25 Feb
Blog

Nature’s Two Most Powerful Exercise Recovery Tools

In the first part this series, Train hard, recover harder, I explained that stress is a double-edged sword. In order to make adjustments, you have to impose stress, but too much stress affects your recovery.

Stress can be both good and bad, but your body doesn't distinguish between types of stress, and your body can only handle that much stress. Stress is good during exercise; Your ability to benefit from it depends somewhat on your overall stress level.

So you have to manage all of your life stress in order to free up as much capacity as possible for dealing with training stress. Stress management strategies can create a larger window of time for exercise stress to apply and recover.

In Part Two, Good Recovery Starts With Good Programming, I discussed optimizing your exercise program as another effective tool for maximizing recovery. By focusing on delivering efficient exercise stress, you make your recovery easier.

Intelligent program design = fatigue management

The four key factors to consider are:

  1. Volume landmarks

  2. SRA curves

  3. Stimulus: fatigue ratio

  4. Relative intensity

At this point, I am assuming that your workout is optimized and provides a reasonable incentive.

From this point on, the remaining adjustments, such as B. Increases in size and strength, from recovery, result in this simplified muscle building equation:

Stimulus + recovery = adjustment

In this third part of the series, I'm going to cover your two most powerful recovery tools and how to maximize them.

The two most powerful recovery tools available to you are:::

  1. sleep

  2. nutrition

If you focus on these consistently, you will be rewarded. With your choice of sleep, diet, and stress management, you are ready to make great strides in the gym.

The positive influence of sleep on performance

Sleep is your most important recovery tool. I have spoken repeatedly about the positive effects of sleep on athletic performance and your ability to recover from hard exercise. The harder you can train without exceeding your recovery capacity, the faster you can progress.

Sleep is the most anabolic state for your body. Lack of sleep limits your strength and muscle mass gains. It also increases your chances of losing muscle mass if you cut and absorb fat as you accumulate.

To maximize recovery and build more muscle, you need to prioritize sleep.

Better sleep will help you with this too::

In short, it makes you a fitter, happier, and more productive person.

Let's be honest; you probably already know that. Bet you don't give sleep the credit it deserves when it comes to your lifestyle choices. Most of us realize that we should sleep more. We know sleep is important. However, we do not prioritize it.

I'm pretty sure you are making this mistake because I do too. I've been guilty many times in the past. It's all too easy to stay up late to catch the next episode of a TV show or to scroll aimlessly through Instagram. Whenever I do that, I always regret it the next day.

Lack of sleep can creep up on you. You may not realize that you have been deprived of sleep. The occasional late night has little effect. The problem is when those late nights get normal.

Stay on the laptop for a long time to meet work schedules or relax before a good show. Both eat into your sleep and have a huge impact on the quality of your recovery. Over time, you will likely feel like a zombie with no caffeine in the morning, your fitness performance will begin to increase, and you will make poorer dietary choices. It all happens little by little.

They sneak up on you. I've seen this over and over with customers trying to burn the candle on both ends. They pretend they can get away with it because the drop in performance is gradual. Be warned, lack of sleep adds up and if not resolved, it can slow your progress.

My sleep deprivation experience was less gradual and more like a blunt force trauma. I had always slept well and made it a priority. Then I had children. After our son was born, it took me 18 months to feel normal again in the gym. I vividly remember the session after my first full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. I felt like superman.

The sad thing is, I wasn't a Superman.

I wasn't even around. After a good night's sleep, I was just a normal Tom. My perception of what was normal had been so distorted by 18 months of sleep deprivation that I now felt amazing. You could have slept in the same situation without realizing it. Make sleep a priority for a month and I'm confident you will look better, feel better, and perform better.

The research on sleep deprivation is alarming. Studies show that for 11 days in a row with less than six hours of sleep, your cognitive abilities are roughly as high as if you had stayed awake for 24 hours.

After 22 days of sleeping less than six hours a night, your brain is functioning at the same level as someone who has stayed awake for 48 hours straight. To put things in perspective, it means your reactions are likely to be worse than someone who is over the legal limit for alcohol.

Are you more zombie than human?

Take a sleep survey on yourself and assess if you are more of a zombie than a human.

As a guide, this is what you should aim for when it comes to sleeping::

  • Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep every night.

  • Go to bed at the same time every night.

  • Wake up at the same time each morning.

  • Wake up without an alarm clock.

  • Sleep all night long – multiple bathroom trips are a sure sign of poor quality sleep (or way too much drinking just before bed).

  • Waking up in much the same position that you fell asleep (not throwing and spinning all night) is a good sign.

  • You should wake up refreshed.

How can your sleep hold up against this list? I suspect you are not ticking all of these points. In my experience, most people can't even check off a few of them. Your goal is to work towards ensuring that you can check off each of these bullet points.

Here are some practical tips to help you sleep better and longer.

  • Prepare for success: Get a comfortable bed, mattress and pillow. Bed quality can affect sleep. It can also reduce back and shoulder pain. Given that you spend almost a third of your life in bed, it makes sense to invest in a good one.
  • Establish a routine: Go to bed at about the same time and get up at the same time each day. Weekends count too. It was found that matching sleep and wake times improves long-term sleep quality.
  • Include relaxation: It has been found that relaxation techniques before bed improve the quality of sleep. Read a book, listen to a chill out playlist, take a hot bath or take a deep breath and meditate. Do whatever you can to relax and unwind.
  • Cut the coffee at 4pm: Drinking coffee is cool. I love this stuff, but having it later in the day can disrupt or even prevent your sleep. On average, the half-life of caffeine is around five hours. However, this half-life can vary massively between individuals. If you are a slow metabolizer of caffeine, you may have levels in your system that will keep you awake and will keep you awake until the wee hours if you drink it after 4pm. In extreme cases, having it within 10 hours of going to bed can be disturbing for some people. So cut yourself off at 4pm and see if it's easier for you to fall asleep. If you're still having issues, push things forward to 3pm and reevaluate.
  • Disconnect the matrix: The blue light emitted by the screens of your devices can disturb your sleep. The body's internal clock or daily rhythm is mainly influenced by the hours of daylight. Artificial lights like street lights and lightbulbs are already bothering it, but looking at screens magnifies the problem. Your internal body clock is supplied by the eye nerve, which is directly influenced by blue light. Your phone, TV, laptop, and tablet emit the same light. To improve sleep, I suggest that you disconnect from such screens for at least 60 minutes before going to bed.
  • Receive natural sunlight during the day: In these times the body needs light. Studies have found that two hours of bright light during the day increases the amount of sleep by two hours and improves the quality of sleep by 80%.
  • Sleep in the batcave: Make your bedroom pitch black, calm and cool to maximize the quality of your sleep. Remove all electrical devices.
  • Room temperature: Set the thermostats to around 20 ° C. It was found that room temperature affects the quality of sleep more than external noise.
  • Stay away from alcohol: Just a few drinks have been shown to reduce your sleep hormones. Alcohol alters melatonin production and lowers HGH (Human Growth Hormone) levels. Melatonin is an important sleep hormone that tells your brain when it's time to relax and fall asleep. HGH helps regulate your body clock, counteracts aging, and is vital to recovery.

There you have it, your comprehensive guide to better sleep. You have no excuse now. You know sleep is crucial. You can also rate your sleep based on the standards listed above. If you come up short, you have nine tips to improve your sleep.

As you improve your sleep, everything else improves too. Try to improve your sleep before you worry about investing in other recovery modalities.

Neither of them can hold a candle to sleep, and sleep is free.

Your caloric intake and energy balance

Your second most powerful recovery tool is your diet.

By properly fueling your body, you can take advantage of the stimulus generated by your exercise. Training creates the incentive to build muscle, lose fat and increase strength. Your recovery will determine whether or not you will achieve that potential.

When it comes to nutrition, there are several variables that you can manipulate. The most important variable when it comes to nutrition for recovery is your caloric intake and energy balance.

What is a calorie and what is energy balance??

A calorie (Kcal) is a unit of energy. Our food contains calories and fuels us with energy to lead our daily lives. Everyone needs different amounts of energy per day depending on their age, size and level of activity.

Calorie budget refers to the number of calories you consume compared to the number of calories you burn.

If you eat excess calories, you will gain weight. If you eat a calorie deficit, you will lose weight. While eating high calorie food in the process of maintenance, it means that you are maintaining the weight. When it comes to physical change, calories are king.

When consuming a calorie surplus, maximizing regeneration is easier to manage than when consuming a deficit. You have an abundance of calories available to meet your macro and micronutrient needs. When it comes to diet and you have an excess, keep things simple. Hit your macros, distribute your protein intake fairly evenly between 3-6 meals a day, and eat a variety of fruits and vegetables.

When you are calorie deficit, the details of your diet are more important in maximizing recovery as less energy is coming in. The basic principles still apply, but you need to take better account of your low calorie eating habits to ensure that you meet both your macro and micronutrient needs.

Meal timing, food quality, and micronutrition are more important when you are in a deficit, but none of them outperform achieving a reasonable calorie deficit.

Energy balance and macronutrients are the two most important factors in your diet in terms of body development and strength gains.

How to set calories for individual results

If you have an excess, I suggest that you eat enough to gain between 0.25 and 0.5% of your body weight per week.

A quick strategy to estimate your daily needs is to multiply your weight in pounds by 15.

This formula generally gives a good approximation of the calories needed to maintain your weight. An excess of 500 calories per day equates to roughly a pound of weight gain per week. If you weigh 200 pounds, this is right at the upper end of your weight gain target. An excess of 250 calories a day will result in you gaining roughly half a pound a week. An excess of between 250 and 500 calories would be adequate for a 200 pound lifter.

If you are in deficit, I recommend losing between 0.5 and 1% of your body weight per week.

If you maintain a faster rate than this for an extended period (say, more than four weeks), you run the risk of adversely affecting your fitness performance and muscle loss.

Similar to the excess example, you can estimate maintenance calories by multiplying your weight in pounds by 15 calories.

From this point on, you need to subtract calories in order to achieve a deficit. A 500 calorie deficit will give you one pound loss per week. For our 200 pound example, an ideal rate of fat loss is between 1 and 2 pounds per week. Consequently, a deficit of 500-1,000 kcal per day is the area to look out for in order to achieve this.

Macronutrients

There are three types of macronutrients: protein, fat, and carbohydrates. All of these provide energy and therefore contain calories. Here's how to establish and establish your macronutrient needs and goals.

The calorie content per gram of each macronutrient is listed below::

  • Protein: Four calories per gram

  • Fat: Nine calories per gram

  • carbohydrate: Four calories per gram

This information is useful in the practical step of creating your diet with the appropriate proportions for each macronutrient.

Protein is essential for survival

Protein comes from the Greek word proteios, which means "of primary importance".

  • Protein is involved in almost every process in your body.
  • Proteins are vital and healthy.
  • They play an important role in athletic performance and body composition.
  • Muscle mass consists mostly of protein.
  • Protein helps you recover from your workouts.
  • It preserves lean tissue on diets.
  • It will help you build more muscle as you build.
  • It has the greatest effect on satiety, or feeling comfortable, of any macronutrient.

To build muscle, consume protein in the range of 1.6 to 2.2 g / kg lean body mass to stimulate the MPS for the day.

Recent research supports the high end of this range.

I generally recommend eating 2 g of protein per kg of body weight. This formula is easy to remember, easy to calculate, and conveniently covers your needs. From a practical point of view, I've also found that it is a crowd that satisfies most people's appetites and eating habits.

Take away key– Eat 2 g of protein per kg (0.9 g per lbs) of body weight per day.

Never eliminate fat from your diet

The consumption of dietary fat is important for regular hormonal function, especially testosterone production.

You should never remove fat from a diet.

There is not so much an optimal amount of fat to consume, but a minimum

0.2-0.5 g / kg / day for normal hormonal function. There have been compelling arguments in favor of consuming between 20 and 30% of calories in fat to optimize testosterone levels.

However, when 0.6 g / kg / bw is reached, no significant benefit for the hormones can be seen.

How Much Fat Should I Consume?

I prefer a minimum of 0.6 g / kg / kg per day.

  • If there is an excess, this is enough to optimize hormonal function and generally equates to around 20% of the calories.
  • Since hormone function has little benefit after a calorie surplus after 0.6 g / kg / bw, there is no physiological need to increase this number as you go through your mass phase.
  • Even if the total calories are adjusted upwards to keep gaining weight, there is no physiological need to exceed the fat content of 0.6 g / kg / bw. In my experience, however, many people find it easier to stick to their eating plan when the fat is slightly higher as the total calories increase.
  • I generally find anything up to 1g / kg / bw is effective.
  • If there is a deficit, I suggest a range of 0.6-1 g / kg / body weight.
  • The risk of hormonal disorders is higher with a chronic calorie deficit.
  • While many clients have performed well and had exceptional results at the low end of this range, I tend to be conservative and start at the high end when a phase of fat loss begins.

From this point on, I take a results-based approach based on loss rate, customer feedback, and gym performance.

Take away key– Consume at least 0.6 g of fat per kg (0.3 g per pound) of body weight.

Carbohydrates affect hormones

Carbohydrates, like fats, have a positive effect on hormones. The carbohydrates you eat are converted to glucose and stored in the liver or released into the bloodstream. However, most of this glucose is actually taken up and stored by the muscles as glycogen. Despite this storage, glycogen is at the bottom of the body's list of priorities.

Glucose is used in a hierarchical order.

Cells in need of energy are the priority for the incoming glucose. Only when the majority of the cells' energy requirements have been met does the carbohydrate consumption increase blood sugar. When blood sugar levels reach a reasonable level, glycogen synthesis in the liver is the next priority.

Only then does the synthesis of muscle glycogen begin to a significant amount. When muscles absorb blood sugar, they can use it for activity or repair. This is important for muscle repair, recovery, and growth.

Carbohydrates are the dominant source of energy for the central nervous system (CNS) and physical activity.

They promote strenuous training and regeneration by replenishing muscle glycogen. Stored muscle glycogen is the primary and preferred source of fuel for high-intensity exercise. Carbohydrates are a great benefit for people who train hard.

During the diet phases, keeping carbohydrate levels very low has become very popular. This is not entirely unfounded, as cutting down on carbohydrates can help create a calorie deficit. I suggest you resist the temptation not to consume carbohydrates.

