do increase calories, make sure the extra is from protein. To me, true fitness is a balance of strength, speed, endurance and flexibility. As mentioned previously, you will not see this is most elite athletes as their particular sport is their sole focus, to the exclusion of other fitness factors. I think you need this pillar of four fitness attributes to be truly healthy. And a lot of it comes down to diet, with exercise proving a close second…

PS: I need to state this up front, as some people will notice the photo has been altered. It was only altered to remove the advertising banner that was behind my head, nothing more.

[Roger Caffin]

> when "dormant"(i notice differences in a week even), i lose muscle super quickly
Really????
I find this a bit difficult to believe, if you mean you are losing muscle CELLS. That only happens to someone when doing something ridiculously extreme. Fiennes was actually burning muscle tissue in the latter stages of his Antarctic crossing, but very few would ever approach that. Seriously bad thing as well.

Could you be just changing the water balance in your muscles? If so, where's the worry? Lyn T can tell you all about pumping up muscles for a competition, but that does not involve increasing the muscle tissue. It is just swelling the muscles up by fluid retention, from prior work-out.

Anyhow, what is the benefit from bulked-up muscles? Apart from body-building competitions? I know plenty of lean walkers (many elderly!) who don't look anything like an advertisement for body building – but they will still walk the legs off you out on the track.

Cheers

[MFR]

Lynn, tell me if I'm wrong here, but it looks like you "pumped up" very little. But what I see in your picture is a lot of lean, dense muscle mass. The benefit there would be greatly increased strength. Contrary to most body-building models (which emphasize split routines to exhaust muscles into getting really large) strength training yields a rather lean physique that is capable of lifting large amounts. This will look a little different on everyone just because of body types/make-ups, etc., but the effect is less about size and more about strength.

Here's a picture of Eugen Sandow, an old school strongman who emphasizes what I mean. Notice the classical look to his body–the Greeks got a lot of things right. Certainly his muscles are larger, but nothing compared to body building today. That's because Sandow's chief draw was being able to actually lift things. (Notably, his pectorals aren't very large because that wasn't a lift emphasized in his day.)

[Lynn Tramper]

Clayton, you are absolutely correct. Much to my coaches dismay, I ignored his advice to follow a classic 'bodybuilding' weight program as I wasn't really aiming to be a bodybuilder (I got coerced into competition), but wanted functional strength. So I basically trained like an Olympic weight lifter with emphasis on core strength moves. But I think the sport of bodybuilding has, for many decades, been tainted by heavy reliance on anabolic steroids. Honestly, to get any bigger, as a female, I would have had to resort to this, and I think the inflated muscles (pumped look)commonly associated with bodybuilding has more to do with the drugs used than the training technique. Again, this is not always true. Young adult males have plenty of natural hormones floating around to achieve pretty decent pumped looking muscles, women do not naturally achieve that look. I was also much more pumped looking the day after the competition, due to over-depleting my muscle glycogen to make weight, but by the next day after gorging myself on lots of carbs, I actually looked a lot bigger…

[Lynn Tramper]

Roger, muscle cells are rarely lost, they just shrink or grow, and become stronger or weaker. Functional strength does not rely on size per se, merely making the cells you already have more efficient. Size is overated IMHO, but I fully understand why someone would want to at least maintain strength, as for most of us it can be useful in in aspects of life outside hiking. if the goal is merely to be the best/fastest hiker, than just hike more. But there is more to total fitness than just the endurance needed for hiking. I presume from the OP that the goal was to maintain basic fitness when not hiking. Honestly, speed, flexibility and strength are not needed for hiking, but they are pretty important for aging well and performing a myriad of daily tasks. Most of the people I work with can't even sit at a desk properly, as their core strength is poor, they don't stretch out their hamstrings which shorten while sitting for long periods, and this leads to a host of back and associated problems. To me, this is where overall fitness comes into play. That, and actually being able to lift and carry a bag of cement is quite nice!

[Anonymous]

"Anyhow, what is the benefit from bulked-up muscles? Apart from body-building competitions? I know plenty of lean walkers (many elderly!) who don't look anything like an advertisement for body building – but they will still walk the legs off you out on the track."

Indeed. Function is the name of the game in the real world.

[MFR]

True. But different goals yield different training. I doubt most doing strength training plan or hope to walk your legs off. Strength training that emphasizes compound lifts (activating several muscle groups at once) can be very functional in the real-world. Just not to walk anyone's legs off.

[Anonymous]

"Strength training that emphasizes compound lifts (activating several muscle groups at once) can be very functional in the real-world."

No argument there. Just a different set of goals, as you said. I guess my bias was showing in my post.

