Train Smart

Get In Better Shape In An Instant

By Scott Poston

There are many benefits to strength training: decrease injury risk, increase performance potential, to look and feel better.  Maybe you have experienced these benefits, but maybe not.  I hate to use the phrase, No Pain No Gain (it’s so two decades ago), but there is some truth in any cliché.

No Pain, No Gain

Your muscles get worked with every subtle movement you make.  Walking from the office to the water cooler doesn’t leave you burned and sore the next day, but if an elevator breaks down and you’re forced to walk 13 flights of stairs, well, consider it a free gym membership. 

Each of your 640 skeletal muscles has a threshold

 of exertion before it fatigues (i.e., gets in a workout).  Most of the time our muscles are working below threshold.  And everyday you are raising or lowering that threshold by tiny micro adjustments.  For example, if the message you send to your quadriceps today is that getting up out of a chair is their only job, then they adapt.  The body, after all, is just a factory that produces whatever you demand.  And the threshold is lowered.  Thirty years of that and you’re left with a dusty factory floor, 4 part-time workers, and an empty vending machine.

 So move already!

Snail on the move

Walk the 30 flights to your office once a week.

Close your office door and do 25 or 50 squats (no warm up required!).

Go on a walk after lunch.

Join a gym and start doing something, anything.

Don’t get stifled by the what, when, where, and why’s.           

Just Move It!