To get the most out of your workout, you need to do overloaded workouts. Eat enough carbohydrates to do this. They also help you retain muscle mass even as you lose body weight.

When you're low on glycogen, you risk suppressing the anabolic response to weight training. Eating enough carbohydrates allows for higher exercise intensity, higher exercise volume, faster recovery between sets and between sessions, and anti-catabolic and anabolic effects.

"How Much Carbohydrates Should You Consume?" Short answer:

"The rest of your available calories"

More protein preserves muscle mass and saturation

While you're in excess of calories, hitting your macros is likely to get 80% of the benefits of your diet from a recreational standpoint.

Factors such as nutrient timing, micronutrition, food variety, and quality all contribute to optimal results, but they make little difference.

When you're in a deficit, those tiny gains are yours to deal with as you don't have the safety net of an abundance of calories to do the heavy lifting for you.

Here are some tips on how to squeeze the most out of your diet for maximum recovery while cutting:

  • If you are in a calorie deficit, consuming the high end of the protein guidelines given earlier (2.2 g / kg / bw) is a great idea.
  • High protein intake has been shown to preserve muscle mass.
  • Anecdotally, high protein intake also appears to regulate appetite. This scheme is useful when cutting calories.

Protein timing

Several studies have shown that a 25-40g serving of protein is enough to maximize muscle protein synthesis (MPS). To give you a more specific recommendation, I suggest that you aim for 0.4 g / kg body weight per meal. If you weigh 65 kg, that would be 26 g, while a 80 kg man would have 32 g of protein per meal.

The current literature shows that eating a mixed whole meal results in MPS lasting approximately three hours and peaking for 45-90 minutes. While protein shakes / amino acid supplements typically only last two hours and peak earlier. Then MPS begins to subside.

Research shows that these peaks and valleys are beneficial in MPS for maximum muscle growth.

Based on the scientific evidence available, 4-6 servings of protein per day, 3-4 hours each, is the best choice to maximize MPS.

If you are calorie deficient, fine-tuning your eating plan to maximize MPS is the best option to avoid muscle wasting.

The holy grail of nutrient timing?

We've all heard of the post-workout anabolic window. Post-exercise diet has long been considered the holy grail of nutrient timing. I think this is a mistake. Pre-workout nutrition is just as important, if not more important, than post-workout nutrition, in my opinion.

As mentioned earlier, it takes the body several hours to digest a meal. For example, suppose you have a balanced meal before you exercise. In this case, your body will continue to receive a constant supply of nutrients throughout the session and even in the post-workout window.

Many people overlook the critical consideration that the important nutrient timing factor is that the nutrients are in your bloodstream, not when you eat them.

The nutrients from your pre-workout meal are in your bloodstream during and possibly after your workout. This means that you can immediately supply nutrients to the working muscles. If you only focus on the post-workout meal, there is a significant delay in the amount of nutrients getting to the muscles where you need them.

With this in mind, a few points should be noted here::

  • Insufficient carbohydrates can interfere with strength training.

  • Consuming carbohydrates in the pre-workout meal can improve performance in the workout session.

  • Consuming carbohydrates while exercising in sessions longer than an hour can improve performance at the end of the session and prevent muscle wasting (especially when combined with a quickly digestible source of protein).

  • By consuming carbohydrates after exercise, muscle glycogen is replenished more effectively than at other times. This post-workout window is much longer than the much touted anabolic window of 20 to 30 minutes. The 4-6 hours after the workout when consuming carbohydrates replenishes the optimal muscle glycogen.

As you build up, your carbohydrate intake is likely high enough that you don't have to worry too much about postponing your eating for one time or another.

If you distribute the carbohydrates evenly throughout the day, you are in good hands.

Calories and carbohydrates can be very low during a diet. IIn this situation, it is more important to consider your specific carbohydrate intake timing to aid in quality exercise and recovery.

It is wise to make sure that you consume carbohydrates at least during meals before and after your workout.

After that, you can just spread it fairly evenly over the other meals you eat during the day.

Eat the rainbow

Choosing nutrient-rich, low-calorie foods is a wise decision. This choice will help you stay full, which means you will be more likely to stick to your diet.

It also means you are getting all of the micro-nutrition you need to support a good recovery from exercise. A wide variety of vegetables is a smart decision when cutting calories.

An easy way to get a wide range of micronutrients is to eat fruits and vegetables in as many different colors as possible.

Avoid pseudosciences

While it is tempting to reach for the expensive recovery tool backed by pseudoscience, it is better to pluck the low hanging fruits of improving your sleep and diet to aid your recovery.

These two factors will have a far greater impact on your recovery and results than any other failed recovery method.

Use the guidelines I have provided to get a massive recovery benefit and keep those silly recovery fashions for less informed lifters.

25 Feb
Blog

Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook Review: Chrome at Work

Lenovo Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook Review Company

ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook (13 inch) 2-in-1 laptop

“The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook fits well into the company and offers a high level of security and manageability. But consumers should look elsewhere. "

  • Solid build quality

  • Good full HD display

  • Comfortable keyboard, touchpad and pen

  • The performance is strong

  • Mediocre battery life

  • Expensive

Chromebooks have made a name for themselves in the education world. In business? There is still a lot to be done.

Part of the problem is the lack of high-end options for those who want something with a premium finish. Bringing the popular ThinkPad brand to Chromebooks should do the trick, especially if you add a powerful AMD Ryzen processor to the mix.

This is the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook Enterprise, a long winded name for a laptop that emphasizes security and performance for high-end users.

My test device was equipped with the new Chromebook-specific AMD Ryzen 5 3500C CPU, 8 GB RAM, a 256 GB PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) and a Full HD IPS anti-glare display (1,920 x 1,080). There were also a few add-ons, including a hybrid active capacitive pen and a 5MB camera with a view of the world, at a post-coupon price of $ 859 ($ 1,321 as configured).

Does the extra security and specialized AMD processor give the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook a head start?

design

Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook follows the same general aesthetic pattern as the rest of the ThinkPad lineup. It's completely black with only a few embellishments (although the black isn't quite as deep and looks grayer) like the blinking LED "i" in the ThinkPad logo on the lid and the red accent on the keyboard provided by the TrackPoint nubbin .

Interestingly, Lenovo skipped the red stripes along the TrackPoint buttons, which made the keyboard deck a bit simpler than usual. The chassis lines are also a bit more complex than the ThinkPad X1 Nano, for example, with rounded backs on the lower case and lid and a more forward-facing design.

A Chromebook looks good, and I find it more noticeable than the Dell Latitude 7410 Chromebook Enterprise, which is a pretty direct competitor – though the Latitude is a clamshell while the ThinkPad is a convertible 2-in-1.

Like all ThinkPads, the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook made of aluminum has a robust construction. The lid, keyboard deck or lower case must not be twisted, bent or bent, and the 2-in-1 device provides a high level of safety when lugging around. You don't need to spoil this laptop.

The bezels make the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook bigger than it needs to be.

It's easily the equivalent of the Latitude 7410 Chromebook. In fact, the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook is as well built as its Windows 10 competitors including the HP Specter x360 13 and Dell XPS 13. I notice that the hinge is pretty stiff and requires both hands to open the lid. However, the display is held in place by the four modes of clamshell, tent, media and tablet.

One area where the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook falls behind is the frames. They are thin on the sides but quite large on the top and bottom and have quite a massive chin. Part of the chin size is for the 2-in-1 hinge, but overall it looks a lot less modern than the ThinkPad X1 Nano and Dell XPS 13.

The Latitude 7410 Chromebook falls somewhere in between. The bezels make the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook bigger than it needs to be. It's bigger than the ThinkPad X1 Nano, though that's no big surprise given the laptop's smaller 13-inch 16:10 display, and it's much larger than the Dell XPS 13 with a 13.4-inch 16: 10 display.

Lenovo Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook Review Company "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/olympus-digital-camera-1015-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP//yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

Lenovo Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook Review Company "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn3.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/olympus-digital-camera-1025-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP//yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

At 0.70 inches thick, it's also a bit chunky compared to the XPS 13's 0.58-inch and the Specter x360 13's 0.67-inch. The XPS 13 and Specter x360 13 weigh 2.8 pounds, compared to the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook at 3.3 pounds. The Latitude 7410 Chromebook is 0.67 inches thick despite its 14-inch display and weighs almost the same as the Lenovo at 3.36 pounds.

The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook includes a few features that are of interest to corporate customers. First, there are some security features like the ThinkShutter slider that covers the webcam if you want to protect your privacy and a fingerprint scanner that provides a secure (and in my experience fast and reliable) way to log in without a password.

The Google H1 security chip works with Chrome OS to prevent software and firmware version resets, log transitions between developer and normal mode, protect user encryption keys and much more. These functions could of course also be attractive to consumers.

The 2-in-1 system can also host Google Enterprise, which offers a variety of resources for securing and managing a fleet of Chromebooks. Google Enterprise features include a managed Google Play Store that allows organizations to control which apps users can install, Microsoft Active Directory integration, managed Chrome browsers and extensions, single sign-on, and more. Google Enterprise is free to configure for the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook, but comes with an annual fee of $ 50.

Lenovo Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook Review Company "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/olympus-digital-camera-1009-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP//yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

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Lenovo Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook Review Company "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn5.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/olympus-digital-camera-1024-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP//yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook offers solid connectivity. On the left side of the laptop there is a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a 3.5 mm audio jack and a microSD card reader. On the right side there is another USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port and a full-size HDMI 2.0 port. Wireless connectivity is cutting edge with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0.

Finally, my test unit came with an optional ($ 20) second camera on top of the keyboard deck, a 5-megapixel model that can be used as a camera with a view of the world in tablet mode. Selecting this option will reduce the number of microphones to just one from the dual microphones that are not equipped with the 5 megapixel camera add-on.

performance

Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

For the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook, in this case the Ryzen 5 3500C, Lenovo opted for the latest Ryzen CPU from AMD, which is directly geared towards Chrome OS. This is the midrange CPU between Ryzen 5 3250c and Ryzen 5 3700C. The CPU is a quad-core CPU with eight threads that run up to 3.7 GHz. It is actually an APU with integrated AMD Radeon graphics with eight graphics cores.

According to AMD, the Ryzen 5 3000C series offers double to triple the performance of the previous AMD Chrome OS offering, the Athlon A6 series.

The only benchmark in our suite that we can run on Chromebooks is Geekbench 5, and the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook scored 907 in the single-core test and 2,739 in the multi-core test. This is very close to the 1,025 single-core and 2,712 multi-core rates achieved by the 10th generation Intel Core i5-10310U of the Latitude 7410 Chromebook.

The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook was very fast in everyday use.

That's also roughly half the performance you'll find on most Windows 10 laptops with core processors, but Chrome OS is of course far lighter than Windows 10 and doesn't require anywhere near the processing power to get a good experience.

Probably thanks to the generous 8 GB of RAM (for Chrome OS) and the fast PCIe SSD, the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook was very fast in daily use. I was able to open some tabs and Chrome OS apps while running some Android apps in the background without any noticeable slowdown. As with the Latitude, fans have occasionally dabbled with the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook, but that's not too high a price for great performance.

I also played a few games on the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook, including the Asphalt 9, and found the performance a little underperforming. Asphalt 9 in particular was surprisingly choppy. You will be fine with the occasional Android game, but GPU-intensive titles seem to put a little strain on the APU beyond its capabilities.

display

I couldn't test the 13.3-inch Full HD IPS display on the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook with my colorimeter. Below are my subjective results. Lenovo rates my review unit's display at 300 nits of brightness, and I would guess it comes close to that number.

It's a glare-free screen too, so working in bright environments wasn't a problem for me – although I didn't bring it outside, where direct sunlight would likely turn out to be too much for the display. Lenovo also offers a 4K display along with higher specs (16GB of RAM and a Ryzen 5 3700C CPU) for about $ 100 more.

Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

The colors looked well balanced without being oversaturated, and they seemed accurate enough. I compared some images to some other color accurate displays (e.g. the Dell XPS 13) and they looked similar on the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook. I would rate colors as good for a premium laptop, but I can't quite say exactly how wide the color gamut is and if it's suitable for creative types. The gamma also seemed spot on, as the Netflix video didn't look too light or too dark.

The two speakers weren't something to write home about. The sound was just average, with medium volume but no distortion. Highs and mids were clear, but there is no bass to speak of. The audio works well for video conferencing and the occasional YouTube video. However, for Netflix binging or tones, I use headphones or a bluetooth speaker.

Keyboard and touchpad

The keyboard of the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook corresponds exactly to that of the ThinkPad X1 Nano. This means that it has the same ThinkPad keycaps, the same spacing and the same spring travel and is even splash-proof thanks to the liquid drainage channels on the bottom of the case.

However, when I used the two keyboards side by side, I noticed a small difference in the mechanisms. The version of the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook was a little less fluid and had a slightly harder base than that of the ThinkPad X1 Nano.

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Maybe these are the same keyboards and all I saw was a normal manufacturing variance, but I found the Chromebook version to be a little less accurate. It's a good keyboard, don't get me wrong, and better than the one on Dell's Latitude 7410 Chromebook but not as good as the one I enjoyed on the ThinkPad X1 Nano.

It's also a step below the HP Specter line of keyboards and the Dell XPS 13, but a step above most (much cheaper) Chromebooks.

The touchpad is smaller than it could be as the two buttons support the usual ThinkPad TrackPoint node in the middle of the keyboard. The surface of the touchpad was comfortable and all the usual Chrome OS multitouch gestures worked well.

The TrackPoint worked just as well as it did on other ThinkPads and provided another way to control the cursor for those who like things like that.

Lenovo C13 Yoga Chromebook EnterpriseMark Coppock / Digital Trends

The touch display was responsive and precise. Lenovo includes a docked hybrid "active capacitive" pen that does not require an active layer, making the display thinner and less complex.

The pen supports 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, and I found it to be good for scribbling and the occasional handwritten note. Chrome OS doesn't offer the same color support as Windows 10, but whatever support works there works just fine with the optional pen (a $ 44 add-on).

