Ed McNeely- Peak Centre for Human Performance

Strength training can have a tremendous impact on running performance. Using barbells and dumbbells is the fastest and most effective way of increasing strength to improve your performance but there are times when you are on the road for work or just can’t make it to the gym. When this happens consider having some rubber tubing on hand.

For many people training with tubing offers all the benefits of strength training with machines and weights with several advantages over the more traditional training modalities.

The most obvious advantage of using rubber tubing for your strength program is the portability of the tubing. Tubing takes up very little space and a complete program can be designed using two or three different resistances and household items like broom handles, stools, and chairs, making it an ideal training tool for those who want to train at home and have limited space. Tubing can easily fit into an overnight bag or suitcase when you are traveling, allowing busy professionals to get in their workout on the road.

Tubing is one of the most cost effective strengthening tools available, starting at under $5 for a single tube a complete home tubing gym can be developed for under $75. The low price makes tubing the ideal equipment for settings like physical education classes and group fitness.

Tubing offers nearly complete freedom of motion. It can be adjusted to any size and shape body and can be used in an unlimited number of positions. The freedom of motion that you get from tubing means that not only are the major muscles exercised during a movement but the smaller stabilizing muscles that are important for preventing injury are also strengthened.

Tubing provides the opportunity to more closely simulate sports movements than free weights or machines. One of the main principals in sport conditioning training is transfer of training. Transfer of training refers to the amount of sport performance improvement that comes from a certain exercise or training method. For instance if you increase the amount you can bench press by 100% and your basketball free throw improves by 1% because of it you have a 1% transfer of training. We know that it is impossible to completely simulate a sport activity with any type of resistance training but the closer you can come to the movement the greater the rate of transfer. In some instance the tubing can actually be attached to the sport implement to ensure a closer simulation.

Many strength training machines lock you into a fixed movement pattern that is dictated by the pulley, cam and track arrangement of the machine, making them very effective for training the primary muscles but less effective at working the stabilizer muscles. The latest pulley devices from companies like Free Motion and Life Fitness come close to replicating the variety and freedom of motion that you get from tubing but even they are limited to a certain number of preset positions.

Speed of movement is an important factor in developing sport specific strength and power. Sport movements like swinging a golf club or tennis racquet, hitting a baseball, and kicking a soccer ball are all done at high speed with relatively low resistance, the weight of the club, racquet or ball. Low tension tubing not only allows you to use the rotational movement patterns needed to excel at these sports but it allows you to perform the movements at close to game speed, further increasing the transfer of training.

In a normal free weight exercise you are limited by the amount of weight you can lift at the weakest point in the exercise. For instance if you are doing a full squat you will find the weak point occurs when your knees are bent at about 140 degrees and you are much stronger as you get closer to the top of the movement. When you are using a weight that you can lift at the bottom you are getting little training effect in the top part of the movement. Tubing and other elastic resistance devices increase their resistance as stretched; adding elastic resistance to a free weight bar in addition to the weights allows you to increase strength throughout the whole range of motion by loading the muscle at the end of the range of motion where it is strongest. This type of training has become popular with strength and power athletes.

While tubing is a valuable tool for developing strength and muscular fitness it does have limitations.

Even though there are a variety of tensions of rubber tubing very strong people and athletes in strength and power sports often require greater resistances than can be developed using tubing alone. Many competitive athletes attach tubing or large elastic bands to the weights they are lifting to add more resistance at the top of multijoint movements like squats or bench presses.

It is difficult to quantify your performance when using tubing. There are no resistance numbers when you are using tubing so you do not know how much weight you are lifting. You know you are getting stronger if you are using a thicker tube but only as long as you are buying your tubing from the same manufacturer. There are no standards for tubing tension or resistance so a ½ inch tube from one company may have more or less tension than a ½ inch tube from a different company.

Despite these few limitations tubing is an economical, portable training tool that will help you meet your strength, power and fitness goals.

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PEAK Centre staff have the highest certifications available in Canada for Sport Science. With their combined experience and education, PEAK Centre is at the forefront of practical Sport Science application.

Ed McNeely – Peak Centre for Human Performance

There was a popular children’s bedtime story call the Little Engine that Could. In that story, a train engine struggled to get up a steep hill but by repeating the phrase “I think I can” over and over he made it up. Little did we know at the time that train engine had stumbled upon the secret to overcoming fatigue in many sport situations.

Research into fatigue has tended to take a systems approach, focusing on one single cause at a time. As a result we have gone through periods where lactate was the cause of fatigue, glycogen depletion was the cause, heat was the cause etc. etc. etc. This was great fodder for discussion boards and magazine articles but it never really explained why an athlete fatigues and why athletes fatigue at different rates.

Several years ago the notion that the brain was the sole cause of fatigue was put forward as a theory called the Central Governor theory. This theory met with a lot of resistance from the scientific community and some heated debates played out in several sports science and sports medicine research journals. While there are flaws and areas of contention in many scientific theories the notion that the brain is responsible for fatigue makes a lot of sense and explains many of the practical experiences of coaches and athletes.

In simple terms, when you start to exercise your brain sends out signals to your muscles to make them move. At the same time signals come back to your brain from your body to help your brain adjust the exercise. Your brain is monitoring things like lactate levels, carbohydrate levels, heart rate, breathing rate, temperature, changes in hormones, muscle soreness and pain. When all these elements are within certain parameters your brain is happy to let you go along doing your exercise. As the feedback from your body starts to get more intense your brain starts to tell you that the exercise is getting hard and isn’t something that you normally do. This is when you start to ask yourself if you want to continue. At this point you have the option of consciously telling your brain that everything is OK keep going or you can tell your brain that things may not be OK maybe we should stop. At some level of difficulty the signals coming back from your body that tell your brain not to keep going will overwhelm the signals that you consciously send to keep going and you will stop.

The process of training and getting fitter is designed to increase the speed or power at which the “stop” signals get too strong to keep going. But there is also a perception component to fatigue. As you expose yourself to harder exercise more frequently your brain gets used to the intensity of the signals coming back and realizes that the pain you are experiencing is not dangerous and you can push through. The next time that you are struggling with a workout and your brain starts to ask if you are sure that you can go on remember the Little Engine that Could. If you think you can you probably will.

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PEAK Centre staff have the highest certifications available in Canada for Sport Science. With their combined experience and education, PEAK Centre is at the forefront of practical Sport Science application.