Take care of your muscles
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Take care of your muscles. Especially if you are an endurance athlete. Especially if, until now, you have never considered this aspect alongside the big topic of general physical training. Take care of your muscles, particularly when you train a lot, when the cold weather arrives or as the years go by.
Paying proper attention to looking after your muscles, to prevention and to muscle tone, but also to muscle elasticity and readiness for contractions of various kinds, is a much underrated aspect of sport in general, and of endurance sports in particular, especially at amateur rather than professional level.
The biker or runner who makes use of every second of their daily training break is, on average, very focused on increasing their training load, the time spent on the bike or the km covered on foot. They do not bother to "invest" a few minutes of their session in caring for their muscle fibres.
Caring for your muscle fibres means doing targeted exercises based on the physical activities you do and on the individual weaknesses that can be made up for, and through these, having the chance to reach higher levels of performance.
If, for example, we wanted to get the most out of a fitness programme for a biker that includes not only the bike ride but also a few minutes of indoor exercise, it would be advisable to focus heavily on core stability and on strengthening, mainly for endurance, all the muscles of the abdominal wall and lower back. Think about it: how could we expect to hold out for a long time on the bike, in the same position and with the same tension on the muscles, including those of the trunk, without some decline over time? If you held a glass of water in your hand for a few hours, wouldn't you too start to see your arm shake from the fatigue and tension building up?
And what about the upper limbs? In this case you would need to focus on resistance exercises with added load, performed in a way that has a positive impact on strength endurance, rather than risking gross errors in technique that would lead to hypertrophy. So you would need to go about it sensibly: go to the gym, carry out small maximal-load tests for the different muscle groups and work at 70-80% of the tested maximal load, with no more than 10-12 repetitions and an explosive movement in the contraction phase. Training loads could vary over the weeks without always increasing the stimulus, but rather following a cyclical structure, to avoid, as mentioned above, the mistake of gaining mass or becoming needlessly heavy and sluggish.
For a cyclist, the lower limbs are, of course, fundamental. In this case, however, the work done on the bike is a fundamental support. Only by repeating the athletic movement we are training for does real adaptation and specific training take place. On the bike, it is the use of different gears that determines the power output and therefore how the muscle fibres are recruited, with the option of adjusting the resistance at will.
For the runner, on the other hand, the whole area of muscle work linked much more to elasticity, stability and plyometrics should be supported and improved, compared with what is needed for cycling.
The two types of physical effort in fact differ greatly in their dynamics. While the first, on the bike, is a very constrained, repetitive and fixed effort, running involves elements of stability as well as reactivity and explosiveness.
In running, therefore, much more than for cycling, it would be advisable to take a few minutes for a good amount of muscle release with stretching exercises, though without overdoing it. This phase could be useful when preparing for a particularly intense session or a race, times when the athletic movement is pushed to the limit and risks being poorly managed by the body. Unlike cycling, where the bike is still a limiting factor on the athletic movement, when running I can put a great deal of force into the ground, but I must also be able to manage that force for long periods of time, without wasting too much energy through fatigue or suffering excessive trauma. Having a warm muscle, well supplied with blood, ready to lengthen and shorten through ranges different from those of everyday life, is important.
Taking care of your muscles also means giving them the right fuel. Besides protein , a factor that is undoubtedly too often underestimated is carbohydrateintake. When we talk about muscle fibre, we think mainly of amino acid intake to support contractile activity and help it recover quickly from the fatigue it has endured. Including the right amount of carbohydrates in the diet protects muscle mass from wear and tear, which in the long run, in endurance athletes, is one of the factors that predispose to overuse injuries.
Paying proper attention to looking after your muscles, to prevention and to muscle tone, but also to muscle elasticity and readiness for contractions of various kinds, is a much underrated aspect of sport in general, and of endurance sports in particular, especially at amateur rather than professional level.
The biker or runner who makes use of every second of their daily training break is, on average, very focused on increasing their training load, the time spent on the bike or the km covered on foot. They do not bother to "invest" a few minutes of their session in caring for their muscle fibres.
Caring for your muscle fibres means doing targeted exercises based on the physical activities you do and on the individual weaknesses that can be made up for, and through these, having the chance to reach higher levels of performance.
If, for example, we wanted to get the most out of a fitness programme for a biker that includes not only the bike ride but also a few minutes of indoor exercise, it would be advisable to focus heavily on core stability and on strengthening, mainly for endurance, all the muscles of the abdominal wall and lower back. Think about it: how could we expect to hold out for a long time on the bike, in the same position and with the same tension on the muscles, including those of the trunk, without some decline over time? If you held a glass of water in your hand for a few hours, wouldn't you too start to see your arm shake from the fatigue and tension building up?
And what about the upper limbs? In this case you would need to focus on resistance exercises with added load, performed in a way that has a positive impact on strength endurance, rather than risking gross errors in technique that would lead to hypertrophy. So you would need to go about it sensibly: go to the gym, carry out small maximal-load tests for the different muscle groups and work at 70-80% of the tested maximal load, with no more than 10-12 repetitions and an explosive movement in the contraction phase. Training loads could vary over the weeks without always increasing the stimulus, but rather following a cyclical structure, to avoid, as mentioned above, the mistake of gaining mass or becoming needlessly heavy and sluggish.
For a cyclist, the lower limbs are, of course, fundamental. In this case, however, the work done on the bike is a fundamental support. Only by repeating the athletic movement we are training for does real adaptation and specific training take place. On the bike, it is the use of different gears that determines the power output and therefore how the muscle fibres are recruited, with the option of adjusting the resistance at will.
For the runner, on the other hand, the whole area of muscle work linked much more to elasticity, stability and plyometrics should be supported and improved, compared with what is needed for cycling.
The two types of physical effort in fact differ greatly in their dynamics. While the first, on the bike, is a very constrained, repetitive and fixed effort, running involves elements of stability as well as reactivity and explosiveness.
In running, therefore, much more than for cycling, it would be advisable to take a few minutes for a good amount of muscle release with stretching exercises, though without overdoing it. This phase could be useful when preparing for a particularly intense session or a race, times when the athletic movement is pushed to the limit and risks being poorly managed by the body. Unlike cycling, where the bike is still a limiting factor on the athletic movement, when running I can put a great deal of force into the ground, but I must also be able to manage that force for long periods of time, without wasting too much energy through fatigue or suffering excessive trauma. Having a warm muscle, well supplied with blood, ready to lengthen and shorten through ranges different from those of everyday life, is important.
Taking care of your muscles also means giving them the right fuel. Besides protein , a factor that is undoubtedly too often underestimated is carbohydrateintake. When we talk about muscle fibre, we think mainly of amino acid intake to support contractile activity and help it recover quickly from the fatigue it has endured. Including the right amount of carbohydrates in the diet protects muscle mass from wear and tear, which in the long run, in endurance athletes, is one of the factors that predispose to overuse injuries.
