Acute high intensity interval exercise reduces colon cancer cell growth
physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
A few months back I did a bunch of negative pull-ups [1] in an attempt to strengthen my pull-up muscles. The next day I was the most sore I've ever been in my life. Two days later the soreness increased. My arms were stuck in a 50 degree angle. I couldn't bend them straight or curl them up all the way. I had an intuition that something was wrong, checked the symptoms on Google, and saw something about a weird condition called rhabdomyolysis [2] where your muscles are so damaged that they start releasing damaging proteins into your blood that can damage your kidneys. Again, my intuition told me to go to the ER right away, which was unlike me because I'm your typical guy that usually trusts that my body will heal on its own. The doctors thought it was highly unlikely that I had rhabdo, but they ran the blood tests anyway, and were surprised to find out that I had diagnosed it correctly. I was hooked up to IV for 4 days after that, 24/7, pissing huge amounts of water every hour or so, because the only treatment is to just flush the proteins out of your system. If I hadn't gone to the ER that night, and had slept through it, I very well could have destroyed my kidneys.
At the ER the doctors told me that rhabdo cases were on the rise because of HIIT classes pushing people past their limits. From what I understand it's a rare condition, I think only 1-5% of the population at risk of it, but it doesn't hurt to know. The bigger lesson from this experience for me was to be more careful about pushing myself past my limits. I'm only 29 and I already see that my body can't take the beatings that I used to give it. Ironically I'm exercising every day now but am much more mindful of putting extreme strain on my body. I support high-intensity exercise, but I stop if I'm at the point where my muscles are exhausted and I no longer am doing the exercises with good form.
After some intensive research several years ago, I concluded that HIIT was the most effective means of reaching and maintaining a high level of fitness. After injuring myself a couple times, I did more research on injury prevention and settled on the following rules, which have kept me injury-free ever since:
1) If I haven't exercised in the last 3 weeks, my first workout consists of merely going through the motions of each exercise with minimal exertion (no heavy breathing). Even this light exercise triggers the Repeated-Bout Effect which will protect skeletal muscles in the next workout.
2) Have two rest days between each workout. Muscles get stronger on rest days, not on workout days. Two rest days (versus one or three) appear to maximize my gains when my workouts are at a high intensity level.
3) Never increase intensity by more than approximately 20% above the last workout. This keeps me safely within the protective margins of the Repeated-Bout Effect.
It's easy to overtrain pullups/chipups/rows and end up with tennis or golfers elbow, which is not fun. Being a tendon overuse injury, it takes a long time to heal.
If it progresses to tendonitis, you're in for a lifetime of problems that are very debilitating. Think not being able to grab a dinner plate off a high shelf.
Don't treat pullups (even negatives) as something you can just grind. If you "grease the groove" by doing lots of small sets thruought the day, only do a quarter to a half to what you can comfortably do. Give yourself a maximum number of sets that you will do during the day. Progress slowly over many months, with proper form and slow reps and no kipping. Don't do anything silly like add "a rep a day", or try to "drain the tank" every time you hit the exercise.
It's surprisingly easy to override discomfort with willpower and actively destroy your own body
When designing workouts for my partner, she would schedule and recommend semi-regular rest weeks.
These were weeks were she wasn’t to do much exercise except maybe some light cardio and get extra sleep.
FWIW: my lats aren’t great myself (pull ups are not my strength!), but there are other lat exercises to build up strength and core you should do before going all out on those things. Or instead of pronate(pull up) form, go supine(chin up) as it let’s you get a little more out of your arms as you build up to it.
Never heard of that condition. That’s frightening. My first instinct is similar: “Ah, I’ll just rest it”
This was recommended to me as a good beginner exercise for building up strength to do full pull-ups. In hindsight it's obvious why it destroyed my biceps. My pull-up muscles were fatigued and I was essentially just dropping my full-body weight on exhausted muscles. To be fair I still thought I was in control. It would take a second or two to go from the top position down to the bottom. But now I realize that if you can't slowly lower yourself down at a very slow pace, say 5 to 10 seconds from top to bottom, then your muscles are exhausted.
Edit: My big beef with Crossfit and like circuits are that they do similar things:
They recommend great methods for exercise, strength building, cardio, etc.
However, they often have next to zero form coaching and some of the things I've seen people doing with their bodies right beside coaches and trainers in programs like that ... they're just asking for injuries (either short term, or long term. How they teach rowing form is particularly bad).
It's less the exercise, and more the parameters—form and knowing your limits are core. In a coach, they should be able to judge what you're ready to be doing.
I'm pushing 40 now, and one thing I've learned is to recognize when my body is telling me "you need to back off now." I don't recover the way I used to (I can't lift 4 days a week anymore, for example, and squats and deadlifts are right out due to back problems), so I need to be careful not to overdo it. Because then I'll hurt myself and have to take a few weeks off -- and worse, I'll be hobbling in to work for a week or more like an old, broken man, and all the millennials will laugh at me :)
It seemed to come on gradually. What initially caused it I don't know... I played football in high school, I've lifted weights since I was a teenager (only cutting out squats/DLs when they became too... risky), I was in the Army for a bit, who knows... should probably get a doctor to look at it.
My father started having problems with his lower back around the same age (30s), so maybe there's a genetic/hereditary issue. Though at least he still manages to do squats in his 60s. I wonder if having a longer spine (I'm about 5 inches taller than him) would make my issues worse?
I've been able to prevent this from happening again after any sort of hiatus by making sure to build from low to high intensity over two or three sessions. Something about doing a couple of low intensity workouts primes your body to respond better to any proceeding exercise in the coming weeks. I haven't had any crippling delayed-onset muscle soreness since using this trick.
Yep. Running 2 or 3 days a week. Weightlifting once or twice a week. Routine was probably squats/deadlifts, pushups/BPs, and lat pulldowns/rows (just exercising all the major muscle groups, not trying to be Arnold). Very active all throughout my childhood and teen years. It's not like I'm a heavy guy, either: 6 feet, 170 pounds. The doctors themselves said that they were surprised at the diagnosis because I looked in-shape.
Another way to do HIIT is to grab a stationary bike and do intervals there, e.g. 3 minute warmup at low level then increase difficulty or start pedaling faster for a minute. At some point you'd start reducing breaks in between, maybe in 1-2 years you'd do at most 10s low-intensity in-between.