Body Weight Endurance Workout & 2 K Build-Up Training (2016.7.7)

Variety is the spice of life.

No matter how effective some exercise may be,

if you keep doing it again and again,

you get bored.

Therefore variation is the key to maintaining motivation.

So though I often start a day with some body weight training

that I can do from home,

I make small changes every now and then

so that I can do it with a renewed motivation.

For example,

pull-ups, dips, and hand-stand are my favorite home workouts.

Sometimes I go for a certain fixed number of reps for each exercise,

and do those reps a certain number of sets.

But today I did pull-ups and dips not for reps,

but for a period of 30 seconds.

In this time frame I began with a concentric movement for four seconds,

held at the peak contraction for four seconds,

did the eccentric movement in four seconds,

and once my arms got all extended,

went back to the first movement and continued

till I hit 30 seconds.

I did the same for dips, too.

Now when you approach the workouts this way,

the key muscles are constantly engaged with varied degrees of contraction

depending on the angle of your arm in the cycle of their concentric and eccentric movement. 

And you can give maximum stimulus to the key muscles in that fixed period of time.

This is particularly effective in building endurance.

I learned from experience 

that when you do this training, 

you can develop your ability to do pull-ups and dips more reps

than you are usually used to doing,

Of course, strength can be defined in many different ways,

and endurance is not the only kind.

There is an explosive power also.

If you want to improve on that,

maybe a different approach is better,

such as hand-clap push-ups 

instead of slow dips such as demonstrated in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpAsAMrp_oU

Anyhow, after doing the body weight training above,

I went for a training run.

Today I ran 2 K as I recorded my lap time at every 500 M.

I started off at my relatively comfortable half-marathon pace,

and slowly built up the pace

to eventually run the last 500 M at a pace 

that's a little faster than my usual 10 K pace.

The details are as follows:

1st 500 M: 2: 29

2nd 500 M: 2:23 

3rd 500 M: 2:19

4th 500 M: 2:12

Just for your information,
when you run a long distance after high intensive muscle training,
you can maximize your body fat loss,
because much of your muscles glycogen has been exhausted
by the time the muscle training is over.
In order for you to sustain your running training,
your body must tap your fat reserve for energy.
Therefore, effective body fast loss.

So when your main focus is one losing your body fat fast,
remember this order of intensive muscle training first
and slow cardio such as running after that.