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Here's The Info I Promised
January 26, 2018
Hello,

Meet Your New BFF!

I hope you are having a great Thursday! As I promised earlier this week, I want to continue with the "Breaking Back into Fitness After a Long Hiatus" series. So let's get right to it!

I have some great news for you today. You see, even though you may have conveniently forgotten to make time for your workouts for a while, your muscle has not forgotten. It has memory!

Muscle cells are unlike any other cell in the human body. They are much bigger with a volume thousands of times larger than other cells. In order to support this large volume, each cell contains several cell nuclei. They are multinuclear and this turns out to be a very good thing.

Cell nuclei are added during strength training and ARE NOT LOST during detraining!

This means that once you have built new nuclei, they are there for life like a BFF! They do, however, atrophy (shrink) after several months of not training, but they are waiting patiently for you to start training again. Once you begin retraining, the extra nuclei you built the last time around are already there. Is that cool or what?

All you have to do is get your booty back into your strength training regimen, and your cell nuclei will rapidly start synthesizing new protein again to build muscle mass and strength. What's not to love about that?

Remember this is not a race. Try not to get carried away. The last thing you want to do is hurt yourself and then be out of the game again. So fight the desire to go too heavy too fast.
  • Take it slow and start at the beginning again.
  • You will want to do single sets of your exercises for the first workout or two. Don't worry! You will progress much faster this time around thanks to those beautiful cell nuclei you already created.
  • Start out with lower intensity than you were lifting when you stopped. Try about half or a little more than half the weight you were once lifting. Increase it slowly so you won't get too sore and to prevent injury.
  • For general fitness, you will want to do 8-12 reps, choosing a weight that makes the last 2-3 reps very challenging yet still doable with good form.
Check out these strength training guidelines for a refresher course on the rules of the strength training road.

As for cardio, you can kind of keep the same thing in mind as far as intensity and duration goes. Start out at about half or a bit more than half of what you were doing before your break and build up slowly each week. You should be able to be back to your normal intensity and duration level within about a month.

That should get you back to your buff beach body just in time for spring and summer. Woohoo!

That's it for this issue. I will pick up with some great nutrition tips in the next issue, so be sure and keep an eye out next month for more essential info to help you live your healthiest life possible.

Remember you can always contact me with any fitness question or newsletter topic ideas. I love hearing from you!


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Thanks so much for subscribing to this newsletter and for reading it and for your support. Our relationship is reciprocal as I live and learn from all that happens in my life, just as you live and learn through yours. We are truly in this together, and I empathize with your challenges as I do my own. I promise to hang in there and learn and grow along with you, and I hope that sharing through my writing maybe helps you a smidge. If it does, that is my payback. It is why I continue to do what I do.

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From my heart to your health,

Linda Burke, PFT

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