Battery life

Mark Coppock / Digital Trends

Lenovo packed 51 Wh of battery life into the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook's case, and that's a decent amount for a 13.3-inch Full HD device. We don't have any other experiences with the AMD Ryzen 5 3500C, so I was excited to see how long the 2-in-1 battery would last.

In our web browser test, which ran through a number of popular websites, the laptop lasted 7.25 hours, which is about 40 minutes less than the Dell Latitude 7410 Chromebook and Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5 with an Intel Core i3-10110U.

As the best measure of laptop productivity longevity, this promises to be almost a full working day, but not quite. It's significantly less than many newer Windows 10 laptops that will last a few hours.

Many Chromebooks have significantly longer battery life.

In our video test, which ran through a Full HD Avengers trailer, the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook lasted about 7.5 hours. That's two hours longer than the Latitude 7410 Chromebook, but not very competitive with the Windows 10 field, where 10 hours or longer is the norm.

Finally, I ran the 2-in-1 test through our most demanding test, the Basemark web benchmark (which for some reason doesn't run on Intel Tiger Lake laptops) and it took almost exactly three hours. This is an average score, but again 40 minutes less than the Latitude 7410 Chromebook.

Overall, I found the battery life to be a disappointment. Many Chromebooks last much longer thanks to the overall efficiency of Chrome OS. Either the AMD CPU is not very energy efficient, or Lenovo has tuned it more to performance than battery life. In any case, you want to have your power supply with you for longer working days.

Our opinion

The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook has a target group and for this target group its strengths. However, it's not the best performing Chromebook we've used, nor is it the most durable on a single charge of the battery. It's as well built as ThinkPads always and takes on the Latitude 7410 Chromebook – the other enterprise Chromebook we tested – with the added flexibility of a convertible 2-in-1 device.

However, being Google Think-enabled is the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook's only real claim to fame. That explains the relatively high price, which is well above what a typical Chromebook buyer should pay.

Are there alternatives?

We've mentioned the Dell Latitude 7410 Chromebook a few times, and it's a comparable computer that isn't a clamshell. It's also significantly more expensive, costing $ 1,900 for a computer with a Core i5, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and a 4K display.

You can also consider the HP Pro c645 Chromebook Enterprise if it ever releases. The Acer Chromebook Enterprise Flip 13 is available now, offering the same Google Enterprise features in a 2-in-1 format for $ 1,300 – though you only get one 8th Gen Core i7 CPU. You will likely appreciate the 2,256 x 1,504 3: 2 display.

If you don't need the business features, then chances are you'll be looking at the Google Pixelbook Go, our pick as the best Chromebook you can buy. It's cheaper too, but it's also only for consumer use. As such, corporate buyers should consider one of the other machines on this list of alternatives.

How long it will take?

The ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook is built to last for years, and its components should keep Chrome OS running for just as long.

However, the one-year warranty is disappointing for an enterprise-class laptop.

Should you buy it?

For the average Chromebook buyer, no. It's a decent option for the corporate Chromebook user, but there are better Chromebooks out there for the average person.

Editor's recommendations




24 Feb
Blog

What Is The Effect Of Blue Light On The Skin?

Whether we're protecting our skin from the sun or protecting it from the aging effects of gravity, it sometimes feels like our complexion is being attacked on all sides. And with the increase in screen time due to the pandemic, we can add another attacker to the list: blue light. This type of harmful light comes towards us from multiple sources – not only does blue light come from the sun, but also from the screen of your cell phone, computer, television, and most lightbulbs. In short, our skin is exposed to a potential source of damage for a large portion of your day each day. Here you will find all the information about whether artificial blue light is harmful and what you can do about it.

Man looking at laptop

What is blue light?

Blue light is simply light on that blue end of the visible light spectrum, which is within the wavelength of 400 to 450 nanometers. This is a short wavelength that has a higher energy output and, unfortunately, can cause greater damage to the skin. As mentioned earlier, blue light is not only found in sunlight, it is equally important that it emanates from electronic devices that are now integrated into most people's daily lives. According to Brian Goodwin, Eminence Organics international trainerWe are typically exposed to blue light between your mobile phone and the computer screen for more than 13 hours a day. Due to the long daily exposure times and the high potential for skin damage, blue light could be the number one enemy of our skin health.

What do we know about the dangers of blue light?

Blue light first got a bad rap when people noticed that it was related to poor quality sleep. Late night hours in bed scrolling through your phone resulted in restless nights, and scientists soon discovered why. According to Harvard Health, blue light at night, suppresses the secretion of melatonin, the hormone that affects the circadian rhythms that plan your sleep / wake cycle. With an out of whacked sleep cycle, many people don't get enough sleep and are open to health problems like depression, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems.

A good night's sleep isn't the only thing at risk. Exposure of the eyes to blue light was one of the other potential problems that professionals first pointed out. The cornea and lens do not filter out blue light, so it goes straight to the fundus. And a A study by the University of Toledo found that blue light "converts vital molecules in the retina of the eye into cell killers that damage the retina," leading to conditions like macular degeneration. Although the experiments were only performed in a laboratory and not on eyes, the potential for eye damage from blue light appears problematic.

Why is blue light harmful to your skin?

With blue light making waves in sleep and eye health, it's no surprise that potentially damaging effects on skin health have also been discovered. in contrast to others Environmental stressors for the skin – like sunlight and UV rays – there is no heat, no burns. However, don't let the lack of immediate effects fool you. Visible light, especially in the blue wavelength, has become a hot topic in skin care as there is increasing evidence to support its contribution to photoaging, including wrinkles, worsening skin laxity, and hyperpigmentation.

Visible light, especially in the blue wavelength, has become a hot topic in skin care as there is increasing evidence to support its contribution to photoaging, including wrinkles, worsening skin laxity, and hyperpigmentation.

Inflammation and free radicals

Academic studies like that The 2010 Journal of Investigative Dermatology found that exposure of the skin to the blue light we get from the sun causes more pigment, redness, and puffiness than when the same person's skin was exposed to similar UVA rays. This is supported by a 2015 study published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, which concluded that exposure to blue light can stimulate the production of free radicals in the skin, a major cause of premature visible signs of aging. The free radicals generated create unstable molecules, which leads to inflammation that attacks the cells.
Infographic of blue light stimulated free radicals that attack a skin cell

So if we know that blue light is dangerous to our skin, how does it actually cause harm and what are the effects? When blue light puts pressure on the skin, it reacts with inflammation, which leads to swelling and redness. It also creates free radicals that damage the skin by damaging DNA and leading to weakened collagen and elastin. With compromised collagen and elastin, the skin becomes uneven, creating lines and wrinkles. Free radical damage also cause it Hyperpigmentation which leads to more signs of aging like dark spots. In summary, Brian outlines our body's alarming reaction to blue light: “The skin reacts by immediately protecting itself with inflammation that causes signs of swelling and redness. This triggers a chain of other events that cause symptoms in the skin, such as: B. Hyperpigmentation and a faster breakdown of collagen and elastin. "

How do we protect our skin when we sit in front of our devices for most of the day?

Cocoa seed extract: the blue light skin protection

Researchers have found that concentrated natural cocoa seed extract protects the skin from blue light damage by blocking the skin's blue light receptor cells. A decrease in cell activity in these blue light receptors decreases free radical damage and increases collagen and elastin production in the skin.

This unique extract contains three beneficial, naturally occurring components. These are peptides, saccharides and antioxidants that address the negative effects of blue light such as collagen breakdown, elastin breakdown and hyperpigmentation. Peptides in cocoa seed extract are a chain of amino acids that protect the skin from blue light stress and promote collagen and elastin strengthening. Polyphenols are groups of organic compounds that have antioxidant properties for the skin and protect the skin from the free radicals produced by blue light. After all, saccharides are sugars that draw water into the skin. They help prevent and treat the possible dehydration caused by blue light.

At Eminence Organics, we have formulated a range of all SPF mineral moisturizers that are silicone-free, use non-nano-zinc oxide technology, and help with environmental stressors. From our newest line of SPF moisturizers, one is particularly useful for improving the appearance of skin exposed to blue light – The Lilikoi Daily Defense Moisturizer SPF 40. This lightweight daily moisturizer contains cocoa seed extract, Satsuma mandarin peel and SPF 40, all mineral protectants to protect the skin from blue light stress and pollution.

What is most alarming about blue light? Let us know in the comments below or share with us on social media. If you want lto earn You can find more information about our SPF moisturizers in our spa locator. There you will find an Eminence Organics Spa partner near you.

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Lilikoi Daily Defense Moisturizing Cream SPF 40

Lilikoi Daily Defense Moisturizing Cream SPF 40

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This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for accuracy and completeness.

24 Feb
Blog

The Importance of Structured Training Programs in Recovery

What if I told you that by improving your exercise program, you could dramatically improve your recovery and results?

In Part 1 of this Train Hard, Recover Harder series, I explained that exercise is one of many stressors your body has to contend with, and that stress management is the key strategy to increasing your ability to train hard and recover harder .

Most of us consider stress management to be the way to deal with our grumpy boss, sloppy kids, an empty bank account, or other everyday worries. While using strategies to manage this type of stress is beneficial, I will focus on managing your exercise stress.

By focusing your attention on the input (training stress), you can increase the output (recovery and adaptation). Unfortunately, most of the people who asked me for tips on how to improve recovery have brought things backwards.

You are desperately trying to restore poorly designed exercise programs with junk volumes.

This thinking is like closing the stable door after the horse is locked. It is too late.

The principles of designing exercise programs

I believe in the importance of programming in order to achieve your fitness goals. Your progress can go from good to great if you properly understand the basic principles of programming.

I've seen this in my training and with countless customers as I've refined my approach to programming.

I've learned programming principles that I really believe will take your training to the next level during this time.

By focusing on delivering efficient exercise stress, you make recovery easier. A good recovery starts with great programming.

Intelligent program design = fatigue management

But first let me explain how you, and so many others, including my younger, dumber self, put yourself in a position where our training turns recovery into an uphill battle.

A workout based on FOMO

Many motivated, disciplined and hard training gym rats fall victim to training based on the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

This FOMO means that we try to include every conceivable exercise in our program without considering the toll that will be put on our recovery. The days off at the gym are getting shorter and shorter as we worry that a day without a workout is a day without progress.

Social media plays a major role in this.

In the past, you've only seen other people's elevators who happened to be in the gym for 60 to 90 minutes like you. We are now seeing a highlight role of people's PRs on social media. Instagram is full of hundreds of weird, wacky, Frankenstein exercises as people vie for attention.

As a result, we can compare everything we do in the gym to millions of others.

  • You see one of your favorite athletes doing an exercise.
  • You see another athlete doing a different variation.
  • You see a successful trainer extolling the virtues of another exercise.
  • You see a celebrity influencer doing another.
  • Before considering the exercises you liked in the last article you read or any seminar you attended.

You feel compelled to include all of these exercises in your FOMO program to reap the benefits of each. All of these exercises could have value in their own right.

However, if they are randomly stacked on top of each other, they will become smaller than the sum of their parts.

Some are useful and some are redundant, while others just don't suit your needs.

What they have in common is that they all eat into your recovery reserves.

When you follow a program with such a bloated list of exercises, a huge recovery trench is dug that even the most advanced recovery protocols cannot fix.

The other consequence of social media is that #NoDaysOff B.S. We have been led to believe that we must all get up at 5 a.m. to meditate before we can tackle the grind and play full #Beastmode in the gym and office.

Now I'm not knocking on hard work. It's important, but the mindless attempt to push the limits 365 days a year is a recipe for burnout and failure.

You need to have some downtime for your body to recover and adjust.

Unfortunately, attitudes toward climb and grind have led many fitness enthusiasts to follow exercise plans that require them to set up their home at the gym. Exercising seven days a week probably isn't a good idea even if it's your job, and let's face it, nobody is paying you to exercise.

Instead of feeling guilty about not going to the gym a few days a week, realize that this is what you need. This mindset requires discipline.

If you're like me, you enjoy the challenge of training. The gym is part of your routine and doesn't require motivation or discipline. However, a day off requires some discipline.

This more is better approach ends up with exercising every day doing too many different exercises with many more sets than you need to.

Your workout is full of junk volumes.

I bet you've heard the saying, "You can't overdo a bad diet."

You have likely knowingly told a friend or co-worker that they wanted to lose a few pounds and felt complacent and complacent while sharing your wisdom.

Have you ever thought about it::

  • "Can't restore a crappy junk volume exercise regimen?"
  • "That this could be exactly what you were trying to do?"
  • "Could this be the exact reason you haven't made any noticeable progress in vivid memory?"

Most people encounter this situation by continuing to hit the ground running and focus on moving forward with their recovery. They invest in all kinds of recovery modalities but never seem to fix the problem. That's because they have things backwards.

Instead of dealing with the symptoms of a poor recovery, they should target the root cause.

Train Smart to Maximize Recovery

Whatever your physical goals, you have to train to achieve them and you have to train hard. It would help if you prepared wisely too.

In other words, smart training is hard training, but hard training is not necessarily intelligent.

Training to build muscle is tiring in nature. If you plan your workouts intelligently, you can manage that session-to-session fatigue to keep moving forward.

However, if you turn on full #Beastmode every time you walk into the gym, workout to crush a muscle, and half kill yourself, the fatigue will build up very quickly – too quickly. Your body cannot recover and adapt. You dug a hole too deep.

The goal of your workout isn't just to recover. It's customizable!

Burying yourself in the gym might be the right thing to do. It may have a cathartic quality, but it will limit your results if you do it every time. Even with sleep, diet, and stress under control, there is only so much pressure you can do before you break up.

By shifting your recovery considerations to improving exercise dose optimization, you can improve them dramatically. This turnaround means better training, better recovery from training, less risk of injury, and better results.

To turn your thinking around and maximize your recovery, I want you to understand four basic principles in designing your exercise program.

These principles go a long way toward developing a program that offers the greatest potential for your high quality training stimulus and optimal recovery capacity:

  1. Your personal weekly training volume milestones
  2. Muscle-specific stimulus recovery fit curves
  3. The attraction: fatigue ratio of different exercises
  4. Relative intensity

Minimum Effect Volume (MEV) and Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV)

Dr. Mike Israetel is primarily responsible for popularizing the concepts of volume landmarks. There is a continuum from the minimum effective volume (MEV) to the maximum recoverable volume (MRV).

