Trust in the LORD with all your heart.
goldenpath, former firm instructor , nancy tucker has a new site.
www.bodyfitcolumbia.com one of the people on there is crummie, he is mark henrickson , who is one of the original firm team along with the benson's. he posted this and i found it very helpful.
As a pre-weight training warm-up, even two minutes of cardio will sabotage your lifting results.
Why? Most cardio (1) works only works/warms leg muscles & joints, and (2) burns off your lower-body muscles' precious, very limited supply of ready ATP (adenosine triphosphate)-- the single compound that causes ALL muscle activity.
Perfect for lifting, quickly available ATP sources are depleted (in the working muscle) within two minutes of strenuous activity. This short window of opportunity is ideal for weight work, which requires intense work for the short period of time needed to exhaust each muscle group.
The ideal warm-up for weight work is to precede each lift with a few repetitions with an easy, light weight-- using the identical motions used for the heavy weight exercise that follows. (This warms up the right muscles and joints, from the proper angle.)
On a per-muscle basis, your stored ATP is gone in the first 5-6 seconds of intense activity. A muscle contracts when its ATP releases energy-- by losing a phosphate to become ADP (adenosine diphosphate). Sources of muscle energy is like a four-stage rocket. Depletion of ATP ends stage one.
Stage two is over in the first 20-25 seconds of intense activity, after local Creatine Phosphate is spent-- donating a phosphate to ADP (diphosphate) to restore it to the powerful ATP (triphosphate).
Stage three is over within only two minutes (or less!) of intense activity. In this phase, local glucose (sugar) revive is used to revive ATP.
The fourth and final stage is the "aerobic stage" which is a good fit for cardio-- but awful for weight lifting. Although cardio may seem like a good idea for burning fat it isn't-- because burns calories at 1/18th the rate at which the first three stages incinerate calories.
For fat loss, burning calories is all that counts-- and they much faster in the first three stages.
cathy