To Combine or not to Combine Weightlifting and Running

For the entire first semester of this year, I discussed everything that I could think about that was involved with running and the training of running. But during the transition from the first to the second semester, I ended up injuring myself, preventing me from continuing to delve into this topic. But through my careless mistakes I managed to stumble upon a new method of exercising that not only allow me to stay in shape, but also enthralled me as much as running did. This is new sport of weightlifting was unlike anything I had ever attempted to be successful at, as it entailed a much different mindset than running did. This is one of the main reasons why few weightlifters are strong runners and vice versa. Not only are different muscles trained for the different sports, but the levels of effort that must be put into each one are extremely different. Running involves constant effort for the duration of the run, with the only break occurring when/if the runner decides to stretch. But in the case of weightlifting, only short bursts of energy are necessary, but with each burst involving more effort for that short amount of time than running would involve. But both types of exercise involve enormous amounts of exertion, and can leave the exerciser feeling exhausted and out of energy for the rest of the day. This raises the question whether it is possible for one of the forms of exercise to potentially inhibit the improvement of the other form of exercise.

Weightlifting does have the potential to hurt an individual’s running performance. According to Competitor the difficulty in adding heavy weight training to your training schedule is that it’s very tiring. Like a hard track workout, lifting heavy will leave your muscles sore and tired the next day. The more heavy lifting you do, the less effective you’ll be on workout days. Another problem that can emerge is the excess weight that a person can gain from lifting weights. The increase in a person’s muscle mass will make the individual feel like he/she gained weight and make each run more difficult, even if it is only a few pounds. But while this could potentially happen, it is unlikely because that person will already be burning off excess calories by running, avoiding the possibility of gaining weight. And even though lifting weights can leave a person feeling exhausted for a day or so afterwards, it may actually be beneficial to lift weights along with continuing to run.

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The addition of weightlifting into an existing runner’s workout could bring unexpected benefits. According to Breaking Muscle, the additional strength one gets from a weightlifting program will help that person switch gears quickly and sprint faster. It will not only allow the individual to grow larger muscles, but train his/her fast twitch muscles, or the muscles that are responsible for quick muscle contractions like for punching or sprinting. Another good reason to weight lift as a runner is to help maintain good running form even when fatigued. If a person runs longer distances, it is crucial to have good form when fatigued because this will likewise help prevent injuries. So sprinters and long distance runners alike can benefit from strength training. But of course an individual must follow certain guidelines if he/she wants to benefit from combining these two kinds of exercises.

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First of all, one should not attempt to do an intense-weight workout and then try to do hard running training. This will either lead to over-exhaustion or injury because the exerciser will be too tired to focus on his//her form while working out. But it is possible to do both on the same day as long as a person knows his/her limits. Livestrong gives one way for a person to test his/her limits. It recommends lifting for 20 minutes and then jogging a lap, and then alternating like this until you adjust to an effective combination. This will allow the individual to both run and lift without exerting too much effort during either exercise. It also allows him/her to increase the intensity of each workout until an ideal balance is found. There are even people that believe running and weightlifting on the same day may be more beneficial than doing them on separate days. Another article on Livestrong states that an aerobic workout such as running is a good warm-up for a weightlifting session. A moderate-intensity run of 5-10 minutes will increase mobility, warm up your muscles and can help prevent injury. But if the warm-up is taken too seriously, it can cause the person to be tired during his/her later workout and decrease his/her performance during it.

I hope that reading about the possibilities of combining running and weightlifting have convinced you that it is not only possible to combine the two, but it may even be beneficial to! To anyone reading this that was considering running and weightlifting, I hope that you take some of my advice and learn how much your body can handle on one day, just as I have been doing over the past few months. As long as you focus on one exercise more than the other and take the other exercise easy that day, you can surely hope to improve your body in a way that you never thought possible!

Weightlifting Supplements

The simplest and most important thing that a person can do when wanting to get in shape is just getting up and going to the gym or going outside and starting a workout. It’s much easier for a person to wish that he/she would just instantly be in shape than to actually go about changing various parts of his/her lifestyle to achieve the goal of getting in shape. But many times, it’s just the thought of how much a person will have to do to achieve his/her that prevents that individual for starting in the first place. Whether one may worry about all the aspects of getting in shape like eating more healthily, eating less, or simply time management; there is truly nothing more important than actually starting the workout. Once a person gets into a routine of consistently working out a few times each week, it becomes incredibly easier to start changing those other aspects of his/her life. But while this may be true for beginners, other intermediate and experienced people may have far different problems.

