Muscle Fibers Types
“Oh gosh here comes another story….”
After I graduated high school I went to what is called the Naval Academy Preparatory School(NAPS). It was a place designated for those who the Naval Academy didn’t believe were ready for the academic rigors of the Naval Academy either due to our grades or our SAT/ACT scores. Where we lived is in the blue oval, Ripley Hall.
However, it was criticized as being a backdoor for athletes to get into the Academy that otherwise wouldn’t belong there. There was some truth to this. We would sometimes call ourselves the Naval Academy Party School. Yeah, there was some wild stuff that occurred during my year here but that’s for another day.
In the oval to the right that’s placed over that field is where I had one of the hardest workouts of my life.
During our sports period, we were required to work out. For those on track to become varsity athletes at the academy they would train with their teams for the most part. Later in the year, they allowed some of us normies to participate in their weight room workouts.
But in the beginning, if you were a normie you were pretty much allowed to do whatever workout you wanted to every day.
Some of the teams there allowed for walk-ons, for the normies to become more than just normies. I had my eyes set on the wrestling team as in high school I was pretty involved with a martial arts studio that held grappling classes several times a week. Grappling is different from wrestling but still has some similarities.
I’ve never really been part of a sports team up to this point as I was a band nerd the previous couple of years.
I had a few other friends interested in the wrestling team as well so I thought it was a good choice. So after signing up and receiving word about when and where our first try-out was we got dressed and walked on over to the field. It was a cloudy day with a light drizzle but it was raining hard by the end of our try-out.
The coach at the time saw how many walk-ons there were and found it appropriate to turn the try-outs into a weed-out. For the next hour in rows of five and lines of seven to eight, we would go non-stop back and forth with
Forward Sprints
Backward Sprints
Bear Crawls
Crab Walks
Buddy Carries
& More
I never could catch my breath for that hour. Meanwhile, the coach would be yelling at us,
“Get tired!!!!”
“Push past that wall of fatigue!!!!”
I didn’t want to quit. This was my only chance to be part of a sports team so I kept pushing. By the end of that hour, soaking wet and feeling like our lungs were gonna pop, I only remember one or two people who quit. All of my friends and I had made it.
Our coach at the time was pleased with this for he wasn’t going easy on us.
However, a few weeks later the athletic director of the school got concerned about us walk-ons getting injured so we were kicked off anyway…
For the non-walk-on wrestlers although they were breathing hard this was more of a walk in the park for them. They have been involved in this type of intense training for years. For myself up to this point, all I did was
30 - 40 minute runs with a weight vest
Martial arts classes with some conditioning
& weight lifting.
Although I’m black and can perform a decent sprint, this type of training was outside my comfort zone. Your body will eventually adapt to whatever training stimulus you give it.
Humanity has known this since the beginning of time. However, recent facets of knowledge have made this pursuit more complicated than it should be.
In my previous post, I talked about Harold Hillman and his work in questioning electron microscopy. The main problem is that the way we know about the human body is due to observing dead tissue separated from its host and put through conditions that it would never experience thus altering what we are looking at. What we “Understand” about human skeletal muscle comes from this process.
But when we toss out the sliding filament narrative and venture into the muscle as a “Viscous Fluid” narrative, how do we make sense of speed?
If muscle fiber types, fast and slow twitch were discovered through similar methods how can we update our understanding?
Let’s find out…
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