Quote:
Originally Posted by Meulen
NICE!!! We actually recommend a similar 2 month diet during winter training months for our endurance athletes. Not only do they lose weight on the diet but seem to continue losing weight in post diet months and seem to attest they perform better in races/workouts.
The only thing I'll add is about the stretching. A lot of recent studies are showing stretching before workouts actually contributes to injuries. Theory goes that stretching loosens up soft tissues and and promotes hyperextensions. Over the past few years we've been promoting regular use of foam rollers to lengthen muscles and take out adhesions instead.
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hmm. That sounds good. In the absence of that, I'd argue for fairly light stretching before and more after, and/or in between sets. Hyper stretching will definitely loosen things up too much, so I'm not surprised of hear of evidence that it leads to injuries if people overdo it.
The "no pre-stretching" idea was based on fairly recent data that the tighter ligaments had more potential energy and therefore actually burned more calories when stretched during exercise rather than before.
I feel that is probably adequate advice for fit and reasonably flexible individuals (and irrelevant for ballet dancers and trained fighters or gymnasts). But newbies should definitely at least do some modest warm up stretches, if nothing else because figuring out the interval between "not enough" and "too much exertion" will be ill defined.
The foam roller probably works really well. Nothing like that at my gym that I am aware of, sadly...