When you train harder, there is potential for further progress as long as you don't exceed your ability to recover. Identifying your MRV is important information to know as you design your program.

Your MRV consists of two components::

  1. Your systemic MRV
  2. A body part-specific MRV

For exampleFrom a systemic point of view, you can potentially do five hard workouts per week with 16 work sets per muscle group per week.

Note. That's only an example; Please do not misunderstand it as an instruction to train five days a week with 16 weekly sets per body part.

Having a reasonable idea of ​​your MRV is crucial in developing a framework for building your week of training.

Maximize muscle stimulation

Body part specific MRVs can change dramatically. By dealing with it::

  • You can refine your program to go from good to great.
  • Some of your muscles may react differently than others.
  • Some muscles may tolerate higher exercise volumes, intensities, or frequencies.
  • Other muscles can achieve the same training effect with a lower stimulus.

Understanding this will enable you to program your workouts with an extreme level of accuracy and efficiency. You can minimize the volume of junk and maximize stimulation. This program allows for better recovery than the same treatment for each muscle group.

For example:

  • Your quads may only tolerate six sets done twice a week for a weekly MRV of 12 sets.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, you may find that your rear delts get an effective workout from six sets in one session, but can recover well from 24 sets a week.

In the meantime, your other muscle groups can drop in different places on the spectrum.

Knowing this, you can adjust the weekly volumes and frequencies for each muscle to optimize your training split.

By doing this, you've also increased your recovery capacity.

Establishing your system and muscle group volume tolerance takes time and attention to detail, but is well worth it.

Once you have this information, you can move from general cookie cutting plans to truly individualized programming. Your results will improve as a result.

Adjustment of stimulus recovery

Recovery is a return to baseline, and adjustment is when your body surpasses its previous baseline to an improved performance level or increased muscle size.

You don't just want to recover from exercise. You want to make adjustments.

Just as different muscle groups have different volume tolerances, they also have different SRA curves (Stimulus Recovery Adaptation). Several factors play a role in SRA curves.

The main points that you need to consider are::

  • The training frequency for each body part should depend on its SRA curve.
  • Factors such as the size of the muscle, its structure, function, the fiber type ratio, and the muscle damage caused by exercise all influence the SRA timeframe
  • Exercises that stretch a muscle a lot tend to cause more damage. This damage elongates the muscle's SRA curve.
  • Exercising with a larger ROM usually results in increased systemic fatigue, which slows the SRA curves.

The SRA curve of a muscle is relevant for determining your training frequency.

In an ideal world, you would structure your workout so that every muscle group is hit again at the peak of its adaptation curve. This structuring means that your exercise program may not be symmetrical.

The importance of structured training programs for recovery - fitness, bodybuilding, recovery, DOMS, elite training programs, adrenal fatigue, burnout, goal planning, training programs, training frequency, strength program, compound exercises, training stressors, individual training

Source: Is Lifting Heavy Weight Important To Building Muscle Size?

Exercise frequency is an important exercise variable and deserves the attention it needs to optimize your results.

Looking at exercise frequency is a good place to start::

  • Determine how many days a week you can exercise.
  • Determining how many hard workouts to do each week is a good start to managing your training stress.

It's just a start, however. I urge you to take yourself to a higher level by thinking about the frequency of training. Instead of being satisfied with the answer:

"How many days a week should I exercise?" Also, answer, "How many days a week should I exercise each muscle group?"

When you find the answer to it, then you can create the ideal weekly workout plan for you.

Your decision about the frequency to use for each muscle group should be influenced by the factors I set out in the previous bullet list. Although there are several factors to consider, the difference in the SRA curve of each muscle is relatively small.

This difference is small, but significant.

You know that intuitively. You can narrow it down to a few days. For bodybuilding training, this is usually 24 to 72 hours.

Research has shown that training one muscle 2-4 times a week is best when your goal is muscle growth. Once you can determine where each muscle fits in this area, you can unlock your growth potential by training each muscle at the perfect frequency.

Some muscles work best for two sessions a week, while others only respond when you press 3, 4, or even 5 times a week.

From years of experience with countless customers, I've created the following guidelines to give you a starting point::

  • 2 x per week: Quads, hamstrings, glutes, chest, anterior delts
  • 3 times a week: Back, triceps
  • 4 times a week: Biceps, calves, and posterior and lateral delts

Note. These are just averages based on my experience. You need to experiment a little to find your optimal training frequency.

Stimulus Fatigue Ratio (SFR) explained

I want you to look at the final concept from a program design point of view: the Stimulus Fatigue Ratio (SFR).

SFR is the amount of muscle building adjustments that exercise can give you in relation to the fatigue it creates and what it takes to recover. Some popular exercises have a bad SFR when it comes to hypertrophy.

The ideal exercise creates a high stimulus for a low rate of fatigue.

Choosing exercises that put tension through the target muscle and fit your structure is a good starting point for controlling your level of fatigue.

When evaluating a prospect's program, I often see conventional deadlifts, sumo deadlifts, and rack pulls in their plans. These are good exercises when deadlift strength development is your primary goal.

However, these exercises don't rank high if hypertrophy is the target when looking at SFR.

They have all caused significant fatigue with little muscle building stimulus::

  • You consume a lot of weight.
  • It is necessary that you expend a lot of energy to get upset
  • Need long warm-up exercises
  • Quickly drain your body's resources while creating a negative return on hypertrophy.

Traditional deadlifts involve little eccentric loading, sumo deadlifts are just one way of moving the most weight with the least amount of mechanical work, and rack and pinion trains are usually just a ego trip.

In short, they are not a great choice for stimulating muscle growth and they will tire you out so much that there is not much else you can do in your workout.

Choosing exercises with better SFR will help you build muscle more efficiently.

How to rate SFR

Exercises with a larger ROM put a lot of strain on a muscle, require great dexterity, coordination, and stability, and are more difficult to recover.

As a rule of thumb, it is harder to recover from barbell work than it is from dumbbell work.

Dumbbell movements are usually harder to recover from equivalents performed with cables or fixed machines.

Perfect doesn't exist

It is important to understand that nothing is perfect. There is no exercise that creates a muscle-building stimulus without fatigue.

  • To get results from training, you have to work hard.
  • Hard work guarantees fatigue.
  • You cannot eliminate fatigue, but you should try to maximize the stimulus for each unit of fatigue created.

Often times, when I look back on the exercises that I have identified as being featured frequently in a prospect's programs, it means choosing Romanian deadlifts over traditional deadlifts and sumo deadlifts. And the choice of rack pulls as superior for hamstring growth.

Overdressed

I strongly believe that compound barbell exercises should be the foundation of your workout. This does not mean that dumbbells, cables, machines, and isolation exercises are worthless.

We have been brainwashed to believe that the best exercises are compound barbell exercises. At the same time, these are excellent exercises. They are not always the best choice.

The best exercise is the one that best achieves the desired stimulation.

It also has to take into account your physical abilities at that moment. If you do four exercises for quads in one leg workout, doing squats, front squats, squats, and leg presses, it is brutal.

These are undoubtedly great exercises that produce high levels of stimulus but also produce high levels of fatigue.

After back squats, front squats, and mince squats, your legs are likely to feel like jelly. As a result, your leg press performance would likely be pathetic.

This fatigue negates its theoretically high irritation value.

If you are so exhausted from the previous three exercises, you may not have the psychological willpower and exertion required to create any significant stimulus for the leg press.

At this point they are an exercise to create minimal stimulus fatigue.

Even if you could overdo yourself to put a decent amount of pressure on the leg press, there is a risk that you will drive the fatigue so high that you will blow right past your quad MRV.

You would dig yourself a massive recreational ditch to climb out of before your next leg session. That makes the sets of leg presses junk volume.

By definition, when you exceed the MRV of a muscle group, you have exceeded its ability to recover. The stimulus may be high, but the fatigue is even higher.

That's a crappy SFR ratio.

This fatigue will slow your SRA curve and means your legs are unlikely to recover for the next session. The selection of these four compound lifts seems big and smart, but it isn't. You would go to tremendous effort to diminish the results.

A smarter choice in this example would be::

  1. Back squats
  2. Split squats
  3. Leg press
  4. Leg extension

These exercises still produce adequate stimulus, but the fatigue produced is less. You are also switching from complex multi-joint exercises that require high internal stability to machine-based single joint exercises that provide external stability.

Taking advantage of external stability at the end of a session when you are tired is a wise decision.

This means that you can make the target muscle the limiting factor without wasting energy on stability and coordination.

If building muscle is the goal, you want the target muscle to be the limiting factor, and not your ability to stay erect.

Too much muscle stimulation leads to unsustainable fatigue

Creating a lot of tension in the extended position of an exercise creates a strong stimulus to growth.

In a 2014 study, two groups trained with the same range of motion, but group training with longer muscle lengths not only gained more muscle, but also retained more strength and size after a training period.

The stretch is a good reason to exercise with a full range of motion. Note, however, that some exercises can have the same range of motion but different levels of tension in the stretched position.

Also, keep in mind that too much stimulus can bring fatigue to unsustainable levels. Because of this, when planning your workout, consider how much muscle damage a particular exercise will cause.

Stretching has a major impact on muscle damage under load within an exercise. Using the hamstrings as an example, you can compare Romanian Deadlifts (RDL) and lying leg curls.

The RDL puts extreme stress on the hamstrings.

For laypeople, the weight at the bottom is hardest and heaviest when the muscle is fully extended. RDLs are excellent choices, but you should be aware of the consequences of the extreme tension they create in the extended position.

The RDL is a barbell lift that is heavy to load. It also puts strain on the glutes, spine erectors, lats, and grip, causing a lot of muscle damage.

  • Conversely, the lying leg curl challenges the hamstrings in their fully shortened position, and there is relatively little stretch under load.
  • As a result, hamstring sore muscles and SRA curves are longer when exercising with RDLs than with lying leg curls.
  • Therefore, you may only be able to exercise hamstrings with severe RDLs once a week. You can increase the frequency to two or even three times a week by using lying leg curls in other sessions.

Manage the relative training intensity versus recovery reserves

The relative intensity is a measure of the effort. It's often used sentence by sentence to assess how close you have come to failure. Repetitions in Reserve (RIR) are a widely used metric to assess this. Two RIRs mean you stopped a set of two reps in reserve. One RIR corresponds to one in reserve; 0 RIR is when you couldn't do any more repetitions.

Sometimes people approach the relative intensity from a slightly different angle. They focus on the perceived difficulty or exertion of a set or training session. This is known as the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). On the RPE scale, an effort of 10/10 is a maximum effort. This corresponds to 0 RIR.

The exact terminology of RIR versus RPE doesn't matter. The point is, both are useful methods of quantifying your efforts, the difficulty of a set, and your training. This all adds to the relative intensity of your workout.

Managing your relative intensity can be a useful tool for providing an effective training stimulus without digging too deep into your recovery reserves.

Exercise occasionally to fail

Imagine the most challenging session you have ever done. Every sentence is doomed to fail. Maybe even a few drop sets and forced reps. Recall how you felt during this session.

You were probably a sweaty, broken mess that spread on the floor, wondering why you voluntarily underwent this torture.

During the session, your muscles burned and waves of nausea flooded you. In the end, you felt utterly obliterated and it took you forever to drag yourself out of the gym.

If we class this as a 10/10 attempt, I would suggest that you rarely get a 10/10 hit in order to get the best possible profits. A 10/10 session can be beneficial if done occasionally. However, it will cause you to exceed your ability to recover if done all the time.

Instead of chasing a 10 every session, you probably want to get an 8/10 most of the time. If time demands and progress dictates, dive into the 9-10 / 10 area.

Go there occasionally but don't make it your default.

When you hang out in the 8/10 range on average, you know you are posing a muscle challenge, a growth stimulus, and a stimulus to recover from.

  • Do this by bringing most sets of free weight compound exercises to 2-3 RIR.
  • Push machine-based connections a little closer to failure by usually staying at 1-2 RIR.
  • Then send the single joint exercises in full and press 0-1 RIR regularly.

Doing this is still tough training. It's smart too. It enables recovery. With recovery, there is adjustment. Adaptation can be seen as progress in this context.

Progress on the weights you've lifted, the number of repetitions, and the total number of sets you can do. Long story short, it means bigger and stronger muscles.

The benefits of a regular 8/10 workout are the benefits::

  • It provides an efficient incentive.
  • Sessions can be completed in 45-70 minutes and you can move on to your day after a quick shower and bite to eat.
  • You can exercise frequently.
  • You reduce the risk of injury.
  • You don't worry about how difficult each visit to the gym is.
  • You make substantial profits.

On the other hand, batting 10/10 usually plays out like this::

  • There is an incentive.
  • Sessions last 70 to 120 minutes, and it takes you 20 minutes to collect enough to get into the shower. The tightening happens in slow motion. Eating a meal … forget it, you still feel sick. All in all, it takes about an hour after the session to begin to feel vaguely human.
  • You can't exercise as often – recovery will take a few more days, and the debilitating DOMS mean that exercise 3-4 times a week is the vaguely sustainable maximum (even if it pushes it forward).
  • They increase the risk of injury.
  • Most of the sessions involve getting excited, using stimulants, and creating a lot of anxiety about how difficult each visit to the gym is.
  • You will likely burn out or be injured, or both.

Any workout like this is a fake economy. It takes more than there is and limits all the training you can handle.

Less overall training = fewer gains

Exercise training program design – cook to be a master chef

To create a great program that will deliver results and maximize recovery, it is important not to think in a vacuum or to look at the world through a straw. All training variables are linked and have a mutual effect. Finding the ideal mix of all variables is critical to great results.

Factors to consider when composing an exercise program::

  • Your total and muscle-specific training volume
  • Recovery periods for each muscle
  • Exercise selection and SFR
  • Relative intensity

When you consider these factors when planning a program, rather than just following a training template, it is like moving from a cook to a cook. A chef follows a set recipe, and a chef uses his or her taste and judgment to make micro-adjustments that take a dish to award-winning levels.

They understand how all ingredients complement each other and when a little more of an ingredient makes all the difference. This enables them to take the same ingredients and turn them into a Michelin star quality dish.

