bluefoxicy

How fast is normal for building capacity, and for rebuilding?

When I was amusing myself with the 100 push-up thing, I was building total capacity at or above 18% per 2 days--the number of push-ups ramps by about 18%, and since it's just repeated isometric work (i.e. it's all identical units, though this is not isometric exercise) your total energy output (work completed) is linearly correlated to the number of push-ups. Do 10 push-ups today and 12 tomorrow? That's 20% more energy output before your muscles give up. (Measuring muscle strength and stamina separately is much harder--repping push-ups is stamina, but you're going to get stronger doing this).

At one point I moved from Tier 2 to Tier 3, but that didn't last--I couldn't keep up on Tier 3. Too much growth demand I guess. Have to try again.

64% per week is a lot. That's like you can lift 100lb on Monday, and on Friday you can lift 164lb. More relevant, it's like being able to do sets of 10 reps of 50kg on Monday and the same number of sets of 16 reps on Friday. Do you know where you'd end up if you carried that out for 6 months? The 100 Push-ups thing indicates that normal people who don't puss out (even women--the mascot has boobs) can go from 4 sets of 4 to several sets of LOTS, and then just blast out 100 in one shot. That's going from really friggin' weak to really friggin' strong in a month and a half.

Of course, I couldn't make half a mile without killing myself, and a month later I was bicycling 7.5 miles to work with 850ft climbing there and 1230ft back due to horrible terrain, taking 5 minutes longer than driving it in my car, without a hitch, 5 days a week. That's pretty amazing, I guess, considering I was biking twice a week for 2 weeks.

Yesterday I nearly vomited and it took an hour before I didn't feel like I was dying of e.coli because of a 2.5 minute boxing session with a 100lb bag. Today I blew it off no problem, I friggin' murdered that bag. I should have gone harder; my heart rate didn't get up quite as high and I wasn't much winded.


I feel like I rebuild capacity a lot faster than I build it initially. I've had strong arms, strong cardio, and strong legs before. The second and third attempt at the 100 push-ups thing, I blew through the first three weeks in two weeks; I raced right past the program, I was building way faster than it suggested, yet I started out even weaker than on my first try. Same with bicycling, when I get back into it I come back up in a day or so, a week at worst, not 2 months, though day one after half a year's haiatus is horrible.

Is that normal? How fast should I be building, rebuilding? Am I just stronger than I think to begin with? This is a lot less hard work than I am lead to believe by slow, lazy fat people who eat potato salad while watching TV. (To be fair, I don't take care of myself at all; everything has a purpose, either amusement or utility. Bicycling, boxing, even the push-up thing is just to see if I can do it rather than to get myself in shape.)

I'm not a fitness guy; I do things for amusement. Finding out I'm too weak and the whole thing is painful and unfeasible is just an annoyance that happens along the way. Don't ask me how muscles work; all I'll do is treat them like machines.

chasm54

You aren't treating your muscles like machines. Machines don't get more powerful with use.

Your feeling that you rebuild capacity much faster than you built it first time round is almost certainly correct, and a common experience. People call it "muscle memory" and I'm not sure anyone fully understands the mechanism, but it is well recognised. But I don't believe that when cycling you "come back up in a day or so" after a six-month hiatus. You will certainly notice a big difference after a few days hard training, but were you to measure your performance in terms of power output I'm confident it would take you a while to return to a previous peak - assuming that peak was bigger than a molehill in the first place. And with all due respect, 7.5 miles to work on a bike isn't very far.

What you are probably experiencing on the bike is similar to what you were doing with push-ups: you make very big gains to start with, but couldn't possibly sustain an improvement of 18% every two days indefinitely.

How fast people respond to exercise varies greatly. About 20% of the population are "non-responders". If they exercise, they get all sorts of health benefits like lower BP, lower insulin resistance etc., but for some reason they don't get any more aerobically fit. A slightly smaller percentage are "super-responders", their bodies adapt very fast to stress. And everyone else is on a spectrum in the middle.

bluefoxicy

Yeah 7.5 miles isn't much. At a point I could just bike around all day; when I started I couldn't go more than half a mile or so without feeling like I got hit by a truck, so getting from a fresh season where I'm in terrible pain trying to get anywhere back up to 8-10 miles at 12-15mph looks like a lot of growth to me.

My body adapts very quickly to stress but I don't think that's because I'm some kind of super-human; it's probably more that the human body is an amazing machine in general and I've never really considered just what people are capable of. Stuff I'd figure would take years apparently doesn't take quite as long; I had a colleague who spent 2 months training from scratch to run a marathon, and that's a lot of running.

chasm54

Depends how fast you want to run it, and what "from scratch" means. Some people are ordinarily quite fit and lean. Others are 400lbs and haven't so much as run for a bus in 20 years. Two months preparation isn't much, but if one is in reasonable shape to start with I guess it would be enough to get to the point where one could at least complete the course.

It doesn't take long to see quite big gains in one's power and speed on a bike. What does take time is building the aerobic base that will allow one to consolidate the gains, tolerate the increasing training loads and keep getting stronger from year to year. Pro cyclists tend to peak in the their late twenties and early thirties for this reason, one sees very few (Eddy Merckx aside) who fulfil their potential when young.