In article <
[email protected]>, "(Pete Cresswell)" <
[email protected]> wrote:
> RE/
> >Unless you regularly somehow add weight to doing push-ups they will not increase the size of the
> >pec muscles.
>
> I'll bet they will if somebody ups the reps enough.
Not quite. The key to hypertrophy is full-to-complete overloading of as many muscle filaments as
possible combined with enough recovery time for repairing and rebuilding the filaments. That's why
high-resistance, low-repetition exercise builds muscle mass. Low-resistance, high-rep exercise
utilize only a fraction of available muscle fibers with little overload, but it does tend to tax the
energy delivery systems (i.e., mitochondria and capillaries) which helps develop endurance. However,
they won't develop as much bulk.
Marathon runners and "spin" cyclists tend to have sinewy but slender legs relative to sprinters and
"hammer" cyclists. I can do over a hundred pushups easily but my pecs aren't really that bulky,
compared to when I was doing higher-weight dumbbell flyes.
Quick explosive movements also utilize entire masses of muscle fiber, but the resistance is low, so
unless you do lots of _intense_ reps, you won't overload muscle as effectively as plain old
high-resistance exercise. That's probably why a lot of boxers have well-developed wings even though
there's little resistance in pulling the arm back from a punch.
> The stroke for knee-paddling a surfboard has very little resistance to it, but after two years of
> surfing I had a back like Arnold Schwartzenegger's. Neck like a pencil and legs like pipe
> cleaners...but a huge back...
True, surfers and swimmers tend to have good backs. But keep in mind that arm circles from paddling
and strokes utilize the trapezius, teres, rhomboids and other smaller secondary back muscles that
bulk up in addition to latissimus dorsi.
Van
--
Van Bagnol / v a n at wco dot com / c r l at bagnol dot com ...enjoys - Theatre / Windsurfing /
Skydiving / Mountain Biking ...feels - "Parang lumalakad ako sa loob ng paniginip" ...thinks - "An
Error is Not a Mistake ... Unless You Refuse to Correct It"