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Intermediate and advanced weightlifters have a far different kind of problem that beginners; it’s not about getting themselves in shape, but is about improving their bodies more efficiently and noticeably than they have improved in prior months. This problem emerges after months of getting larger and larger muscles, but eventually hitting a plateau caused by the body either getting used to the workouts or an imbalance of nutrition in the body. A huge issue with this problem is that there is one simple yet extremely dangerous catholicon to that will allow the person to grow more quickly than any natural weightlifter on the planet, and that is an anabolic steroid. According to Boundless, anabolic steroids increase protein synthesis within cells, which results in the buildup of cellular tissue (anabolism), especially in muscles. This not only causes the user to have larger muscles, increased endurance, and decreased fat by increasing the person’s BMR (basal metabolic rate), but also necessitates a shorter recovery period. To any weightlifter who is no longer seeing the same results that he/she used to, anabolic steroids would certainly seem extremely enticing. But of course there is a downside. Steroids cause irreversible changes to a person’s body like stunting the height of growing adolescents, masculinizing women, and may even lead to premature heart attacks, strokes, and kidney failure.

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The negative health consequences that emerge from taking steroids obviously don’t outweigh the ephemeral physical rewards for the majority of the population. But one may ask, “are there other ways that I can increase my performance in the gym that aren’t accompanied by permanent damage?” The resounding answer is YES. There are countless other ways to help a person grow muscle beyond simply going to the gym and eating healthily. These mainly come in the form of supplements, and hundreds/thousands of these have little to no negative health effects. One such supplements that I use daily is creatine. Creatine is a white powder that is naturally produced in virtually every living creature and helps to supply energy to all cells in the body, primarily muscle. According to Men’s Fitness, consuming creatine can help your muscles build phosphocreatine, which gives you the ability to perform better at shorter, intense, strength-building exercises. A New Jersey study found that following a 10-week resistance training program, participants who took a daily creatine supplement significantly increased their resting testosterone levels. Aside from benefits that occur solely in the gym, there are other ways that creatine can help you in nearly every aspect of your day. Creatine has also been shown to improve mental acuity, productivity, and even act as an anti-inflammatory in the body. There is research being done on the benefit of giving creatine to patients with diseases like Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease, as well as mitochondrial disorders and brain pathologies. There are studies that are beginning to show how creatine can slow down the aging process in some adults because of its ability to allow people to maintain lean body mass and cellular energy.

Another major benefit of creatine is its ability to stay inside the user for weeks after he/she stops using it. This allows for the individual to be able to forget to take it every once in a while without it completely leaving the body. But one downside of creatine is that it usually causes the user to gain some weight initially, although it is nowhere near as a bad as it seems. The user will not gain weight from fat, but rather from water weight because creatine helps the individual retain water more efficiently. Initial weight gain could also be attributed to gaining muscle if the individual is someone who frequently goes to the gym. But as with all supplements, creatine is not for everyone. I hope that everyone reading my blog posts takes my information with a grain of salt and does his/her own research about the topics I discuss before going out and trying them for oneself. All in all, if you have been thinking about getting in shape lately, I seriously recommend that you convince yourself to go to the gym just one time and you’ll see that it’s not only incredibly easy to start but even easier to continue once you have!

Bodyweight Training vs. Weight Training

It is finally the point in the semester where the warm days aren’t just once in a blue moon, but are now frequently every week. While this is far better than having to bundle up in jackets over sweatshirts every day, it has its downsides. There is almost no consistency with this kind of weather; one day it could be 70 degrees outside, yet two days later it could be back in the 30’s. But during the few days that it is warm outside, there is no reason to not go out and enjoy the weather by working out outside. Some people may argue and say that it is not possible to do their kinds of exercises outside, like weight lifters, but with a slight change in that person’s workout method, it is possible. The easiest way to adapt a prior workout to one that can be done outdoors is by bodyweight training. Bodyweight exercises involve strengthening many of the same muscle groups, but without the help of a machine to add resistance. One article about bodyweight exercises is Greatest which discusses some of the key benefits to bodyweight training. One major benefit of training without machines is that it is an extremely efficient workout. Instead of having to move from one machine to another while constantly changing the amount of desired weight, bodyweight workouts make it easy to transition from one move to the next with little rest in between. Another benefit is that it not only involves strength training, but it also acts as a cardio workout at the same time. Without the countless rests that there would in between machines at gym, bodyweight exercises will keep the heart pumping to improve cardio, while still encouraging muscle and strength development. The last benefit that is most alluring to the general population is that bodyweight training is 100% free. There is no cost of having to drive to the gym, pay for a gym membership, or even buy your own weights; nearly every bodyweight workout can be done in one’s own backyard. 

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There is no limit to the variety of bodyweight exercises a person can perform. This is because there is always some kind of variation that made or a different way to work a different part of the exact same muscle. Jason Ferruggia lists 20 of the best bodyweight exercises for building strength and muscle. They range all the way from simple pull-ups to complicated handstand push-ups and L-sits. These exercises don’t simply train the muscle, they improve flexibility and are far easier on the joints than using resistance machines. Nearly every exercise listed is some variation of calisthenics, but they can be used to cause immense improvements on an individual’s overall muscle mass. These exercises build muscle while getting rid of unwanted fat at the same time. While machines almost exclusively require the user to sit down, bodyweight exercises require the opposite. Virtually every exercise is performed while standing up, improving the individual’s balance, and burning calories by causing the exerciser to be much more active during his/her workout. None of the workouts will lock the exerciser into a certain range of motion like any machine would, and each side of the body is equally trained unlike the machines at the gym that can cause a person to unintentionally work out one side of his/her body more than the other. This unequal distribution of muscle is one of the easiest ways to cause an injury while working out.

