Sprints, Bodyfat and Making a Hormone

Guys,

Started going down to the track and sprinting 400's and 100's recently. I just wanted to get a more thorough leg workout. Needless to say after sprints followed one day by deadlifts, two days later by squats...

I was so sore I could barely walk and sat down and googled sprints. Turns out, if you believe what's on the internet, speed work is purported to raise metabolism, decrease bodyfat, make muscles larger (full body) and increase growth hormone by ridiculous amounts.

 
Be careful of injuries, though! Sprinting can also be in the form of water activity such as swimming (mixing strokes is less likely to injure).

Best,

Dave

Links:

"Raises metabolism" :

http://www.shapefit.com/sprinting.html

 

"Corvoisier of cardio":

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/par46.htm

 

"Researchers from Loughborough University have shown that in sprint-trained athletes, growth hormone levels reached 25 times their resting levels approximately 30 minutes after finishing a 30-second sprint.":

http://www.maximuscle.com/trainingtips/growthhormone.html

 

"General anti-long, slow distance cardio article":

 http://www.mikementzer.com/aerobic.html

 

 

One More:

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do;jsessionid=6284DA31DD8D CBDE11AAA98169341A06.hydra?id=481095&pageNo=-1#bottom

New research is showing that endurance performance can be dramatically improved with very high intensity anaerobic work. In a previous study from this group, six bouts of very high intensity interval sprinting (4-7 Wingate sprints per session) conducted over two weeks (three times per week for two weeks) improved time to exhaustion at 80% of VO₂ max by an almost unbelievable amount (baseline time to exhaustion = 25 minutes; post training time to exhaustion = 51 minutes).

In this study, the same researchers duplicated the prior training protocol and this time measured both metabolic adaptations and changes in time trial performance. In eight men, high intensity sprint training improved resting muscle glycogen by 53%, improved maximal activity of several aerobic and anaerobic enzymes, reduced the amount of lactic acid produced during exercise and improved time trial performance (+10.4%) and average power produced (+25W) during the time trial.

If you’ve ever done a Wingate, you’ll understand just how brutal this protocol is. However, this kind of hard work pays off with some unbelievable performance gains.

Good stuff.  Thanks for the post and sharing this stuff with us on the Men's Board. I couldn't open the sprint.html site or the one on growhth hormone production but they were both addressed in the articles I could access.  I copied it all to a Word doc for my collective reading and printing.  Thought my competivitve swimmer daughter (age 12) might be interested in some of this info as well. Joe

Thanks, Joe. The info, along with the 530% increase in growth hormone all seems to be true, albeit only with 30 seconds of near 100% effort. With swimming, the coolness of the water and the position (laying down) won't allow for as high a heartrate as with runnning, so maybe crosstraining for your daughter running or on the bike. The highest level of exertion possible is on a row machine, due to the number of larger muscles involves (lats and legs combined). So row machine sprints might be optimal, especially for a swimmer.

 

Best Wishes,

 

Dave