Pity Party Of One But There Is Some Hope On The Horizon

During my Pity Party of One where I was contemplating my training potential for the year, I found a grain of hope.  It came in the form of a technical article that is far above my scientific knowledge to understand but someone smarter than me outlined the key findings for me.

Just for kicks and giggles, I'm going to share the actual title of the article here:

"Skeletal Muscles Do Not Undergo Apoptosis During Either Atrophy or Programmed Cell Death-Revisiting the Myonuclear Domain Hypothesis"

If you understand that, you are way, way smarter than me. I tried to read through the article but most of it was like reading a foreign language.  The conclusion was moderately comprehensible and I had read a summary that made me happy about the message.  In a nutshell,  if you've done resistance (weight)  training previously, at any time in your past, the trained muscles responded by created more nucleii.  Now, mature muscle cells contain multiple nucleii. The results of the study suggges that when you stop training for any reason, whether it be injury, illness, lack of time, anything really, the extra nucleii that were created remain in the muscle cells.  It was previously assumed that extra cell nucleii created during resistance training died when the muscle atrophied after resistance training stopped.  However, the study suggests that these extra nucleii may, in fact, stick around.  Then, when you resume weight training after a break, there are more nucleii in your muscles that are responding to the work.  The result is a faster muscular response to the return to resistance training.

Yay!  At least there is some grain of hope, a possible silver lining to my return to training.  My plan all along was to to get back to the gym first anyway to establish a strong physical base.  I have this thought floating around in my head that I can return to moderate strength training sooner than I can return to full on  triathlon training.  Not sure if that is the case but it's the plan right now. We shall see.

Other Reasons To Hit The Gym:  Aging and Injury Prevention

Muscle and other cells die out as we age.  Specifically, after we hit 50 (and I've successfully done that), you and I will lose 1% of our muscle mass annually.  The only way to counteract this in order to maintain strength and/or muscle mass is to do resistance training specifically directed at building strength and mass.  Do the work, people, if you want to still be strong and fast!

And injury prevention is a no-brainer:  who wouldn't want that?  Our summers are short enough in Canada, we all want to take advantage of every warm, sunny day we can be active and outside.  We don't want to waste any of our summer days inside and sidelined by injury.  Strength training will help you do that.  Barring a current injury or illness, what's stopping you?  Find a gym, a training partner, a trainer, whatever you need in order to get in the gym and do the work.  Hopefully, I will see you there?

Take It Outside

Since our summers are short, it would be awesome to do some of our strength training outside.   As long as you've properly protected your skin with adequate sunscreen, it would be awesome to do some strength training outside.   I'm thinking TRX, aren't you?  I have some thoughts on that one and we'll see how it goes. If it goes well, you'll be the first to know!

I'm not likely to find as beautiful a spot to train as this to train but we still have some pretty nice spots here in Edmonton. You'll see!!