Category: Exercise Science, Biology, and Research

SLEEP and Recovery

Why Sleep and Recovery Is So Important For Personal Training Clients

In pursuit of the perfect body, many people focus on things like workout routines and supplements, however, many fail to consider another vital component of training-recovery. Remember that training is the stimulus to which the body adapts, but sufficient rest is essential to allow time for the adaptations to take place.

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Calorie

What Is a Calorie? Personal Trainers Need to Know!

Weight loss to improve cardiovascular health is a high priority of the American Heart Association because approximately 34 percent of the population is overweight.
The most basic and fundamental law that governs whether you gain weight or lose weight is the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed from one type to another. For our purposes here, the most common unit of energy measure is the calorie.

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VO2 max

Understanding VO2 Max and the Altitude Challenge

When embarking on a new exercise program, there are many factors to keep in mind. One must decide on the frequency of workouts, their duration, and most importantly, their intensity. For more seasoned athletes, these factors are often broken down into much more specific areas; one such area is the consideration of VO2 max.

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MUSCLE FIBERS

Understanding Muscle Fibers and Function

As a competent and effective personal trainer, who is equipped with the knowledge necessary to be considered a fitness “expert”, you need to know the basis of human movement. That is, how knowing the different muscle fibers and how they work.

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hypertrophy

Understanding Hypertrophy: Why Do Muscles Get Bigger?

We know that muscle will grow when properly trained and when proper nutrients are supplied. But what biological system is responsible for this growth stimulus? Is it one or is it all of them? Is growth caused by the forces applied to the muscles through weight training , or on a more cerebral level, is resistance exercise merely a means by which we expose, through recruitment, as many muscle fibers as possible to some other stimulus responsible for growth?

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bioenergetics

Bioenergetics: Aerobic versus Anaerobic Energy Production

While we are all familiar with aerobic activity, defined in the early 1970s by Dr. Kenneth Cooper as activity during which the cardiorespiratory system provides enough oxygen for muscular effort, most of us associate anaerobic activity with that very hard effort we do during intervals. The fact is that each non-sequential muscular effort, such as turning your head, entails some measure of energy production in the absence of oxygen, qualifying it as anaerobic.

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Endorphins

The Power of Endorphins

Runner’s “high” is so-called because of the euphoria associated with the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain, of which endorphins are one category. From…

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