Understanding the training principles in this article can turn you from a training chef to a master chef. You don't have to follow program templates with crossed fingers for them to work.

Instead, you know what it takes to balance stimulus and recovery and get great results.

24 Feb
Blog

Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) Review: A True Command Center

Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) on angle table

Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation)

"It's not often that you get such a rich experience in a product, but the Amazon Echo Show 10 delivers."

  • Smooth and quiet panning

  • Acts effectively as a surveillance camera

  • Incredible audio performance

  • Flimsy plastic construction

After a few years in circulation, the second generation Echo Show 10 is finally getting a real successor, Amazon has announced. The timing is right considering the final try was the Echo Show 8, which we billed as perfection in terms of the lineup because it had the balance between size, performance and price. To stand out from previous offerings, the Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Generation) leverages everything the company has learned about developing smart displays and packaging in new features that make it a more convergent device for the home.

The headline here is how to mount the display on a rotating base for better visibility wherever you move. We have never seen that before. On top of that, it's a more complete package with a great smart speaker and a potential all-in-one security system to keep your home safe when you are away. This is something to be excited about!

Always in sight

As I have already described in detail, the Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) introduces a new feature that we have not yet seen in the series (or even in a smart display) – a brushless motor that has its 10.1 -Inch 1280 allows x 800 touchscreen to pan and cover an entire 360 ​​degree area. I found this convenience helpful as the display always has the correct line of sight, making it perfect for situations where I am moving and cannot physically be in front of the display.

John Velasco / Digital Trends

I was skeptical of this new implementation mainly because I didn't know how it was going to work. Fortunately, my concerns are allayed because in practice it moves smoothly and quietly and never jerks or jerks. When Alexa is on the phone or comes by, I have a bit more freedom if it is placed in an open place. Tracking is a bit problematic at distances over five feet, so I had to move closer for it to recognize me.

If you want to put it in a corner or a desk where it's in close proximity to other things, you can adjust the swivel threshold so it doesn't collide with those. I still found it a bit strange interacting with the touchscreen just because typing tends to jiggle the display a little from its position. Since it is not fixed, there is always that slight shake, but at least that's what the engine anticipates and I never feel like I might be ruining its engine.

Mash-up design that's hard to love

I can't say I'm in love with the new design. First, it's by far the strangest design in a smart display I've ever seen – sort of a marriage between an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet and an Echo Studio. While the mash-up looks weird, it doesn't help that the display's plastic casing feels cheap. The speaker area looks more modern and suits its contemporaries with its mesh fabric cover, which is available in anthracite or glacier white. I prefer the darker shade of charcoal as it is less prone to looking dirty over time.

Another point of contention for some will be the size of the Amazon Echo Show 10. I thought its predecessor was big, as was the Google Nest Hub Max, but the Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) takes up an even bigger footprint. Placed on my desk at home, its stout size makes for a narrower tabletop. However, it works well as a centerpiece on a neat kitchen countertop or coffee table.

Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) on the deskJohn Velasco / Digital Trends

Back to the display: it's sharp, bright, and has great viewing angles. The only complaint I have is that the contrast could be better. It can tilt too, but you have to do it manually. In contrast to the swivel function, the inclination of the display was retained as a manual process. This isn't a deal breaker due to the camera's wide field of view.

Secure your home when you are not there

Speaking of cameras: The Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) offers some much-needed security features thanks to its 13-megapixel wide-angle camera. Partly intelligent display, partly intelligent loudspeaker. This latest model can now also be classified as a security system. This is something I really appreciate because you have a device that encompasses all of these things.

When Alexa Guard is enabled, the Echo Show 10 listens for smoke and carbon monoxide sirens, as well as glass breaking when away from home. This is something that many Echo devices have, but the Echo Show 10 will soon have the ability to act as a sentinel for Alexa Guard Plus subscribers. The $ 5 per month service allows the Echo Show 10 to periodically pan the room to detect movement and then notify you through notifications.

Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) camera close-upJohn Velasco / Digital Trends

What about those who don't want to sign up? Well, you'll be happy to know that in the Echo Show 10, you can always access the camera through the Alexa app. There are also panning controls so you can keep the overview yourself. Of course, privacy is taken into account by a switch on the display that covers the camera and also effectively mutes it. Each time the camera is accessed, a notification will appear on the display informing you that the camera is active.

It's the most complete smart display with Alexa technology to date.

All of this compliments the Echo Show 10's arsenal, which matches the capabilities of the Google Nest Hub Max very well. It is a convergence device more than ever, which makes it an even more valuable part of the smart home.

The best speaker in a smart display

Not only do you get one of the best smart displays, but the Echo Show 10 is a worthy speaker that puts other smart displays to shame. Equipped with two 1-inch tweeters and a 3-inch woofer, the fact that it is an incredibly powerful speaker that can fill rooms enough cannot be hidden.

Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Generation) rear viewJohn Velasco / Digital Trends

Listening to music or watching action-packed films is a pleasure because of the loud volume. The audio section certainly favors the lower end, so you can expect great feedback from its woofer when the beat drops or an explosion occurs. In terms of raw performance, no other smart display can match its intensity – including the Google Nest Hub Max, which I would now consider a distant second in this department.

Its own command center

In view of the fact that the Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) extends its range beyond the basic functions of a smart display, it turns out to be an independent command center. With Alexa and responsive voice recognition, everyone can access and interact with the smart home exclusively by voice. Panning makes it more convenient to speak voice commands from anywhere in the room as the panning is done automatically in the direction of the voice.

In terms of raw performance, no other smart display can match its intensity.

In addition, you still get the same basic functions as the siblings, e.g. B. the ability to control smart lights, view the live stream of a surveillance camera and set up routines to optimize more processes.

Our opinion

Amazon is taking the appropriate steps to make the Echo Show 10 (3rd generation) a worthy successor that not only establishes itself as one of the leading smart displays on the market, but also replaces many other smart devices in the household. That's a big sale in itself, because for the $ 250 cost, you are effectively getting three basic smart home devices – a smart display, smart speaker, and security camera.

How long it will take

Although I am convinced of the smoothness of the brushless motor, I am still concerned about how it will last over the long term. There is also a fear that it will be knocked from everywhere it sits. In contrast to other smart displays, there are moving parts and attachments here. So this is a major concern. There is a one year limited warranty includedand Amazon offers extended warranties that cover damage.

Is there a better alternative?

If the size of the Echo Show 10 is just too big for your tastes, then consider the other smart displays in the Amazon portfolio: the Echo Show 5 and the Echo Show 8. The only other major competitor it has is the Google Nest Hub Max almost the same functions and features, but supported by the Google Assistant.

Should you buy it?

You bet. It's the most complete smart display with Alexa technology to date.

Editor's recommendations




24 Feb
Blog

The Importance of Structured Training Programs in Recovery

What if I told you that by improving your exercise program, you could dramatically improve your recovery and results?

In Part 1 of this Train Hard, Recover Harder series, I explained that exercise is one of many stressors your body has to contend with, and that stress management is the key strategy to increasing your ability to train hard and recover harder .

Most of us consider stress management to be the way to deal with our grumpy boss, sloppy kids, an empty bank account, or other everyday worries. While using strategies to manage this type of stress is beneficial, I will focus on managing your exercise stress.

By focusing your attention on the input (training stress), you can increase the output (recovery and adaptation). Unfortunately, most of the people who asked me for tips on how to improve recovery have brought things backwards.

You are desperately trying to restore poorly designed exercise programs with junk volumes.

This thinking is like closing the stable door after the horse is locked. It is too late.

The principles of designing exercise programs

I believe in the importance of programming in order to achieve your fitness goals. Your progress can go from good to great if you properly understand the basic principles of programming.

I've seen this in my training and with countless customers as I've refined my approach to programming.

I've learned programming principles that I really believe will take your training to the next level during this time.

By focusing on delivering efficient exercise stress, you make recovery easier. A good recovery starts with great programming.

Intelligent program design = fatigue management

But first let me explain how you, and so many others, including my younger, dumber self, put yourself in a position where our training turns recovery into an uphill battle.

A workout based on FOMO

Many motivated, disciplined and hard training gym rats fall victim to training based on the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

This FOMO means that we try to include every conceivable exercise in our program without considering the toll that will be put on our recovery. The days off at the gym are getting shorter and shorter as we worry that a day without a workout is a day without progress.

Social media plays a major role in this.

In the past, you've only seen other people's elevators who happened to be in the gym for 60 to 90 minutes like you. We are now seeing a highlight role of people's PRs on social media. Instagram is full of hundreds of weird, wacky, Frankenstein exercises as people vie for attention.

As a result, we can compare everything we do in the gym to millions of others.

  • You see one of your favorite athletes doing an exercise.
  • You see another athlete doing a different variation.
  • You see a successful trainer extolling the virtues of another exercise.
  • You see a celebrity influencer doing another.
  • Before considering the exercises you liked in the last article you read or any seminar you attended.

You feel compelled to include all of these exercises in your FOMO program to reap the benefits of each. All of these exercises could have value in their own right.

However, if they are randomly stacked on top of each other, they will become smaller than the sum of their parts.

Some are useful and some are redundant, while others just don't suit your needs.

What they have in common is that they all eat into your recovery reserves.

When you follow a program with such a bloated list of exercises, a huge recovery trench is dug that even the most advanced recovery protocols cannot fix.

The other consequence of social media is that #NoDaysOff B.S. We have been led to believe that we must all get up at 5 a.m. to meditate before we can tackle the grind and play full #Beastmode in the gym and office.

Now I'm not knocking on hard work. It's important, but the mindless attempt to push the limits 365 days a year is a recipe for burnout and failure.

You need to have some downtime for your body to recover and adjust.

Unfortunately, attitudes toward climb and grind have led many fitness enthusiasts to follow exercise plans that require them to set up their home at the gym. Exercising seven days a week probably isn't a good idea even if it's your job, and let's face it, nobody is paying you to exercise.

Instead of feeling guilty about not going to the gym a few days a week, realize that this is what you need. This mindset requires discipline.

If you're like me, you enjoy the challenge of training. The gym is part of your routine and doesn't require motivation or discipline. However, a day off requires some discipline.

This more is better approach ends up with exercising every day doing too many different exercises with many more sets than you need to.

Your workout is full of junk volumes.

I bet you've heard the saying, "You can't overdo a bad diet?"

You have likely knowingly told a friend or co-worker that they wanted to lose a few pounds and felt complacent and complacent while sharing your wisdom.

Have you ever thought about it::

  • "Can't restore a crappy junk volume exercise regimen?"
  • "That this could be exactly what you were trying to do?"
  • "Could this be the exact reason you haven't made any noticeable progress in vivid memory?"

Most people encounter this situation by continuing to hit the ground running and focus on moving forward with their recovery. They invest in all kinds of recovery modalities but never seem to fix the problem. That's because they have things backwards.

Instead of dealing with the symptoms of a poor recovery, they should target the root cause.

Train Smart to Maximize Recovery

Whatever your physical goals, you have to train to achieve them and you have to train hard. It would help if you prepared wisely too.

In other words, smart training is hard training, but hard training is not necessarily intelligent.

Training to build muscle is tiring in nature. If you plan your workouts intelligently, you can manage that session-to-session fatigue to keep moving forward.

However, if you turn on full #Beastmode every time you walk into the gym, workout to crush a muscle, and half kill yourself, the fatigue will build up very quickly – too quickly. Your body cannot recover and adapt. You dug a hole too deep.

The goal of your workout isn't just to recover. It's customizable!

Burying yourself in the gym might be the right thing to do. It may have a cathartic quality, but it will limit your results if you do it every time. Even with sleep, diet, and stress under control, there is only so much pressure you can do before you break up.

By shifting your recovery considerations to improving exercise dose optimization, you can improve them dramatically. This turnaround means better training, better recovery from training, less risk of injury, and better results.

To turn your thinking around and maximize your recovery, I want you to understand four basic principles in designing your exercise program.

These principles go a long way toward developing a program that offers the greatest potential for your high quality training stimulus and optimal recovery capacity:

  1. Your personal weekly training volume milestones
  2. Muscle-specific stimulus recovery fit curves
  3. The attraction: fatigue ratio of different exercises
  4. Relative intensity

Minimum Effect Volume (MEV) and Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV)

Dr. Mike Israetel is primarily responsible for popularizing the concepts of volume landmarks. There is a continuum from the minimum effective volume (MEV) to the maximum recoverable volume (MRV).

When you train harder, there is potential for further progress as long as you don't exceed your ability to recover. Identifying your MRV is important information to know as you design your program.

Your MRV consists of two components::

  1. Your systemic MRV
  2. A body part-specific MRV

For exampleFrom a systemic point of view, you can potentially do five hard workouts per week with 16 work sets per muscle group per week.

Note. That's only an example; Please do not misunderstand it as an instruction to train five days a week with 16 weekly sets per body part.

Having a reasonable idea of ​​your MRV is crucial in developing a framework for building your week of training.

Maximize muscle stimulation

Body part specific MRVs can change dramatically. By dealing with it::

  • You can refine your program to go from good to great.
  • Some of your muscles may react differently than others.
  • Some muscles may tolerate higher exercise volumes, intensities, or frequencies.
  • Other muscles can achieve the same training effect with a lower stimulus.

Understanding this will enable you to program your workouts with an extreme level of accuracy and efficiency. You can minimize the volume of junk and maximize stimulation. This program allows for better recovery than the same treatment for each muscle group.

For example:

  • Your quads may only tolerate six sets done twice a week for a weekly MRV of 12 sets.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, you may find that your rear delts get an effective workout from six sets in one session, but can recover well from 24 sets a week.

In the meantime, your other muscle groups can drop in different places on the spectrum.

Knowing this, you can adjust the weekly volumes and frequencies for each muscle to optimize your training split.

By doing this, you've also increased your recovery capacity.

Establishing your system and muscle group volume tolerance takes time and attention to detail, but is well worth it.

Once you have this information, you can move from general cookie cutting plans to truly individualized programming. Your results will improve as a result.

Adjustment of stimulus recovery

Recovery is a return to baseline, and adjustment is when your body surpasses its previous baseline to an improved performance level or increased muscle size.

You don't just want to recover from exercise. You want to make adjustments.

