VII XXVI MMXXVI
Sundays tend to be the most productive days of the week for me, but today was extra!
It started with my usual morning routine: I got up, began preparing breakfast, sat down with my wife for our morning devotional, finished preparing breakfast, ate breakfast, washed the dishes, and sat on my indoor bike to do my matinal reading while I pedalled.
After that, I prepared the grocery list, loaded the washing machine and started it, took the trash out, and walked to the grocery store. When I came back, I put the groceries away, hung the laundry, and began preparing lunch.
While the food was cooking, I blew through a bunch of small chores and errands that I needed to take of on my Mac Mini.
After we finished eating lunch, I washed the dishes, prepared my wife’s food for tomorrow, prepared some ingredients for tomorrow’s breakfast and washed the dishes. Conveniently, by the end of it all, my brother called me, so we got to chat for about 30 minutes.
Then came the highlight of the day: my mobility and strength training exercise routine.
During this vacation, my wife went to see a physical therapist three times and learned a few things that she later shared with me. That, along with what she’s been learning in her residency, and some of the recent conversations that we’ve been having about mobility and strength, helped to do some major improvements to the “Exercise” note that I keep on my Notes app, where I have a list of all the exercises that I do during my warm up before I ride the indoor bike in the afternoon.
What made the biggest difference, and made my warm up feel so much more effective today, were two new pieces of information that I recently obtained (I apologize if these aren’t new to you):
- When I stretch a muscle, I should hold it in the stretched position for at least 40 seconds, so that the muscle can relax into the stretch and, well, actually stretch.
- When I lift weights, I should do it slowly, and with precision, so that I can concentrate on exercising the exact muscles that I want to.
- That also makes it easier to inhale and exhale properly. I learned today that for all resistance-based exercises, one should breathe out during the phase in which we apply force to our muscles (positive phase), and exhale during the phase in which we relax them (negative phase).
A note on that last one: In most cases, the positive phase will happen to be the concentric phase, where the muscles contract. The negative phase will mostly be the eccentric phase, where the muscles extend. In some exercises both are happening to different muscles, and in squats, for example, it’s the eccentric phase (standing back up) that is the one where we apply force.
The reasoning behind why we should breathe in when relaxing our muscles is that inhaling builds up pressure in our thoraces (chests), and tends to me make us “hold” out breath while we use our muscles. That can suddenly sharply increase our blood pressure, leading to an inefficient use of our muscles. However, if we inhale before we apply force, then we fill our blood with oxygen in preparation for it, and by exhaling during the positive phase, we relieve our bodies of pressure, allowing the blood to freely flow to the muscles.
That’s what I understood. I’m not a physical therapist, so I’m not responsible for how you exercise and how it affects you. 😉
Anyway, this new exercise routine made my day, and I can’t wait to try it out again tomorrow.