Technology and sports science is constantly evolving and finding new ways to help athletes improve their training sessions.
Marginal gains are everything in sport. The small improvements add up to big results.
A big problem for elite and amateur athletes alike is to find the best weight to do resistance training for maximal results without tiring the body out too much so you can come back and train hard later in the week.
Now, a new mathematical model has found a way of calculating the optimal weight for each individual and there are plans for it to be made available in a brand new fitness app.
How To Find Your Optimum Training Weight
Researchers from Cambridge University found there is a critical load below which muscle mass won’t increase.
"Surprisingly, not very much is known about why or how exercise builds muscles. There's a lot of anecdotal knowledge and acquired wisdom, but very little in the way of hard or proven data,” Professor Eugene Terentjev, one of the authors, said.
This new optimum weight is all to do with a protein in our muscles called titin which generates the signals that stimulate muscle growth.
The researchers found that about 70% of your one-rep max is a sweet spot where most of the growth occurs.
It’s at this weight that the titin proteins open themselves up and affect the signalling molecules to generate growth.
Why Has It Taken So Long To Figure It Out?
There has been so little understanding of this previously because the chemical interactions happen on such small scales at a molecular level.
"The interactions between the main structural molecules in muscle were only pieced together around 50 years ago. How the smaller, accessory proteins fit into the picture is still not fully clear,” Neil Ibata, another of the study’s authors, said.
While there have been some attempts to extract these molecules and study them individually, this ignores some of the influences that exercise have in a practical sense.
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