Just as different muscle groups have different volume tolerances, they also have different SRA curves (Stimulus Recovery Adaptation). Several factors play a role in SRA curves.

The main points that you need to consider are::

  • The training frequency for each body part should depend on its SRA curve.
  • Factors such as the size of the muscle, its structure, function, the fiber type ratio, and the muscle damage caused by exercise all influence the SRA timeframe
  • Exercises that stretch a muscle a lot tend to cause more damage. This damage elongates the muscle's SRA curve.
  • Exercising with a larger ROM usually results in increased systemic fatigue, which slows the SRA curves.

The SRA curve of a muscle is relevant for determining your training frequency.

In an ideal world, you would structure your workout so that every muscle group is hit again at the peak of its adaptation curve. This structuring means that your exercise program may not be symmetrical.

The importance of structured training programs for recovery - fitness, bodybuilding, recovery, DOMS, elite training programs, adrenal fatigue, burnout, goal planning, training programs, training frequency, strength program, compound exercises, training stressors, individual training

Source: Is Lifting Heavy Weight Important To Building Muscle Size?

Exercise frequency is an important exercise variable and deserves the attention it needs to optimize your results.

Looking at exercise frequency is a good place to start::

  • Determine how many days a week you can exercise.
  • Determining how many hard workouts to do each week is a good start to managing your training stress.

It's just a start, however. I urge you to take yourself to a higher level by thinking about the frequency of training. Instead of being satisfied with the answer:

"How many days a week should I exercise?" Also, answer, "How many days a week should I exercise each muscle group?"

When you find the answer to it, then you can create the ideal weekly workout plan for you.

Your decision about the frequency to use for each muscle group should be influenced by the factors I set out in the previous bullet list. Although there are several factors to consider, the difference in the SRA curve of each muscle is relatively small.

This difference is small, but significant.

You know that intuitively. You can narrow it down to a few days. For bodybuilding training, this is usually 24 to 72 hours.

Research has shown that training one muscle 2-4 times a week is best when your goal is muscle growth. Once you can determine where each muscle fits in this area, you can unlock your growth potential by training each muscle at the perfect frequency.

Some muscles work best for two sessions a week, while others only respond when you press 3, 4, or even 5 times a week.

From years of experience with countless customers, I've created the following guidelines to give you a starting point::

  • 2 x per week: Quads, hamstrings, glutes, chest, anterior delts
  • 3 times a week: Back, triceps
  • 4 times a week: Biceps, calves, and posterior and lateral delts

Note. These are just averages based on my experience. You need to experiment a little to find your optimal training frequency.

Stimulus Fatigue Ratio (SFR) explained

I want you to look at the final concept from a program design point of view: the Stimulus Fatigue Ratio (SFR).

SFR is the amount of muscle building adjustments that exercise can give you in relation to the fatigue it creates and what it takes to recover. Some popular exercises have a bad SFR when it comes to hypertrophy.

The ideal exercise creates a high stimulus for a low rate of fatigue.

Choosing exercises that put tension through the target muscle and fit your structure is a good starting point for controlling your level of fatigue.

When evaluating a prospect's program, I often see conventional deadlifts, sumo deadlifts, and rack pulls in their plans. These are good exercises when deadlift strength development is your primary goal.

However, these exercises don't rank high if hypertrophy is the target when looking at SFR.

They have all caused significant fatigue with little muscle building stimulus::

  • You consume a lot of weight.
  • It is necessary that you expend a lot of energy to get upset
  • Need long warm-up exercises
  • Quickly drain your body's resources while creating a negative return on hypertrophy.

Traditional deadlifts involve little eccentric loading, sumo deadlifts are just one way of moving the most weight with the least amount of mechanical work, and rack and pinion trains are usually just a ego trip.

In short, they are not a great choice for stimulating muscle growth and they will tire you out so much that there is not much else you can do in your workout.

Choosing exercises with better SFR will help you build muscle more efficiently.

How to rate SFR

Exercises with a larger ROM put a lot of strain on a muscle, require great dexterity, coordination, and stability, and are more difficult to recover.

As a rule of thumb, it is harder to recover from barbell work than it is from dumbbell work.

Dumbbell movements are usually harder to recover from equivalents performed with cables or fixed machines.

Perfect doesn't exist

It is important to understand that nothing is perfect. There is no exercise that creates a muscle-building stimulus without fatigue.

  • To get results from training, you have to work hard.
  • Hard work guarantees fatigue.
  • You cannot eliminate fatigue, but you should try to maximize the stimulus for each unit of fatigue created.

Often times, when I look back on the exercises that I have identified as being featured frequently in a prospect's programs, it means choosing Romanian deadlifts over traditional deadlifts and sumo deadlifts. And the choice of rack pulls as superior for hamstring growth.

Overdressed

I strongly believe that compound barbell exercises should be the foundation of your workout. This does not mean that dumbbells, cables, machines, and isolation exercises are worthless.

We have been brainwashed to believe that the best exercises are compound barbell exercises. At the same time, these are excellent exercises. They are not always the best choice.

The best exercise is the one that best achieves the desired stimulation.

It also has to take into account your physical abilities at that moment. If you do four exercises for quads in one leg workout, doing squats, front squats, squats, and leg presses, it is brutal.

These are undoubtedly great exercises that produce high levels of stimulus but also produce high levels of fatigue.

After back squats, front squats, and mince squats, your legs are likely to feel like jelly. As a result, your leg press performance would likely be pathetic.

This fatigue negates its theoretically high irritation value.

If you are so exhausted from the previous three exercises, you may not have the psychological willpower and exertion required to create any significant stimulus for the leg press.

At this point they are an exercise to create minimal stimulus fatigue.

Even if you could overdo yourself to put a decent amount of pressure on the leg press, there is a risk that you will drive the fatigue so high that you will blow right past your quad MRV.

You would dig yourself a massive recreational ditch to climb out of before your next leg session. That makes the sets of leg presses junk volume.

By definition, when you exceed the MRV of a muscle group, you have exceeded its ability to recover. The stimulus may be high, but the fatigue is even higher.

That's a crappy SFR ratio.

This fatigue will slow your SRA curve and means your legs are unlikely to recover for the next session. The selection of these four compound lifts seems big and smart, but it isn't. You would go to tremendous effort to diminish the results.

A smarter choice in this example would be::

  1. Back squats
  2. Split squats
  3. Leg press
  4. Leg extension

These exercises still produce adequate stimulus, but the fatigue produced is less. You are also switching from complex multi-joint exercises that require high internal stability to machine-based single joint exercises that provide external stability.

Taking advantage of external stability at the end of a session when you are tired is a wise decision.

This means that you can make the target muscle the limiting factor without wasting energy on stability and coordination.

If building muscle is the goal, you want the target muscle to be the limiting factor, and not your ability to stay erect.

Too much muscle stimulation leads to unsustainable fatigue

Creating a lot of tension in the extended position of an exercise creates a strong stimulus to growth.

In a 2014 study, two groups trained with the same range of motion, but group training with longer muscle lengths not only gained more muscle, but also retained more strength and size after a training period.

The stretch is a good reason to exercise with a full range of motion. Note, however, that some exercises can have the same range of motion but different levels of tension in the stretched position.

Also, keep in mind that too much stimulus can bring fatigue to unsustainable levels. Because of this, when planning your workout, consider how much muscle damage a particular exercise will cause.

Stretching has a major impact on muscle damage under load within an exercise. Using the hamstrings as an example, you can compare Romanian Deadlifts (RDL) and lying leg curls.

The RDL puts extreme stress on the hamstrings.

For laypeople, the weight at the bottom is hardest and heaviest when the muscle is fully extended. RDLs are excellent choices, but you should be aware of the consequences of the extreme tension they create in the extended position.

The RDL is a barbell lift that is heavy to load. It also puts strain on the glutes, spine erectors, lats, and grip, causing a lot of muscle damage.

  • Conversely, the lying leg curl challenges the hamstrings in their fully shortened position, and there is relatively little stretch under load.
  • As a result, hamstring sore muscles and SRA curves are longer when exercising with RDLs than with lying leg curls.
  • Therefore, you may only be able to exercise hamstrings with severe RDLs once a week. You can increase the frequency to two or even three times a week by using lying leg curls in other sessions.

Manage the relative training intensity versus recovery reserves

The relative intensity is a measure of the effort. It's often used sentence by sentence to assess how close you have come to failure. Repetitions in Reserve (RIR) are a widely used metric to assess this. Two RIRs mean you stopped a set of two reps in reserve. One RIR corresponds to one in reserve; 0 RIR is when you couldn't do any more repetitions.

Sometimes people approach the relative intensity from a slightly different angle. They focus on the perceived difficulty or exertion of a set or training session. This is known as the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). On the RPE scale, an effort of 10/10 is a maximum effort. This corresponds to 0 RIR.

The exact terminology of RIR versus RPE doesn't matter. The point is, both are useful methods of quantifying your efforts, the difficulty of a set, and your training. This all adds to the relative intensity of your workout.

Managing your relative intensity can be a useful tool for providing an effective training stimulus without digging too deep into your recovery reserves.

Exercise occasionally to fail

Imagine the most challenging session you have ever done. Every sentence is doomed to fail. Maybe even a few drop sets and forced reps. Recall how you felt during this session.

You were probably a sweaty, broken mess that spread on the floor, wondering why you voluntarily underwent this torture.

During the session, your muscles burned and waves of nausea flooded you. In the end, you felt utterly obliterated and it took you forever to drag yourself out of the gym.

If we class this as a 10/10 attempt, I would suggest that you rarely get a 10/10 hit in order to get the best possible profits. A 10/10 session can be beneficial if done occasionally. However, it will cause you to exceed your ability to recover if done all the time.

Instead of chasing a 10 every session, you probably want to get an 8/10 most of the time. If time demands and progress dictates, dive into the 9-10 / 10 area.

Go there occasionally but don't make it your default.

When you hang out in the 8/10 range on average, you know you are posing a muscle challenge, a growth stimulus, and a stimulus to recover from.

  • Do this by bringing most sets of free weight compound exercises to 2-3 RIR.
  • Push machine-based connections a little closer to failure by usually staying at 1-2 RIR.
  • Then send the single joint exercises in full and press 0-1 RIR regularly.

Doing this is still tough training. It's smart too. It enables recovery. With recovery, there is adjustment. Adaptation can be seen as progress in this context.

Progress on the weights you've lifted, the number of repetitions, and the total number of sets you can do. Long story short, it means bigger and stronger muscles.

The benefits of a regular 8/10 workout are the benefits::

  • It provides an efficient incentive.
  • Sessions can be completed in 45-70 minutes and you can move on to your day after a quick shower and bite to eat.
  • You can exercise frequently.
  • You reduce the risk of injury.
  • You don't worry about how difficult each visit to the gym is.
  • You make substantial profits.

On the other hand, batting 10/10 usually plays out like this::

  • There is an incentive.
  • Sessions last 70 to 120 minutes, and it takes you 20 minutes to collect enough to get into the shower. The tightening happens in slow motion. Eating a meal … forget it, you still feel sick. All in all, it takes about an hour after the session to begin to feel vaguely human.
  • You can't exercise as often – recovery will take a few more days, and the debilitating DOMS mean that exercise 3-4 times a week is the vaguely sustainable maximum (even if it pushes it forward).
  • They increase the risk of injury.
  • Most of the sessions involve getting excited, using stimulants, and creating a lot of anxiety about how difficult each visit to the gym is.
  • You will likely burn out or be injured, or both.

Any workout like this is a fake economy. It takes more than there is and limits all the training you can handle.

Less overall training = fewer gains

Exercise training program design – cook to be a master chef

To create a great program that will deliver results and maximize recovery, it is important not to think in a vacuum or to look at the world through a straw. All training variables are linked and have a mutual effect. Finding the ideal mix of all variables is critical to great results.

Factors to consider when composing an exercise program::

  • Your total and muscle-specific training volume
  • Recovery periods for each muscle
  • Exercise selection and SFR
  • Relative intensity

When you consider these factors when planning a program, rather than just following a training template, it is like moving from a cook to a cook. A chef follows a set recipe, and a chef uses his or her taste and judgment to make micro-adjustments that take a dish to award-winning levels.

They understand how all ingredients complement each other and when a little more of an ingredient makes all the difference. This enables them to take the same ingredients and turn them into a Michelin star quality dish.

Understanding the training principles in this article can turn you from a training chef to a master chef. You don't have to follow program templates with crossed fingers for them to work.

Instead, you know what it takes to balance stimulus and recovery and get great results.

24 Feb
Blog

Train Hard, Recover Harder | Breaking Muscle

Because of my email inbox and Instagram DMs, post workout recovery is a hot topic. I get all sorts of questions about recovery techniques.

  • "Can you rate my supplement stacks?"
  • "Should I do active recovery training?"
  • "When do I foam?"
  • "How would you change my diet on rest days?"
  • "What post-exercise stretching routine should I do?"
  • "Do ice baths or cold showers help my winnings?"
  • "What about cupping, compression garments, and percussion massagers?"

I'm glad people are paying some attention to their recovery. Unfortunately, I think they are paying their attention to the wrong pieces of the recovery puzzle. In this series of articles, I'm going to help you maximize your recovery and results by focusing on what really matters.

I will explain::

  1. Why stress is a double-edged sword and how to deal with it.
  2. Why recovery starts with great programming
  3. The two most powerful recovery tools and how to optimize them
  4. Six other recovery methods that work

This trend towards paying more attention to recreation is admirable.

In part, this is not surprising I like to remind people that instead of lifting bigger and stronger weights, they are recovering from lifting weights.

I have tried many times to illustrate the importance of recovery by presenting progress as a simple equation:

Stimulus + recovery = adjustment

Stress can be good

Stress can be both good and bad. Good stress, or what psychologists call eustress, is the type of stress we feel when we are excited. Exercise is a burden on the body. With sufficient dosage, it is undoubtedly useful.

Bad stress comes in two forms:

  1. Acute Stress triggers the body's stress response, but these triggers and emotions are not happy or exciting. In general, acute stress does not take a heavy toll. The stress response is fleeting and the body quickly returns to homeostasis or its pre-stress state.
  2. Chronic Stress is bad. It occurs when we are repeatedly exposed to stressors that take a heavy toll. We often feel down, overwhelmed, and trapped by this stress. For example, a stressful job with a donkey for a boss or an unhappy relationship at home can cause chronic stress.

