Quotes from Gym Jones Article in Outside Magazine

Want to loose weight fast, try not drinking alcohol for a month.

Weight lifting, properly deployed, will serve any athlete at any level because it develops power, they told us, and power is the one thing central to almost every sport. Most of what I new about weight training I'd learned in high school, where I mimicked routines that had originated in competitive bodybuilding. The strategy entailed isolating muscles and working them until they failed - curls, bench presses, triceps extension, etc. - and them moving on to the next muscle group. After a while, your muscles got bigger, and naturally, everyone assumed that a bigger muscle was a stronger muscle.
But that wasn't always the case. In fact, exercise physiologists discovered that muscle isolation is often counterproductive when it comes to executing more complex natural movements, where muscles are required to work in concert. Hence the value of Olympic lifting, with its expanded range of motion. Physiologist also discovered that only certain types of lifting make muscles grow larger - specifically, doing eight to 15 reps in sets that end in complete exhaustion. In contrast, slightly modified approaches, like fewer reps with heavier weight, build stronger muscles without making them bigger - particularly appealing to endurance athletes, for whom increased size is considered a liability.

There's legitimate science behind the high-intensity work, too, and both John and Twight believe that done right, it produces rapid and profound results. The most convincing studies have been done by a Japanese physiologist named Izumi Tabata. In 1996, Dr. Tabata discovered that short-duration, high-intensity training enhances anaerobic capacity while simultaneously increasing aerobic endurance. This allows you to shed more fat than with moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, and it also produces a metabolic after-burn as the body works to repair itself.

Outside - Nov 2008