Malcolm and Rebecca round out the year with a practical guide to increasing our strength. I can tell you, this absolutely works! Why? Before, and then after my total knee replacement on 1 November, I entered their strength training programme and I'm a convert. It’s simple and it works! Thanks to them, while I’m not exactly bending it like Beckham yet, I soon will be!!
Physically, a judge’s strength is almost on an opposite trajectory than professionally. Physical strength for most of us does not increase with time or even with the advantage of repetition. With physical strength, the evidence can almost be fully disregarded in order to find the truth. Let us explain.
The average number of leg bends during walking we do each day is 5,000 per leg. Each leg bend is performed against gravity thus a leg bend is a strengthening exercise. On day two we perform another 10,000 leg bends and therefore, if we look at evidence, we should be stronger by twice as much as day one of walking, or at least quite a lot stronger than the day before. After one year of leg bending 10,000 times daily we must be super strong if measured against the first day. Yet this does not happen. Are you physically stronger now than you were 10 years ago? Probably not, yet the loads you have ‘lifted‘ have hugely accumulated. So why have you only stayed the same in your strength — or even slipped a little?
Muscle strength requires loading to fatigue before muscle develops more strength, and as few of us enjoy the discomfort of fatiguing by choice, we inadvertently weaken our musculature, sometimes diametrically opposed to our intentions!
Tiring deliberately takes conscious effort, and a busy court schedule can be a scapegoat to cloak what we should do, compared with what we or others think we should do. So the number one rule for muscle strength is, only the activity you do when the muscle is tired counts as a deposit in the Muscle Bank.
Gravity pushes down 32 lb per square inch. It takes 1,800 pounds to stand upright, so to avoid this burden we tend to capitulate to gravity and, by stealth, stoop as we age. Daily at our clinic we see patients who have good large muscle strength, but poor intrinsic muscle strength — a bit like trying to hold up a tentpole with a strong centre pole on a flat base, but with two guy ropes, not three, or better four, in support. Can you sleep in a tent that sags in the corners? Yes, but the potential is not reached and sooner rather than later the remainder of the tent fails.
SIMPLE SOLUTION
Occasionally gems of wisdom so profound we do not know how we could have practiced without them fall within our quiver. Not taught, but learnt, when in the 80s, visiting the training camp of The Los Angeles Laker’s Basketball Team came from the Strength and Conditioning Coach Don Swanborn, a Swede who had been head-hunted to strength condition Martina Navratilova, the tennis great, and others. With Don a friendship was struck and we taught and learnt — me more than he — from our conversations. This truism resulted and is willingly shared with judges.
The One Hundred Percent Plus Rule
It is a principle more than a rule. The principle works in every situation. pain free or in pain, reduced function or fully functional, old or young, irrespective of the day.
Instead of working your targeted muscle once in full, work in three stages.
The first stage, to 60% muscle fatigue. Pause, do another completely different exercise.
Go back to the first exercise prescription, repeat the same exercise to 40% of muscle fatigue.
Pause, do another different exercise. Return to the first exercise and repeat to 10% muscle fatigue.
Your compounded output is NOT 100% but 110%. The exercise performed when fatigued is the strength-improving work.
As you work to this principle you will find some days are easy exercise days, some are not, depending on your effort the day prior, but always you will perform 110% of what you are capable of doing that particular day.
Our recommendation is to work two days on one day off, or three days on two days off.
To hasten muscle fatigue dynabands, weights, indeed any resistance will work. Simple household appliances, such as an axe, spade, rolling pin, vacuum cleaner work as resistance. You do not require expensive equipment, as tempting and essential as sellers would have you believe.
Judges should consider carefully the difference between ‘tirement’ and ‘retirement’. There is usually much more choice in tirement than the other word. As physiotherapists, if we had our way we would make compulsory muscle ‘tirement‘ of judges 60–70 years, not retirement.
Puri whitiora
Keep fit
Rebecca and Malcolm