Deep Fitness?

 

Every so often, I peruse the health section of Amazon Kindle.  The other day, I came across a book on something called deep fitness.  I gather it is a new term to match the information found in this book.  I decided to look at it in more detail. I would call this a program because it claims to be a science based strength program that provides maximum results quickly.

They use the term "deep fitness" to refer to a person's overall state that mitigates various health risks. The big claim is that most exercise beliefs are about 50 years behind the current research. It claims that the health of your muscles is the foundation of your metabolism.  So one of the best ways to improve your metabolism is to work on your muscles. 

This program claims you only need to do one to two 30 minute sessions per week to increase your strength. It is composed of 30 exercises, some of which can be done at home with your own weight or a resistance band, and some can be done at the local gym.  They even have videos at a paid site that one can use to go with this program. 

Since I am not a person who is up to date on all the research, I went looking for reviews of this particular program because it is important to know any weaknesses of something like this.  The first 50 pages or so look at the biology associated with the body and it supports how important it is to do strength training each and every week.  The book focuses on six principles that focus on muscle strength.

The first one is the overload principle.  The idea behind this one is that the muscle only strengthens when it is required to do more work than it is accustomed to.  This is the reason you increase the amount of weight you use, or use stronger resistance bands. This is one of the fundamental tenants of strength training.  The second principle states the muscle strength increases due to the resistance applied that is more than the muscle is accustomed to. The resistance has to be increased so the muscle strengthens. 

The next one says that when the muscle is worked to the point it fails, this promotes increased muscle strength. This process does not have to take a long time.  I notice it takes a couple minutes when I up the weight I use, until I get used to it.  The fourth principal is the one where intensity is more important than duration. So how hard you go is more important than how long you do it.  Rather than counting reps, just do it until you've fatigued the muscle since you want to cause failure.

The fifth one focuses on the rate at which you do the exercise.  What produces the best results is to do the exercise slowly since that provides less stress on your joints.  Slowly is taking at least two seconds up and two down, or four seconds each way. The final principle is that the strengthening occurs after you have finished exercising because you are working the muscles to the point they fail and they have to recover so they are back to normal and this happens once you are done with your exercising.

This book seems to take all the current knowledge on strength training and put it all in once place and into one workout.  Having researched this topic, it means I need to make a few changes to my workout but it won't take much change to meet what is needed based on their information.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.