Your tolerance and ability to cope with stress are different from mine.

Our tolerance also fluctuates over time. There is only so much stress to deal with. When you are under too much pressure you become overwhelmed. Your recovery from exercise will suffer during times of high stress.

Managing your stress level improves the quality of life.

It improves your digestion, rest, mood, and productivity. It will also improve your muscle building and fat loss.

Coping with stress; Not avoidance

Note that I am calling it stress management – not avoiding or reducing stress.

The fact is, you can't completely avoid stress.

However, you can improve management. The better you deal with stress, you will be happier, fitter, leaner, and more muscular. In short, life is getting better.

What is stress

The body's control center is the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS regulates the involuntary functions of the human body. The stuff that happens without you consciously thinking about it, like breathing or digestion.

The ANS has two branches::

  1. The parasympathetic is also known as resting and digestive mode.
  2. The sympathetic is the fight or flight mode.

These two work like a seesaw. Whenever one of the modes is activated, the other is not activated. When one is up, the other is down.

Unfortunately, your body cannot differentiate between different types of stress.

When the sympathetic nervous system is upregulated, it can't tell the difference between the stress of a life-threatening event, challenging workout, or the asshole that just cut you off in traffic.

To deal with stress, we want to spend most of our time in a parasympathetic state. However, the reality is that we spend too much time in a personable state. The uninterrupted flood of stress adds up when we face daily challenges.

This sympathetic state has many negative health effects and inhibits our ability to build lean muscles and reduce body fat.

In my experience, so many hard-gainers have difficulty seeing progress because they are chronically stressed and are working to manage stress, which increases their anxiety and creates a downward spiral.

Instead of winning hard, I refer to these people as easy losers.

Their stress levels cause them to lose profit at an alarming rate at the slightest change in a routine or a life circumstance because they handle stress badly.

With this in mind, it is time to identify strategies that can be used to control stress as much as possible.

Heart rate monitoring to help manage stress

A good indicator of your stress level and your parasympathetic versus sympathetic dominance is your waking heart rate.

By monitoring your heart rate, you can get useful data that can help you assess your general stress status and determine when it is increasing.

Significant increases or decreases in your waking heart rate indicate when you are experiencing higher periods of stress. I suggest you get a decent heart rate monitor to assess this. You can also examine heart rate variability apps to add another tier of rating.

Be more productive with less stress

Cal Newport talks about how the autopilot can help you be more productive and less stressed. He says that there are two types of work in his world:

  1. Regularly occurring tasks

  2. Tasks that do not occur regularly

Being autopilot applies to almost everyone.

The problem with tasks that occur regularly is that they are so numerous that if we try to manage them on the fly, we get left behind and overwhelmed.

I believe that feeling of being overwhelmed is one of the main drivers of stress in people's lives. It is certainly a major cause of mine.

To cope with this, Newport assigns a specific time slot to each regularly occurring task. He calls this his autopilot schedule. He found that he doesn't waste time or energy prioritizing and planning tasks on a daily basis. You're on autopilot.

Once you've assigned this stuff to specific times and made it a routine, you can assign any other available times to other things that interest you. This method requires some advance planning, but it pays off.

The last point is to understand that it will take time to refine and adjust this process.

Fortunately, you're so much more efficient that you have the time to make adjustments as needed.

The miracle morning routine for positivity

When you have a morning routine to start your day, you are on the right foot and set the scene for the rest of the day.

You can run the day instead of the day you run.

I am a supporter of the Miracle Morning Routine. I'm doing the express version, which takes less than 15 minutes and has six steps.

The six steps are::

  1. remain silent

  2. Affirmations

  3. Visualizations

  4. exercise

  5. read

  6. Write

Various apps are available to walk you through the process.

If I stick to the Miracle Morning routine, I will be more productive and feel in control.

Meditation combats stress

Meditation is a great way to combat stress. I haven't gone full muesli yogi yet. When I get a little older, I may fully embrace Zen.

I am aware that the word meditation has negative connotations in some people (my cereal yogi reference is a case in point). So if you're not ready to think about meditation, call it silence, chillaxing, mindfulness, or whatever makes you comfortable.

Instead of fully meditating, I sit quietly and concentrate on my breath for a few minutes.

Abdominal breathing, breathing deeply through your nose and slowly exhaling through your mouth do the trick.

If you want a guide, the Headspace app is excellent. I did some of the 5-10 minute guided meditations and it definitely calms you down. Those few minutes a day have a remarkable effect on managing your stress levels.

Mindfulness

Being mindful or present is all the rage these days.

There's a good reason for that. We live in an always connected, yet very distracted world. The sheer amount of input competing for our attention is mind-boggling.

Living in this always distracted state is stressful and is similar to attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Try to fix this:

  • By focusing on one task at a time
  • Then try to be present during this task.
  • Immerse yourself in the sounds, smells, sensations, images and tastes of everything you do.

It doesn't matter whether you keep a diary in your leather-bound notepad while you have a coffee, hang out with friends over a barbecue or write the sales pitch in front of your laptop in the office.

When you are fully in the moment, you will become more productive, efficient, and effective in everything you do. It will help improve your mood and filter out potential external stressors.

Cheesy quote alert:

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift – that's why it's called the present.

– Eleanor Roosevelt

Emotional responses last 90 seconds

In his book The Chimp Paradox, Dr. Steve Peters on our chimpanzee brain and how it can control us. When the chimpanzee takes over, the logic evaporates and the emotions take over.

Too often when we are under stress we act emotionally. The chimpanzee in us becomes irritable and can wreak havoc before we know what happened.

When we get an emotional reaction to something, it usually wears off after about 90 seconds if we don't respond to it.

Pema Chodron talks about it in the book "Living beautifully: With uncertainty and change".

Emotions will drain and drain. In stressful situations, they can rise up inside you like a tsunami. It's only natural. The best way to deal with stress and keep it under control seems to be to accept the emotions. To feel it. But don't act on them. If you act on them, you add fuel to their fire. They will rage higher and longer. Instead, let them burn themselves. Then, when you are calm and the logic has returned, think about how you can avoid repeating the situation that put you in a position of stress and brought up negative emotions such as fear, worry, hate or fear.

– Pema Chodron

Take a deep breath

While feeling the emotions, it may be a good idea to inhale deeply through your nose, hold for a few seconds, and then exhale through your mouth.

This deep breathing has an incredibly calming effect on your body. In my experience, it can help speed the reduction of negative emotions when they occur.

A side effect of stress is shallow breathing.

Shallow breathing interferes with proper oxygenation to cells and reduces your body's ability to recover.

Given that I love to say, "You don't get heavy weights, you make a big recovery from lifting weights."

I've said it twice in this article, so it should be obvious why I believe that if you get stuck in a stressed, shallow state of breathing, it will limit your gains.

Tip for recovery after exercise: With a few simple breathing exercises you can switch from combat or flight mode to rest and digestion mode after training.

This breathing immediately reduces stress, increases the oxygen supply to the cells and accelerates the recovery processes. Exercising in the evening will also help you relax and fall asleep.

Sleep is the most powerful recovery tool available to you. It is therefore of vital importance!

Breathing exercises can also be useful as a proactive stress management tool when done daily. As I mentioned before, I try for a few minutes every morning. It creates a wonderfully calm feeling. I would never claim to be calm, but this is probably the next thing I feel.

Gain perspective

Is it that bad what challenges you? Most of the things we worry about are not that important. It is rarely life or death, or it leads us to financial ruin.

Sit back, take stock, and ask yourself, "What's the worst that can happen?"? "

Often you can gain perspective, look at the stressor objectively and place its meaning appropriately in the hierarchy of events, needs, desires or stresses in your life.

Then nine times out of ten you will relax and find that you unnecessarily twisted your knickers.

Bonus tip::

Step away from your phone – no, not this second – continue reading this fascinating article 🙂 Then step away from your phone.

Phone addiction

What do you instinctively do while waiting for a train or a queue? Most of us reach for our cell phones. This dependency for our phone wasn't the case 10 to 12 years ago.

We'd have to wait – just preoccupied with our thoughts or maybe the conversation has started with a stranger waiting next to us (conversations with real people, in person – that's strange).

We have lost the art of patience, waiting and thinking.

Boredom is a thing of the past. There's always a notification, something on social media, YouTube, or Netflix to keep us entertained. We are still joining the matrix and we seem unable to extract ourselves.

Smartphones have many advantages (don't get me wrong, smartphones are amazing). The downside is that we have become slaves to them.

Our phones increase our stress and anxiety and help us achieve a personable state.

Try to take some time – some kind of digital detox. Turning off / on airplane mode can reduce stress and anxiety. It can also enable you to achieve the mindfulness and presence that I discussed earlier.

It is not easy to take time for our phones. Smartphones are addicting! I have problems with this, but I know that when the phone is out of sight, when I'm at work or out with family, I'm less stressed, more productive, and happier. This struggle also applies to those I am with. Start small and build time.

Some ideas to control the usage of your phone are:::

  • Don't check for the first 30 minutes of your day.

  • If you are doing important work, please switch it to airplane mode and set a timer for how long the work task should last. Don't look at your phone until the time is up.

  • No smartphones with meals

  • Put your phone in a different room at home so you don't get distracted by it.

  • Are you watching TV with your wife, girlfriend, husband, boyfriend, friends, family, cat or dog? Keep the phone out of sight. Enjoy doing what you do and the fact that the phone doesn't distract you.

  • Set up restricted areas. Whether it's physical (e.g. not in the bedroom) or time zones (e.g. not using the phone for the first hour after getting home from work), this rule improves the quality of your relationships to important other people.

  • Set a good example. If you want to be less distracted when spending time with your partner, the first thing you should do is consciously be less distracted. Then, when you suggest that they do the same, they are more likely to respect and value your opinion. Trying to impose it on them before you have achieved it will meet with resistance.

Hope the stress management tips above are helpful to you.

If you can use some of these to help manage your stress levels, you'll be a happier, more productive, and focused person. You will also benefit from rigorous exercise programs and translate your training into noticeable gains in strength, size, and body composition.

In the second installment in this series, The Importance of Structured Training Programs in Recovery, I explain why significant recovery begins with excellent program design.

In it, I outline the four key concepts you will need to understand how to optimize your training and maximize your recoverability.

23 Feb
Blog

The ultimate guide to prison workout is here for you now

Prison training has been around for a while. Most people who do not know what prison training is associate it with a prisoner's exercise. Well you are correct! Prisoner training is inspired by a famous prisoner, Charles Branson, who also maintained his size and strength for seven years in prison.
So if you are curious to find out more about this workout and this man managed to get it all done in prison, you've come to the right place. Today we're going to take you through the best prison workout!

Why is prison training the order of the day?

The lockdown and pandemic have forced people to lock themselves up in their homes to fight the virus. During this time, many people become lazy and have nothing to do. However, this is the best time for you to maintain your fitness and get back on track with minimal desire. Since your favorite restaurants are closed and the search for outside goods is minimal, this is the best time to focus on your diet and build your body at home. Training a prisoner is the perfect way to accomplish this.

The workout we're going to show you today is simple, convenient, and can be done right at home. So you don't have to worry about anything. All you have to do is follow the directions and do the exercises as detailed below. In no time you will be able to see the results for yourself. Trust me; it works like magic.

In these areas you will find some exercises that you will need to do for this workout.

  1. Dip Dips are one way to build the kind of body you have come to expect from this workout. You need to make sure that these exercises are done gradually. Remember, you control them without thinking. Since it helps build tension well, it can be useful to you in a number of ways.
    Place two chairs a little wider than your leg length apart. Now hold the top of the rear area with both hands. Now bend your arms. Lower your torso towards the floor and don't touch the floor. Bring the body back up in a controlled motion. Now keep your back straight. Pause for 30 seconds between sets and do them for 1 to 15 reps.
  1. Squat Squat was one of Branson's favorite workouts. He often had two men seated on him while crouching in jail. But you don't have to be so hard on yourself. The basics are enough to get you started. Squats can help you build balance and strengthen your back like never before.
    Put your arms straight in front of you. It should be parallel to the floor with your chest up. Your spine should also be in a neutral position. Make sure that your whole body is tense all the time. Now try to take a deep breath and break at your hip. Now slide your bum back. Send your hips further back as your knees begin to bend. Try to keep your knees in line while squatting. Three sets of 10 to 15 repetitions are sufficient for this.
  1. Tape pull apart- Now, if you are trying to build muscle, this exercise will help. If you don't have a tape at home, you can use a towel or vest. Follow the steps carefully for the training to produce results.
    Stand up straight and hold an exercise band in both hands. It should be at chest level. Your hands should be shoulder width apart at this point. Now pull the band apart and squeeze the shoulder blades together. Once this is done, return to the first position. Make sure you do at least five sets of 30 reps each.
  1. Wide grip pull-ups These are the best exercises if you want to improve your muscle tone. By practicing this workout, you can build a potential body and activate your muscles like never before. All you have to do is follow the instructions carefully for more information.
    Hold the chin-up bar with your palms facing out. Your arms should extend well. Also, your hands should be far apart. Now squeeze your shoulder blades together. Exhale and bring your elbows on your hips. Go carefully to the starting position. Now repeat the process. About three sets of five repetitions each are sufficient for this.

frequently asked Questions

  1. What other exercises should I do?
    Step-ups, Butt Clenches, Ab Exhale are some of the exercises that you should be performing. You can also practice star jumping, burpees, and sit-ups for the best experience.
  2. Should i warm up?
    Yes. It would be helpful if you warmed up for about 10 minutes to half an hour before starting your workout.
  3. Is it effective?
    Yes it is.

Conclusion

Training the prisoner is the best way to build a healthy body without going to the gym on time. You can do these workouts at any time in your personal area. We promise; It works out!

23 Feb
Blog

Amazfit GTR 2e Review: It’s the GTR 2, Just Cheaper

amazfit gtr 2e smartwatch review wrist shirt

Amazfit GTR 2e Smartwatch

“The Amazfit GTR 2e is almost exactly the same as the Amazfit GTR 2, only $ 40 cheaper. Save yourself some cash and buy this one. "

  • Lots of workout and health tracking functions

  • Low price

  • Nice design

  • Convenient to carry

  • Limited notification support

  • Battery life much shorter than advertised

Smartwatch and wearables company Amazfit decided that their already inexpensive GTR 2 smartwatch wasn't good enough and announced the GTR 2e at CES 2021. It costs $ 140 compared to the $ 180 GTR 2 and looks almost identical on the surface.

