Fit to SURVIVE
The fire fighter’s guide to health and nutrition
ARE YOU GETTING BETTER OR JUST TIRED? BY ALEX BOERSMA, TORONTO FIRE CAPTAIN, STATION 426-D
How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your exercise sessions? Does your version of a “good” workout necessitate collapsing into a puddle of your own sweat or tasting bile in the back of your throat at the end of every workout? If so, you are not alone. The phrase “no pain, no gain” dominates the psyche of most serious exercisers and prevails as the indicator of choice for whether or not an exercise session has been productive. As a consequence, we find that many fitness advocates tend to promote fatigue or exhaustion almost exclusively, while disregarding many of the other critical factors that contribute to effective exercise session design. Not that fatigue and exhaustion are necessarily ineffective. Certainly, there is a place for exhaustive exercise in many training programs. Recent research on HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) indicates that short bouts of highly intense activity can stimulate significant improvements in both body composition and cardiorespiratory fitness. Intuitively, we understand that substantially fatiguing work would probably benefit from at least some substantially fatiguing training. Such training would seem appropriate for firefighters whose job demands often require considerable effort at the limits of strength and endurance. A problem arises, however, when the “it’s good to push yourself now and then” training mentality changes to “if it’s not almost killing you, it’s not making you stronger”. This way of thinking could not be more wrong. There are plenty of training situations in which working to exhaustion is actually counterproductive. For example, if you are trying specifically to push the maximal thresholds of speed, power or strength, the last thing you want is for fatigue to affect the tempo or
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load you are training with. This is why competitive sprinters and lifters rest for at least 3-5 minutes between sprints and lifts. They want their bodies to completely recover from the previous bout of activity in order to be able to exert maximal forces the next time they move. If they were to reduce their rest, then fatigue would inhibit their ability to produce maximal muscular contractions and they would not optimize for getting stronger or faster. Similarly, most endurance athletes spend a significant proportion of their training time working at moderate intensities. This kind of training, often referred to as LSD (long, slow distance) is known to produce different cardiorespiratory adaptations than those derived from shorter, faster bouts of activity. If these athletes were to perform all their training at high intensities, they would miss out on some of these important adaptations.
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