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One resourceful but not so beneficial property that machines utilize is a mechanical advantage. A mechanical advantage allows the user to choose a heavy weight on a machine while actually lifting or pulling less than that actual weight. This means that while a person may think that he can bench press 200 pounds on a machine bench press, he may very well be lifting much less than that. This is not possible when doing body weight exercises. As long as the individual performs the exercises correctly, he/she will not have the ability to lift any less than his/her true body weight. This might be somewhat disappointing at first as the exerciser used to believe he/she could lift more than he/she actually could, but bodyweight exercises give the exerciser a true representation of how much he/she can lift with each muscle group. Start Bodyweight discusses the benefits and shortcomings of both bodyweight exercises and weight training exercises. While machines allow the user to focus on one specific muscle to work out, bodyweight exercises can work that exact same muscle while also training various muscles around it, albeit that first muscle may not be trained to the same extent as it would have been on a machine. This increases the overall increase in muscle mass of the body, and allows for a person to become fit more quickly. After reading this post, I hope every person can see both how beneficial bodyweight training can be and how this almost exclusively indoor sport can easily be continued outdoors allowing the exerciser to reap the benefits of this short-lived amazing weather.

Common Questions/Problems for Beginner Lifters

Now that we have just passed the halfway mark in our spring semester of 2016, there has been enough time for me to begin figuring out what is and isn’t working for me during my workouts. But while I am in the early stages of understanding, there is still much more that I have yet to learn and that I do not fully understand. The most crucial and basic facet of weightlifting that people most often misunderstand is how often each muscle group should be trained. I have heard anything from every two days to just once a week, and through the countless websites I have visited hoping to find a definite answer on this topic, not one has been able to give me one. The reason for this is because it truly depends on both the individual’s genetics and how hard he/she is exercising during each workout session. Even more importantly, it depends on why the person is exercising in the first place. According to Men’s Fitness, if a person solely wants to become stronger, then he/she should do sets of the most weight possible with fewer than 5 repetitions per set. But if a person wants to build his/her endurance, he/she should use less weight so that each set can have more than 15 repetitions, which is generally used by athletes that need to be able to exercise for a longer period of time during his/her sport. The last type of weightlifting is a moderate amount of repetitions, 8-12, per set and a weight that is 75-80% of the individual’s one RM (rep max). This form of lifting is the most common and effective method of working out to build muscle mass and look stronger.

The reasoning behind why moderate repetitions and medium to heavy weight is the best way to build muscle is because of the production of lactic acid and muscle pumps. When an exercise is difficult enough that the person training can do more than 5 reps but no more than 12, his/her muscles begin to produce lactic acid, or lactate, which can be converted to energy. While lactic acid can be beneficial because of the fact that the body can convert this to energy without using oxygen, it can begin to burn when the lactate threshold is reached, according to WebMD. This is the point where lactic acid builds up in the bloodstream faster than the individual can burn it off. When lactic acid pools in large amounts, it causes a huge surge of hormone levels in the body, including testosterone, which in turn helps to workout longer and harder to further build more muscle. The other reason why this helps to increase muscle mass is because of the muscle pump, or the tight full feeling under the skin where blood has pooled inside the muscle. The conditions that lead to this activate protein synthesis and limit the breakdown of protein in your body. In other words, more of the protein that an individual eats will go toward muscle construction as opposed to being burned off for energy.

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Nearly every point that I have been making throughout this post is definitely not without its exceptions. Although it is best to use moderate repetitions with medium weight to gain mass, this is no longer true after weeks of repeating the same workout. A Workout Routine states that you should change your workout routine every 6-8 weeks, or at least change the way you do the same exercises if your goal is to either build muscle or lose weight. This is because after an extended period of time one’s body starts to get used to doing the same workout over and over and the body begins to plateau. This plateau can be overcome in many ways, because many times a plateau is not actually caused by one’s body becoming used to a workout, but because he/she is not doing something correctly. One way to make sure you are actually hitting a workout plateau is by tracking your meals for the next few days. This is a good way to see if you are either eating too much or too little, which can hinder your workout performance and muscle gain. Another way to check for an actual workout plateau is by making sure you are getting enough sleep each night and that you haven’t made any huge changes to your workout routine in the past week or two. The body responds differently to different workout methods, and while one method may have allowed you to make a certain kind of improvement in the past, another workout may improve your physique in a different way.

The overall message to pull out of this blog is that there is no single workout method that will work best for every individual. Different types of workouts train the body in different ways, and before one starts going to the gym he/she should figure out the reason why he/she is working out and what he/she hopes to achieve by going to the gym. If all of this is kept in mind, and meals, nutrition, and sleep are kept at normal levels, one can be sure to see improvements in just a few weeks.