Tips to Improve Strength

During a sport season, strength is a very important feature in every work program, especially during wintertime, even if is good to do recalls during the whole year.

Strength has many different components (stamina, power or speed), when you are on the court being strong means to be able to push efficiently with “longer gears”, and this makes the difference from an athlete to another.

For example, how can strength be trained? Recent studies have shown that training in gym using is useful to young people and beginners, less useful to an evolved athlete because it determines a lag in reaching physical shape at the beginning of the season, also because, once you stop training with loads, 4 up to 6 weeks occur to burn off muscular fatigue.

Moreover, a wrong usage of loads can give a muscular mass increase and a very negative consequence for your weight/power ratio (that’s true for many sports) with a consequential loss of performances.


Bearing that in mind, we have to admit that with the cold season, when light hours go decreasing, temperatures become less pleasant and more importantly you find yourself in that period from November to December, when you can dedicate to other sports (the so-called cross-training with run, swimming, cross-country skiing, walks on mountains) and it is possible and useful to withdraw with gym and generally with indoor training. The aim is to keep a minimum amount of aerobic and muscular tone conditioning using a “circuit-based” work, through which different muscular areas (legs, arms, torso’s muscles) are involved, using loads that are about the 50-60% of the maximum for two minutes circa of use.

Thank to this method, cardiac frequency keeps a low rhythm, that is an aerobic work, muscles work with no fatigue thus keeping tone and stress resistance. Very important is the work of “transfer” done on bike or on spinning bike, after work done on machinery.

Period to be dedicated to this kind of work in gym, generally lasts not more than six weeks.

How can strength be fed? The supplementary feeding during workout or following the sessions during which exercises are planned for the development of force, is very important, especially with regard to recovery. After every workout it’s necessary first to reinstate the sugars used in efforts given the importance of amino acids and proteins; hard work leads to micro-lesions at the level of muscle tissue that must be quickly repaired, so as to allow, during the anabolic phase, improving of the contractile ability of the muscle itself and expression of the force.
Only in this way you can get some good improvements.

How To Best Manage The Training In A Typical Week

At the beginning of training all athletes are looking to train stimulating the different qualities to be ready for the races; this means way to the so-called "week-type" training.

This term was always meant that microcycle of workout that stimulates the various organic aspects and implies a good basis for preparation. The week-type makes sense, then, in the first phase of the competitive period, but it is useful to continue with the same pattern throughout the year?

Here we must be very clear: if you mean the same pattern in terms of workloads, then it makes absolutely no sense to arrive at a basis pattern to be pursued; and may be less serious if we’re speaking of days dedicated to various kinds of training.

For example, if you're used to dedicate a day to force, one to threshold repetition and one to the distance, this pattern may also be valid forever, varying loads within each day anyway. It makes no sense to do a number repetitions of strength on Tuesday, tot series at threshold on Thursday, for example. Following the same pattern will end up then with the body to bear all the same loads and instead they should vary; then how do you do a recovery period?

I believe that each of us must keep in mind what could be his week-type of training, and that it has to coincide with the best performance, but this pattern can serve as a starting point to establish clearer and more precisely periods and future trainings.

In essence, find out your typical week, but not as a point of arrival, than as a starting point to look for improvements in form and performance you want.

Look At Here How An Eagle Can Become A Chicken

A few times ago I read a short story that impressed me very much. I want to repeat it here to you.

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a hen’s nest.
The egg hatched simultaneously with the brood, and the baby eagle grew along with the chicks.
Throughout its life the eagle did what the backyard chickens did, thinking of being one of them. It rummaged through the soil looking for worms and insects, cackling and shaking its wings rising from the ground a few feet.
The years passed and the eagle grew very old.
One day it saw above it, in the cloudless sky, a beautiful bird that soared, majestic and elegant, in the midst of a strong air current, barely moving his strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up, startled. "Who is that?" asked.
"It’s the eagle, the king of birds," replied its neighbour.
"It belongs to the sky. We, however, belong to the earth, because we are chickens."
So the eagle lived and died like a chicken, because it considered itself to be such.

This is what I concluded:

"You can fly too, you just have to know it and believe it!"

Draw yourself your own conclusions!