In speaking of the greatness of our body to a group of men last week, I was reacquainted with how amazing our muscles are both from afar, looking at their obvious function creating movement, but also up close, under the microscope. I was invited to speak on the specifics of muscle in the context of living healthier as the years go by. We have in our possession a machine of utmost potential — potential to do the most amazing things, and potential to occupy pole position on the couch. It seems when looking at the muscles, they can offer us so much more when we don't set and forget.
In examining muscle, the analogy of Ultrafast Fibre Broadband (UFB) and ultra fast fibres have a few nice similarities. Muscles operate on functional units called muscle fibres which are very small but when bundled together create very powerful movers, and a highly trained muscle can operate with speed and strength. UFB works at its fastest with multiple fibre optic strands conveying super fast signals to create an output. So too a large number of fibres work together in muscle to create an output — with training, you are upgrading from perhaps dial up speed (couch potato) to broadband (recreation athlete) and UFB (elite athlete).
Dial up speed is similar to the minimalist muscle trainer. This person goes through life with the basic package, never really pushing the muscles hard, and so they have a dominance of type one muscle fibres. These muscle fibres are really cheap to run, go for hours without needing rest, but they don't offer much more than that. This is all very well and good, but as we age, we lose muscle fibres, particularly the ones that offer us so much more than type ones. Let's see why.
Type two A fibres are harder to cultivate. Let's say like Broadband, they are dearer to have. To switch these on takes effort, to the tune of say 80 per cent of maximal effort. You have to do some hard work to fire them up and they are available on a subscription basis. In other words there's an ongoing cost to keep them running. It's true that bodybuilders never always look like they do on stage, and if they stop training, they lose that muscle mass. Not fair, but it creates a real world example of "nothing comes for free". This deal looks much more appealing than the dial up package. You can picture the table in the advertising — the dial up has one or two features, the next package has five or six, and the deals get better and more enticing and yet costlier.
To get some type two As you might have to shift some heavy loads that you have to rest after a few reps. Perhaps, as Ted Naiman MD suggests, like shifting your broken down car 200m across gravel with tyres fully inflated.