[MFR]

I'm kind of in the same boat as my goals are rather conflicting right now. I formerly did a lot of strength training, and I've been inconsistently lifting in that vein for the last few months. Now that I find myself doing a lot of hiking and backpacking in the summer, I'm questioning how I ought to be training. (Unfortunately, that just means I'm not doing as much non-trail training as I ought to be.)

[Lynn Tramper]

My best suggestion for cross-training that incorporates hiking goals with strength goals is a combination of sprints with longer walks. Throw in some compound strength training a few times per week as well.

[Roger Caffin]

Hi Lyn

> muscle cells are rarely lost, they just shrink or grow, and become stronger or weaker.
Yes, I know of course.
I was questioning the assumption the original poster was making, that she was losing actual muscle in one week. Doesn't seem very likely to me.

> being able to lift and carry a bag of cement is quite nice!
But OHS halved the weight of the cement bags some years ago because many people could not lift the original ones (110 lb?). More recently OHS made the flour mills reduce the size of the flour bags too, for the same reason!

Cheers

[drowning in spam]

Would OHS kindly halve the weight of rocks/boulders? Same size, hardness and toughness, just half the weight. It'd make trail maintenance much easier. I do barbell squats and deadlifts to help get me ready for rock work, but I'd gladly be able to move twice as much rock.

[Lynn Tramper]

"I was questioning the assumption the original poster was making, that she was losing actual muscle in one week. Doesn't seem very likely to me."

Agreed, unless you are ill, you don't usually lose (or gain) much muscle in a week. Longer term, I would use strength as a measure of muscle changes, though if you aren't doing any kind of resistance exercise this is not a good measure.

"But OHS halved the weight of the cement bags some years ago because many people could not lift the original ones"

INn NZ, we can buy pre-mixed concrete in bags as small as 15kg, but plain cement is usually still sold in 40kg bags. As for the reason for some countries dropping the weight of bags, this is as much a reflection on how we are deteriorating in our general fitness as it is the safe limit of a bag of product X. In NZ, they have recently decreased the weight of pellet fire fuel from 20kg to 15kg as many people can't even manage 20kg. Of course, unlike cement, some elderly people don't have a choice, so a choice of bag weights seems a good idea. But smaller bags of anything cost more, per kg, than larger bags. I was also being a little tongue-in-cheek. I don't know many women that can handle a 40kg bag of cement, and thus we bat our eyelids at young men to do it for us…well some of us anyway.

To me, functional strength encompasses more than just lifting a particular weight. Many gym junkies can lift a lot of *weight*, but still put their backs out when lifting much less weight in the real world. Their functional strength is poor unless the weight has a handy little bar to grip, and they can lift it in a straight plane in a pre-practiced pattern. And *most* people I now have very poor overall core strength, even some that can lift heavy weights. Personally, I still like to play judo, which requires core strength combined with good technique to do well. But really it would be good for the OP to clarify what kind of fitness/muscle/strength/stamina goals they are concerned about. My take-home message, and the only reason I posted that photo, was to emphasise the point that you don't need animal proteins to be strong, and even as a female on a strict vegan diet, strength is not out of reach with the right diet and training program. People who slag off proteins such as soy, fail to understand that it is only potentially limiting in methionine, but only if you are getting the minimum suggested protein intake. If you are eating LOTS of soy protein (or most other plant proteins), it is a non-issue. You will get plenty of methionine. But everyone is different. There are ways to incorporate strength and endurance into a single weight program. Good old Arnold S. did this with his German 10 x 10 method. That's a 100 reps per exercise, without reducing the weight on any rep. It's brutal and painful, so not for the feint hearted, but is do-able. I prefer to separate my strength and endurance activities. For me, I may weight train 3 x week, with sprints the other 2 days, and go hiking on the weekends. Throw in some judo twice a week, which is strength, speed and endurance, and it works for me. Whatever fits the lifestyle (and body type) is the best program…

[Erik Danielsen]

For maintenence of lean mass even when doing little strenuous exercise, I would suggest learning how to make decent bone stock. Its regular consumption has long been recognized as aiding the body in retaining lean tissue despite being itself a rather imbalanced protein; the high gelatin content stimulates higher levels of natural growth hormone, encouraging the body to hold on to (and even build) muscle tissue. Not nearly as effective as proper exercise, but useful. Considering the high content of valuable minerals (many of which our usual diets are deficient in) and stock's healing effect on the digestive tract, a good stockpot and some quality soup bones are well worth having.

I find stock even more beneficial when I AM lifting, however. When I'm stuck not doing much 8 hours each day, going down to the creek and stacking/throwing rocks is my gym time. A spoonful of cold stock beforehand (texture of jello) and a bowl of rice boiled with some more stock and some steak or liver after always seems to make my body happy, and while muscle size hasn't changed much, I keep getting stronger.

A good how-to: http://www.foodrenegade.com/how-to-make-beef-broth/

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