Keep Pushing! Using ‘PRE’ and ‘SAID’ principles to continue muscle growth and performance enhancement.
With the transition from summer to fall, it’s important to maintain your fitness training.
As those long warm days of summer wind down to an end, we pack away the tank tops and swim trunks and welcome the transition to blue jeans and flannel to enjoy the crispness of the fall season. For many of us, this time of year can bring big changes in our schedules and habits, as well. Between students returning to school, adjusting to diminishing temperatures and daylight for our gardens and homes, and seasonal changes in recreation and sport, our daily routines can require some modification. However, something that shouldn’t take a hit is your regular training for health, functional fitness, and performance enhancement in your choice of sport or recreation.
A regular fitness routine is an important part of leading an active lifestyle thanks to the boost in overall physical health.
Regular activity helps improve cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and flexibility, as well as enhancement of your mental well-being such as improved mood, reduced stress, and optimized sleep. If you don’t have a daily fitness routine, I hope this message plants a seed in your thoughts that will grow into one soon! You can receive the aforementioned benefits from consistent exercise by completing your routine 4-7 days per week, aiming for 30-60 minutes per workout, and by utilizing the tried-and-true strength and conditioning principles of progressive resistance exercise (PRE) and specific adaptation to implied demand (SAID) for maximizing your gains.
PRE is accomplished by gradually increasing the weight or resistance in your workouts over time and is vital for continuing to build muscle strength and endurance.
This type of training helps prevent plateaus, allowing for continuous muscle growth, called hypertrophy, resulting in improved performance. Appropriate weight training also promotes greater joint stability and bone density, reducing the risk of injury and osteoporosis. Having a greater volume of lean muscle mass supports metabolic health by enhancing fat loss and increasing your metabolism, tuning your overall health and fitness. Hypertrophy requires the overload principle in weight training to be effective, which states the body must be subject to stress greater than it is accustomed to. By consistently increasing the amount of weight, reps, or intensity of exercise, over time the muscles adapt by becoming stronger and more resilient. To do this you’ll need to dial in the amount of weight you’re using for your exercises, ideally finding a weight/resistance that you can do at least 8 repetitions with, but not more than 12. Complete the exercise for 8-12 repetitions for 3-4 sets, building from the lower of these ranges (3 sets of 8 reps) to the high ranges (4 sets of 12 reps) before increasing your weight again.
Okay, but what exercises should I choose? Glad you asked!
The SAID priniciple is a core concept in exercise selection. This principle simply states that your body will adapt to the way you train it, and while some carryover from one movement to another does occur, your best performance comes from training your body in a similar way to how you plan to use it. For example, having a pair of burly biceps may be a nice aesthetic for beach season, but will have very limited use on the trails or slopes. Similarly, gunning for a 300lb deadlift won’t enhance your freestyle swim too much. Choose exercises that work the muscle groups required for your sport in similar patterns of movement of that given activity. Maintaining a regular fitness routine and incorporating the training principles above will allow you to be able to continue to stay healthy, prevent injury, and grow stronger muscles to keep you moving and grooving the way you love most. Happy training!