High-Intensity Training Frequency

 A once a week session of high-intensity exercise is the standard for what most people will thrive on.

The problem for most is dealing with the extreme muscle soreness from only once a week workouts because if one does nothing between those once a week high intensity workouts, the recovery takes longer, and so the key was discovering how one can recover from those once a week high-intensity workouts, and the fortunate discovery I made was when in my 40s at the height of Nautilus and high-intensity training, I was diverted onto exercising with no equipment for a while, and then when asked to instruct disabled, senior, and even terminal people on recovering from their conditions -- recognized the unappreciated points that Arthur Jones also emphasized but was ignored.

And that was the importance of extending the range of motion as an essential focus of the movement -- because those extremes, provide their own resistance. His claim was that the Nautilus machines provided variable resistance throughout the full range of movement -- but adding resistance, decreases the range of movement. That is to observe that increasing the weight (resistance) always decreases the range that is moved -- and that the real value, was moving from 0 to 100% contraction -- because that difference is the rate of flow, and the principle of fluid dynamics. That's how the heart works in pushing the blood out towards the extremities.

But the greater benefit is not in making the heart work harder (resulting in enlarged, weakened hearts that is the bane of strength athletes), but in using the skeletal (voluntary) muscles of the body to compress (contract) the blood back towards the heart -- and that is why people who exercise that function over every other consideration including running, jumping, lifting weights, optimize their health to those extremities that are well-known for poor circulation and the first places to fail in older people as the dementias, arthritis, venous insufficiency, edema, lymphedema, lipedema, etc.

Contraction is compression -- and why compression clothing works in people with notoriously poor circulation. It reduces the inflammation (swelling) just as it reliably does in healing injuries, as well as the recovery from intense workouts which are a controlled form of injury. That is to note that one must break down to make room and necessity for the new -- as the muscle cell releases energy and produces waste products. However, in modern sedentary lives, it is quite possible that one does not provide any muscle contractions other than what they actually think to effect (exercise), so that the glaring weakness becomes the circulation to the head, hands and feet -- which then become the characteristic markers of deterioration in the elderly and those in poor condition. That's actually where the primary focus should be -- over the biceps and abdominals -- which are not the primary expressors of human performance.

Again, it is because people are distracted from the essential and significant, to the trivial and decorative -- because the problem of the old, weak and disfunctioning, is not that one can no longer squat with 200 lbs -- but they cannot squat at all, which includes many bodybuilders and formerly great athletes. Increasing the weight to 300 lbs is not going to recover that capability -- much less doing it more frequently. That's just wishful thinking.