Lately I’ve been reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography – a good read so far – and as we are all aware, the guy is / was built like a brick outhouse. Well, as part of his weight training regime he comes up with this idea of ‘shocking his muscles’, essentially switching up his workout to stop his muscle memory from forming.
The science behind it, as best I can tell, is that the body is extremely good at figuring out when we do something on a regular basis, and it becomes highly efficient at repeating that activity. This results in the body / muscle growth plateauing, which for Arnold is not good as he wants to keep turning his body into a machine.
How any of this fits in to my life – aside from reading his book – is that I figured I should try something similar. All I ever do, really, is tempo stuff. I am quite happy sitting at ~3w/kg for fairly long stretches, always working around 85-90rpm outdoors, bit higher cadence indoors, and I guess my body is very used to that now.
So why not throw in two things that I generally most dislike about cycling for exercise. Namely sprinting, and grinding.
That was the plan today. Head out, aim for some 200m+ flats or hills, and do as many sprint repeats as I could handle. If I could sprint prior to a climb, then climb fatigued, even better.
When I wasn’t sprinting (I managed maybe 8 repeats total, all at or around 10 seconds in length), I would force myself to ride at a low cadence. I’m not sure which aspect I preferred least 🙂
Whilst I had plenty of time to play with today, the workout kinda smashed me. As such I was done at the hour mark. Not helped by the rain starting up – though that finished about 10 minutes after I got home, so I could have stayed out had I known / wanted too.
I was fairly satisfied with my sprints. Where I was much less satisfied was when I checked the stats. I thought I’d have burned off a bunch of calories today, but really not so at all. I guess sustained efforts like climbing are waaay more efficient for calorie burning, but sprinting is likely better for destroying muscles and then letting them rebuild to be bigger better and strong.
Anyway, much like Arnold, I will be back but maybe I’ll take tomorrow as a rest day. I guess I don’t have his work ethic. Nor fame, nor success, looks, prowess with the women, money, film or political career, accent, or well, pretty much anything at all in common with him in retrospect. Makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking.
