Weird ass fitness terms you should know if you’re serious about your workouts
Why do you need electrolytes? How do you do plyometrics? What the heck is lactic acid?
You may have heard certain terms a thousand times, probably even done some of the workouts and training methods without even knowing it. But do you really know why plyometrics are so good for you? What EPOC stands for, and why it puts your calorie burn into overdrive? Do you know the proper term for that hit the wall feeling on your long run?
High Intensity Interval Training involves short bursts of high-intensity exercise as close to your maximum effort as possible, followed by a lower intensity recovery period. (40 seconds of sprinting followed by 20 seconds of jogging of walking, repeated) It can be applied to any combination of exercises included cardio and strength training. Pushing your body so hard means you can shorten your workouts and still score the increased metabolism and fat burn.
Eight rounds of 20 seconds of very high intensity efforts followed by 10 seconds of recovery.
Cardiorespiratory Fitness
The fitter you are the better your cardiovascular system and respiratory system can supply oxygen to your working muscles. And the better your muscles are at absorbing it. The efficiency of this process directly impacts your body’s ability to sustain prolonged exercise, determining your fitness level.
Your maximum volume of oxygen is a measure of your heart, lungs, and bloods capacity to deliver oxygen to your working muscles, as well as the capacity of your muscles to take up and use oxygen during a workout. Your VO2 Max is a great measure of your fitness abilities, but it’s mostly determined by genetics. The types of muscle fibers you have, as well as the structure and function of your cardiorespitory system are all determined by your genes, which is why some people are naturally better at certain sports.
Reaching EPOC during your workout is the key to burning fat and torching calories even after you’ve left the gym. If you work out hard enough your body has a hard time replenishing the energy stores used during the exercise. This causes your metabolism to stay in overdrive even after your back in your daily routine, a state known as Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC), or “the afterburn.”
The name pretty much spells it out but this target heart rate is the ideal range for your heart rate to fall into during exercise. This number changes depending on your goal of working out.
This is the lower end of your target heart rate- around 60 percent of your max. While the fat burning zone sounds like where you’d want to be, this actually isn’t ideal for weight loss. Calorie burning happens at a higher intensity. The fat burning zone is ideal for performance however.
Every woman wants to get long and lean but anatomically, it’s actually impossible to change your body shape. Your muscles can’t be lengthened. Lifting weight and burning fat however can lead to more sculpted curves and reveal the natural shape of your bones and muscles. Toning, in essence, is about shedding fat and sculpting.
Functional training is meant to help strengthen your muscles to support and improve movements you do every day. All the moves mimic the foundational motions of everyday life-squatting, pushing, pulling, reaching, and lifting. These workouts burn a lot of calories since so many muscles are engaged in a single move.
It’s all about balancing your main sport with another. Runners should take up yoga; swimmers should hit up the weights. While this does help train your supporting muscles, the real purpose behind varying your workout is to avoid injury. Cross training gives the body a break from the same repetitive stresses of a single sport which can otherwise lead to injury.
High impact exercises are running, hopping, jumping rope, and plyometrics. Low impact exercises include walking, biking, and swimming. Moves that require both feet to leave the ground are high impact and moves that keep one foot on the ground at all times are low impact.
This category includes moves like box jumps, hops, skipping, throwing-all exercises intended to have your muscles rapidly stretch (jumping up) then rapidly contract (landing) over and over. The goal is greater explosive power and better neuromuscular coordination.
You need proper balance of electrolytes for your muscles to contract and relax properly, but this mineral leaves your body along with sweat. That means that after a hard workout you need to replenish your electrolyte stores so your body can recover properly.
Lactate, also called lactic acid is a substance that builds up in the muscles during strenuous exercise. Technically a byproduct of incomplete breakdown of carbohydrate, lactic acid is metabolized fairly easily during low intensity workouts. As workouts get harder your body starts to produce more lactic acid in the active muscles, eventually reaching a speed where it’s producing too quickly for your body to metabolize. It begins to build up, causing the muscles to fatigue which is when that “hit the wall” feeling every endurance athlete experiences kicks in.