Dig deeper and there are few changes that make us wonder why we should buy the GTR 2 in the first place. After a while with the GTR 2e, the answer is clear: save some money and buy the cheaper one. Let's get to the why.

design

Before we start, you should know that like the GTR 2, there are two models – the Amazfit GTR 2e with a round case and the GTS 2e with a square case, similar to the Apple Watch. Apart from the differences in design, the two watches are identical. So if you prefer the square version and want to know if it's any good, don't worry as all of the following about the GTR 2e apply to the GTS 2e.

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

The design definitely lets you know that the GTR 2e is a "watch" as it has little visual impact as it is round, has two buttons and is attached to a bracelet. It's definitely not unattractive, but a little generic. The GTR 2e is available in a few colors, including a lighter green. In black, however, it is a simple, stealthy and inconspicuous smartwatch on the wrist.

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

The case is made of aluminum alloy with curved glass over a 1.65-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 454 x 454 pixels and a PPI density of 341 pixels per inch, just like the GTR 2. Amazfit says it was vacuum coated applied to the tempered glass to ensure that it will withstand fingerprints. However, it doesn't have the added scratch protection that you get on the GTR 2's glass. The 2.5D curve on the body and glass is supposed to be different from the GTR 2's 3D curve, but I can barely feel any change when I directly compare the two.

Amazfit GTR 2e (right) and Amazfit GTR 2 (left) Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

It feels solid but is very light and can feel a little cheap. For example, the case back is plastic, and although it's made of glass above the screen, it's so thin that it doesn't feel like it. There are two buttons on the side of the body, the top one with a sporty red flash, and they have a precise, if not very tactile feel. It's all attached to a simple black silicone bracelet that offers lots of customization options and doesn't get uncomfortable. Due to the light construction and the soft strap, I was happy to wear the GTR 2e day and night.

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Dislikes surround the screen. The bezel of the GTR 2e is simpler and that of the GTR 2 and optically not so conspicuous. The thick bezel around the screen is very noticeable in some lighting conditions and angles. While the curve makes it easier to wipe, the tempered glass doesn't feel as comfortable. It's nowhere near as fluid or deliciously cold to the touch as the Apple Watch or high-quality Wear OS smartwatches like the Citizen CZ Smart. The small collection of watch faces is generic and boring.

Due to the light construction and the soft strap, I was happy to wear the GTR 2e day and night

You can't have it all for $ 140, and overall, the GTR 2e is a nice-looking, if somewhat generic, solidly made smartwatch. Despite the price difference, it isn't much different from the GTR 2 either, and there's absolutely no reason to spend more on it.

Software and operations

The Amazfit GTR 2e uses the company's own operating system rather than Google's Wear operating system, which syncs with the Zepp app on your phone. The setup process is quick, possibly faster than setting up a Wear OS watch. For the app, however, you need to check the phone's settings to give it various permissions. When you do this, you'll get notifications more reliably than most Wear OS smartwatches.

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

Scrolling through the menus on the watch is done by swiping up and down the screen. The layout is familiar to anyone who has used a modern smartwatch – down for shortcuts, up for notifications, and up for various tile-style widgets. while the buttons open the menu or activate the training tracking.

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Scrolling through the menus, opening the apps, and generally interacting with the watch is painless. It's fast and fluid enough not to be disruptive. Just don't expect the Apple Watch to be polished and smooth. Notifications are mostly reliable, but not every app delivers them. Microsoft Teams, for example, was a no-show, and when they arrive the text is sometimes strangely formatted. You can't interact with them either. Therefore, consider the notifications of the GTR 2e for your information only. When activated to wake up, the incoming notification is not always displayed, which reduces convenience.

I used the GTR 2e connected to a Xiaomi Mi 11 smartphone. The Zepp app collects all of your fitness tracking data and also has various settings for the watch. It's more functional than beautiful, and for the most part has remained attached to the watch. There is a notification on the phone that makes it clear if the connection has been disconnected. This is helpful if the bluetooth fails in rare cases. The GTR 2e doesn't have WiFi, the biggest spec difference from the GTR 2, but I didn't notice the lack.

Amazfit GTR 2e (below) and Amazfit GTR 2 (above) Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

The GTR 2e is a relatively simple smartwatch as it doesn't use apps. Hence, I didn't miss the WiFi which usually allows for faster app performance. I also didn't notice the GTR 2e connection to my phone dropping regularly, so I didn't feel like the lack of WiFi was affecting general usage at all. Another feature that is missing compared to the GTR 2 is a loudspeaker so that you cannot take calls on your watch.

The GTR 2e doesn't have WiFi, the biggest spec difference from the GTR 2, but I didn't notice the lack.

When I first tried an Amazfit product, the software was one of the worst aspects. The company has continuously and significantly improved the watch's app and operating system since then. This is no longer a reason not to buy. It's great to see that the software has improved over the version installed on my GTR 2 review, including more workouts and faster activity tracking detection. It's not as fully functional or polished as Apple, Samsung, or Google operating systems, but it can be used on a daily basis. Although the software has been shown to be reliable, battery performance suggests that optimization is required.

battery

Amazfit states that the GTR 2e's battery is typically used for 24 days. This is 10 days more than expected from the GTR 2. However, this goal was not achieved or even came close in my reporting period. Without the automatic heart rate tracking required for features like Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) measurement, a single daily non-GPS exercise and sleep tracking depleted the battery about 10% per day.

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

Turn on heart rate tracking with the one-minute interval recommended by the PAI app and the constantly active time display. The battery had dropped to 20% on the sixth day and had to be recharged on the seventh day. This was a major disappointment as even with these active, performance hungry features, it still misses Amazfit's goal of heavy use for 12 days. The battery should be one of the main advantages of the GTR 2e, but instead it's its biggest disappointment.

Fitness tracking and other functions

Health Amazing instead of Smartwatch functions is the specialty of the Amazfit GTR 2e. There is a huge list of 90+ activities that can be tracked on the GTR 2e. All activities can be called up via the lower button on the housing or via the menu. The displayed list can be edited so that your favorite workouts are immediately available. The data is clearly displayed on the watch. Starting and stopping the workout is easy. There's GPS for running and biking, as well as a heart rate monitor for detailed tracking and data.

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

Keeping track of indoor activities is quick and easy, and provides the usual information like calories, elapsed time, heart rate, and handy stats like the heart rate zone when you're on a stationary bike. Swimming does have some extra stroke data but doesn't have specific stats like SWOLF, while the GPS signal is captured in around 20 seconds when you are outside.

With the GTR 2e you can get a comprehensive picture of your health.

In addition to the heart rate sensor, the GTR 2e has a blood oxygen sensor (Sp02) and can also measure stress. None of these are medical grade, so the results are best treated as reference, although the Sp02 data can be of benefit in tracking sleep. I've found the results to be the same as the Apple Watch. The Amazfit GTR 2e also has a built-in temperature sensor that the more expensive GTR 2 does not have. It measures the skin temperature when worn or the ambient temperature when it is not and also serves as a reference.

amazfit gtr 2e smartwatch review zepp app training "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn9.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/amazfit-zepp-app-workout-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7The Zepp app from Amazfit shows training data Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

amazfit gtr 2e smartwatch review zepp app watch "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn1.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/amazfit-zepp-app-watch-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Amazfit Zepp app with watch data and settings Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

amazfit gtr 2e smartwatch review zepp app steps "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/amazfit-zepp-app-steps-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Amazfit's Zepp app displays step count data Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

amazfit gtr 2e smartwatch review zepp app sleep "class =" m-carousel - image dt-lazy-no "src =" https://icdn3.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/amazfit-zepp-app-sleep-640x640. jpg "srcset =" https://www.digitaltrends.com/data:image/gif;base64,https://www.digitaltrends.com/R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7Amazfits Zepp app with sleep data Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

Combine all of this with Personal Activity Intelligence metrics and sleep tracking. The GTR 2e allows you to get a complete picture of your health, even if you are a relatively dedicated fitness fanatic. The package disappoints with the Zepp app, which hides your workout data and isn't particularly inspiring. The app is far less user-friendly than the wellness app from Fossil or as visually appealing as Apple Health or Google Fit. However, it can be linked to popular apps like Google Fit and Strava.

Temperature sensor of the Amazfit GTR 2e Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

For my daily, simple fitness tracking needs, the Amazfit GTR 2e has everything I need. I really appreciated the updated workout list compared to the version I used for the GTR 2 and consider the watch a step further than a simple tracker like the Galaxy Fit 2 and a better workout partner than more fashionable smartwatches like the Citizen CZ Smart.

Price and availability

The Amazfit GTR 2e is priced at $ 140, or £ 120, and is available on Amazon – at the time of writing, it's available for just $ 125. It is available in either black, gray or muted mint green.

Our opinion

You pay less for the GTR 2e than you do for the GTR 2, and while there are some style and design differences between them, they're barely noticeable. Removing Wi-Fi won't affect battery life, which is nowhere near as good as advertised, but all fitness and health metrics are the same.

I have already recommended the Amazfit GTR 2 and not only recommend the GTR 2e to anyone who wants a fitness-oriented smartwatch without spending too much on one. It really is a better buy compared to the GTR 2. They are neither design-oriented nor do they have significant material advantages, so why not just buy the cheaper one?

Is there a better alternative?

The Amazfit GTR 2e is much cheaper than our usual smartwatch recommendations. If cost is not an issue, the Apple Watch is the smartwatch you can buy if you own an iPhone, or for Android phone owners we recommend either the Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 3 or the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3. All of these are but at least all twice as expensive as the Amazfit GTR 2e.

They're also true smartwatches, meaning they run apps and offer better smartphone integration. If you're more interested in fitness tracking than the smartwatch aspects of it, consider a model from Fitbit. The $ 230 Fitbit Versa 3 has a watch-like design and features, as does a $ 120 Fitbit Charge 4 with just a traditional fitness band design.

What about the Amazfit GTR 2? It costs a little more than the GTR 2e, but does not offer any additional, indispensable functions and the construction and material advantages are minimal. When you look at a smartwatch like the Amazfit GTR 2 and GTR 2e, budget probably plays a huge role. So you can save as much as possible and make the GTR 2e for sale.

How long it will take?

The watch strap, metal case, and glass shade should be durable if you handle it normally. It also has a water resistance of 50 meters so you can swim with it. If the Zepp app is still supported by Amazfit, it will technically last two or more years. The design is relatively generic, however, and you may get tired of what it looks like before the watch or software is out of date.

There are also enough fitness features to keep both casual and more dedicated fitness fans happy with the watch. Even if your habits or interests change, the versatility of the Amazfit GTR 2e means you won't have to suddenly upgrade if you decide to go surfing or long distance running.

Should you buy it?

Yes. The battery life may not be as impressive as the specs stated, but it is decent and will hopefully be improved with a software update soon. Apart from that, the Amazfit GTR 2e is a reliable, inexpensive, fitness-oriented smartwatch.

Editor's recommendations




23 Feb
Blog

The Njoie Nforce Percussion Massage Gun

The Njoie (pronounced enjoy) Nforce massage gun is a lightweight percussion massage gun that uses short duration staccato jolts with gentle hammering to penetrate your soft tissues.

Does it help with recovery? I couldn't put it objectively, but it feels good and it's relaxing. And that can be anything it has to be. If you need some science to help you, here's what: Compare the effects of vibration therapy and massage in preventing delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).

There isn't a lot of research specific to percussion massage guns, however. At first I was skeptical because they are not cheap and are called weapons that you have to point at yourself and trigger.

How Percussion Massage Guns Work

At the top of the range for percussion massage guns like the $ 599 Theragun Pro are a few key specs: 60 pounds of power, 16mm amplitude, Bluetooth, OLED screen, and wireless charging.

And if you pay six hundred dollars to get beaten up, you have to consider the specs. You want more than 40 pounds of force so you can apply more pressure and not stop the massager from working because it is jamming.

You want higher amplitudes, with 16mm being the top of the range as this is the amount the massager head moves outward and you need higher amplitudes for deeper massages.

You also want speed, how fast the massage head is moving, with the medium speed range being around 2,500 RPM. In this regard, the Njoie Nforce hits the bull's eye. And it drops below $ 100.

That's a long way to make up for the lack of muscle specs that can be compared to the big boys. I think the only way you can tell the difference in performance is by having devices on either end of the spectrum that you can compare right on your skin.

5 levels advantage
1900 rpm Relaxation
2300 rpm Wake up muscles
2700 rpm Decompose lactic acid
3100 rpm Improve blood circulation
3500 rpm Relieve deep tension

Good vibrations, ROM and DOMs

The Njoie Nforce Percussion Massage Gun - Reviews, Relief, Flexibility, Massage Therapy, Tension, Impact Massage, Massage Gun, Deep Tissue Massage

The benefits of massage are tangible for everyone, from the hardcore lifter to the casual user. The premise of massage is that it moves muscles and tissues, releases toxins by creating better blood circulation, better oxygen flow and general relaxation from tension and stress.

It can help loosen you up after a heavy lifting session and keep you flexible. It can help you sleep better, as anyone who has ever had a massage at a spa can testify.

I can say in no uncertain terms that everyone in my family struggles to use Nforce at night and that it's pretty cool to beat yourself up with it before you go to bed.

Just the vibrations on your skin are enough to relax you. Even so, you need to be careful to keep the gun away from your neck or sensitive body parts. Maneuvering it yourself can be a challenge unless you have experience as a contortionist.

However, it builds grip strength, especially at higher speeds. And if it just gives you a sense of relaxation, then it's worth the hundred dollars you pay for it. That is probably no more than a professional spa massage worth cost.

That brings me to my ultimate recommendation for the Njoie Nforce: You get what you pay for. This is an entry-level product or an inexpensive alternative to more powerful percussion massage guns.

The experience is enjoyable on an occasional basis, but if you're someone who considers a massage gun a part of your workout and recovery, then you should consider something a little stronger.

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