Edith Cowan University research revealed that muscle strength benefits are seen with consistent, short exercise sessions. Participants performing a three-second eccentric bicep contraction thrice weekly saw strength improvements. Daily 20-minute exercises might be more beneficial than a single 2-hour weekly session. Regularity, even in short durations, is key to health benefits.
3 SECONDS every other day?!?!?
Daily 20-minute exercises might be more beneficial than a single 2-hour weekly session
While this is true, it is not the reason.
Your body gets stronger during the recovery period AFTER exercise, not during the exercise (technically). During recovery your body builds back a little stronger than before the exercise so that you’re more capable of handling the same effort next time. After your body has had time to recover, you start detraining slowly.
Keeping your body in a more consistent state of recovery (within reason, you don’t want to overdo it of course) is more beneficial than allowing your body time to fully recover and then slide back a bit before your next effort. So moderate exercise more regularly can be said to be more beneficial because you have just enough time to recover with minimal backsliding.
Note: I’ve simplified and left a LOT of science out of this explanation in the interest of brevity. Please don’t come for me. I’m just a guy who likes to exercise and learn about exercise.
Evolutionarily, it makes sense if you’re pushing a muscle to 100% exertion, even for only a few seconds a week.
Otherwise, animals would have to spend a large amount of energy to maintain or increase muscle mass, which is wasteful and inefficient — the species who needed more energy to maintain muscles are likely extinct or limited in number.
There’s another element to this. Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive, so it’s beneficial for an organism to limit muscle mass to only as much as it needs to succeed, thus reducing how much food is necessary. There’s actually a protein, myostatin, that directly works to inhibit muscle growth. Some specific breeds of cow lack this; search up Belgian Blue cattle for a look.
Yes. The key difference is the near 100% exertion. If the muscles are used to they’re maximum on a regular basis, the body will consider them necessary for survival.
If you suddenly dropped the weight by 20%, so that you exert those muscles less, you would expect them to gradually weaken by a similar margin over time; eventually, to the point that lifting the 80% weight would require near 100% exertion.
Too bad they focus entirely on strength training. I exercise to manage my weight, improve my mood, and improve long term health benefits.
Exactly! I started powerlifting training as a route to weight control. More muscle mass equals more resting calorie burning.
In fact, energy restriction + high protein + resistance training appears to be the best of all for losing fat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRP0VfmjwE
Not to say aerobic exercise isn’t important - far from it - but if you want to lose fat, caloric deficit plus hi protein plus lifting wins.
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Strength training builds muscle which increases your resting caloric burn.
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Lifting weights burns calories too, running isn’t the only form of exercise that does that. Anything which requires your muscles needs energy. You can literally do only strength training and burn enough calories to help put you in a deficit. If you work out in a circuit you can even make it a form of cardio.
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Lifting weights still gives you endorphins, I feel them the same as I did while running.
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Strength training absolutely gives you long term health benefits as it still requires cardiovascular effort in the workout and having a well built frame is going to be beneficial as you get older. Who told you strength training wasn’t beneficial for health? Sounds like a runner’s shitty advice tbh.
The only cardio I do is 10 minutes of stair master or inclined treadmill with 20lb dumbbells in my hands, twice a week, strength training does the rest. I’ve never had an issue managing my weight or seeing the health benefits. I’m cut, lean, and feel great.
Right those are all good points. But I mean the study only measured muscle gain. And some of what they tried was pretty bizarre outer-edge strength training stuff like twitching your arm for 3 seconds. They measured whether this affects muscle gain but not anything else. I hear you’re saying that muscle gain leads to all the other things but it would have been nice to see those actually measured and not just assume you’ll get a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality from twitching your arm for 3 seconds.
I watched a great doco, “how to live younger”, the first episode examines the effectiveness of exercise on the mind with respect to declining mental cognition and dementia. It probably covers a lot of what you want to know. Basically to remain optimally healthy, they suggest the best exercise is whatever you can actually stick with, but daily, even just walking. Getting the blood flowing increases the blood vessels in the brain, which increases blood flow to the brain. But they go into heaps of detail about individual parts of the brain, what their function is and how exercise helps that region, specifically. They talk about the chemicals your muscles release and what the benefits are, hormones and how they relate to body function etc. If you have a vpn, it’s streaming for free on abc iview currently.
I understand what you mean, you would have liked other criteria tested and proven so you can take the information for more than just getting stronger.
I have a feeling though that the overall lesson here is that continuous volume over a week is better because it simulates the environment we are suited for, and anything that allows the body to thrive is probably going to work out mentally as well.
Whatever workout regimen works for you, is always going to be better than not working out because you tried to do a thing you hate, even if it’s not the best at anything.
Me too, but strength training is part of that equation. Strong muscles build strong bones, and lifting weights, while it might not make you technically lighter certainly can make you leaner with better shape. Strength training is used by old people to maintain bone and muscle mass, not just literal strength even if that’s what’s being measured.
Plus it’s just more comfortable to be able to lift things more easily, big heavy pots of boiling water, etc.
I’ve been trying to do something at least once every 72 hours. If I miss one, I have to go again within 72 hours of the last. It’s been working pretty good, considering how little exercise I’ve been doing.
Reference: Yoshida et al. “Weekly minimum frequency of one maximal eccentric contraction to increase muscle strength of the elbow flexors”, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 28 July 2023.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-023-05300-6
