Unlocking Your Full Potential: Muscle Flexibility, Strength, and Load Management.

Being sedentary is the fourth-leading mortality risk, highlighting the importance of maintaining an active lifestyle. Flexibility and strengthening exercises should be incorporated into a regular routine to enhance muscular resilience and improve muscular health. But how do you measure the amount and intensity of exercise to incorporate into your routine? 

Despite increasing research on load management, a single definitive tool that is accurate and reliable for load monitoring has not been established yet. Multiple tools are often used and will vary across different sports. Load monitoring can provide useful information for coaches and athletes about the training response and help in the design of training programs ultimately helping prevent injury and improve performance. A simple and accessible tool to monitor muscle health during training will be a game-changer, That's where Myomar's muscle health test comes in!

Flexibility and Resilience

Flexibility exercises are movements that improve joint mobility helping you carry out everyday tasks and physical activity. Some examples are stretching, yoga and pilates. Health professionals argue that improving flexibility can help improve your posture, reduce aches and pains, as well as lower risk of injury. Everyone’s body needs some resilience; this means preparing the muscles in your body to adjust when missteps occur and resist the strain imposed without injury. As you stretch, your muscles are provided with more circulation and hydration, preparing them to work for you and primes them to bounce back from strain. 

Stretching also helps identify areas in your body that are tense and may need extra support to avoid pain and injury. When your muscles feel “tight”, it's a sign of increased muscle tension, which means that the muscle fibers are in a shortened state. This tightness limits range of motion and may cause a muscle imbalance. When you use your muscles they are unable to fully extend putting you at risk for joint pain, strains and muscle damage. 

Strengthening Exercises and Muscle Health 

Strengthening activities are those that make your muscles work harder than usual, to the point that you may need a short rest before resuming. These activities involve using body weight or working against a form of resistance. Some examples are: Lifting weights, using resistance elastic bands, walking up stairs or hills, or bodyweight exercises like squats or push-ups. 

Regularly performing muscle strengthening exercises not only increases muscle strength but also mass, power and endurance. It also helps make your bones stronger and improves balance and mobility. Increasing strength and joint stability through these exercises can help prevent falls. Additionally, such exercises are found to slow down the rate of bone and muscle loss due to aging. The benefits don’t end there! Regularly performing any kind of muscle strengthening exercises, independent of duration or volume, is associated with a reduced chance of having diabetes, respiratory, and musculoskeletal conditions, and anxiety/depression. 

What is Load Management? 

Principles

Load is defined as the total amount of physical, physiological, and psychological stress on the human body over training sessions and competitions. Loads can be quantified through external loads, internal loads, or a combination of both. External loads are the amount of work performed like training frequency and time, distance covered, jumps completed, balls thrown, number of games played, power output, etc. Internal loads are the amount of mental stress and physiological effects inside your body that are measured through perception of effort, heart rate, recovery heart rate, questionnaires, diaries, etc. An accessible way to monitor internal load is through muscle monitoring. The principle behind load management is implementing optimal training load with adequate recovery. 

Benefits

Understanding the relationship between load and injury helps optimize fitness and performance while reducing harm. Managing internal and external loads is needed for positive adaptation throughout training. Workloads that are too low can have negative impacts by failing to produce the desired improvement or by increasing the risk of injury because of lack of readiness. On the other hand, workloads that are too high can result in over exhaustion or injury leading to physical and/or mental limitations. It’s a fine balance and very important to be monitored on a regular basis!

Implementing Load Management

Recovery plans and forms of load measuring should be sport-specific since demands and skills vary from sport to sport. Training loads are adjusted at different time points in the training cycle to increase or decrease fatigue depending on the stage of training. Recovery should address both the physical and mental stresses of training and competition. Ideally, it should be specific to each athlete with short, mid and long term plans. Some forms of recovery are cold water baths post workout, dynamic stretching, scheduled rest period, and mental relaxation therapies. 

Monitoring varies between team sports and individual practices. Monitoring team sports can be viewed as more difficult because of various training activities like strength training and practices as well as the influence of the environment, like the effect of opposing teams, home or away games and travel. Some of the most useful measures for team athletes are changes inside the body, assessment of movement patterns, and indicators of skill as specific to the sport as possible. It is also important to monitor and manage load for athletes individually within a team. Individual team members can respond in different ways to a given training regimen/load. In individual sports like cycling, running, swimming and triathlon load monitoring is typically measured through volume, duration and intensity of training, and perceived fatigue. Myomar muscle test would greatly benefit this population to indicate what is happening to muscle prior to physically observable changes!

1.        Bennie, J. A. et al. Muscle-Strengthening Exercise Among 397,423 U.S. Adults: Prevalence, Correlates, and Associations With Health Conditions. Am J Prev Med 55, 864–874 (2018).

2.        How to improve your strength and flexibility - NHS. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/strength-and-flexibility-exercises/how-to-improve-strength-flexibility/.

3.        Increase Muscle Resilience with Three Simple Stretches | PALM Health. https://www.palmhealth.com/increase-muscle-resilience-with-three-simple-stretches/#.

4.        Miranda-Comas, G., Zaman, N., Ramin, J. & Gluck, A. The Role of Workload Management in Injury Prevention, Athletic, and Academic Performance in the Student-Athlete. Curr Sports Med Rep 21, 186–191 (2022).

5.        Halson, S. L. Monitoring Training Load to Understand Fatigue in Athletes. doi:10.1007/s40279-014-0253-z.