Muscles; Use Them or Lose Them and You Need Them for Skiing.

Make Him Strong Enough from His Head Down to His Toes.

pop quiz: the lyric above is from what song and artist? clue: ex-head supreme makes a hit, the king of pop wrote and produced.

Alex Hutchinson reports research by Luc van Loon on Outside Magazine. Luc is an ‘extraordinary professor’ of exercise physiology and nutrition at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Muscle that took you six months to build up in your body can be lost in a week! Luc says, “you can mess up a lot more in one week than you can improve in six months of training.”

From what I can gather this is what he concludes and recommends about your Muscles;

1. You naturally breakdown 2% of your muscle every day, this means that amino acids found in protein need to replace them. All your muscles will be gone in 3 months unless they are replaced. You will start to wither if you don’t eat the right sort and amount of protein.
2. Just after exercise your body receives much better signals to convert protein to muscle. However, from each meal you eat there is a limit to how much protein can be converted. You should eat/drink a portion of good protein after exercise three or four times a day for maximum benefit.
3. The reverse is true. Inactivity still means your muscles breakdown but nothing stimulates their repair and regeneration. All of us should avoid bed rest and any period of inactivity. Once muscle has gone it is very hard to get it back.
4. You need to give your body’s system the best opportunity to get as many nutrients as possible from the food you eat as quickly as possible. Chew your food into small bits and sit up straight whilst eating so food travels to your stomach quickly, or drink protein…

My out-take: Use spare moments of your day to exercise – like exercising whilst you are cleaning your teeth. Keep active – ski and do yoga every day. Eat a nutritionally balanced diet – veggie mountain food options for me.

pop trivia: ‘Diana Ross’ had a 1982 hit with ‘Muscles’, written and produced by ‘Michael Jackson’.