May 20, 2019

Falsehoods of Fitness: Just Training Fast or Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers (Episode 6)

Dr. John Jaquish discusses another common fitness myth.

Full Transcript

So, okay, let’s get started. A question we frequently come across is someone says “Well, I don’t know about X3 because I’m training to fire, training to engage my type two B fibers. I’m trying to get to a certain type of fiber, which I know I’m more predisposed.” Like somebody who uses they’re like “I’m only training my fast-twitch fibers and my slow-twitch fibers.”

It amazes me that there are still people believing that you can train a certain fiber and not another certain fiber, based on its fiber type. Now there is such a thing as fiber type, and they do engage at different rates. Now when I tell you the rates, you’ll understand how stupid this line of thinking is.

So, this is just from physiology text. This has been around since the 1970’s and we’ve known this. So, probably before most of you were born.

Types of Muscle Fibers

So slow-twitch fiber, which is type one, engages in 100 milliseconds, so way less than a second.

Type two A, fast-twitch, the difference between slow and fast, 50 milliseconds, so it fires twice as fast. But that’s in a window of time that is immeasurable by humans. I mean, instruments can measure it, but you can’t snap your fingers 100 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds apart.

Then of course, type two B is very fast, it’s 25 milliseconds.

So, the point is, you’re engaging a muscle when you exercise, when you use extra or you lift weights, and if you’re contracting that muscle, and you’re conscious of that contraction, you’re engaging everything. And everything grows—when you stimulate, when you take the musculature to fatigue. Whether it’s standard training, obviously a greater level of fatigue with X3, greater level of growth with X3, but you’re fatiguing all of these things. They’re all firing. It’s the speed of activation, that’s the only thing.

So you can’t really train for a specific fiber type. So, it is information that, while it exists, is highly meaningless to you; therefore you should not pay attention to it. There are many more other things that you should pay attention to that are other than that.

So that is today’s Falsehood of Fitness. I’m back-to-back multiple podcasts.

I’m headed to Greece to launch Osteostrong there. I’m giving a couple lectures to sorta medical authorities in that country and they’re all coming to Athens to hear me so talk, so let’s hope I don’t screw that up. That’s okay, I practice this quite a bit.

And same presentation that I gave at the International Osteporosis Foundation Conference couple weeks ago in Sydney right before Christmas. So very exciting, and I’ll share some of the comments and exciting things from that. And then come back for a week, I’ll do another Falsehood Fitness, not next week but the week after. And then I head to Iceland after that for some more Osteostrong openings.

Osteostrong’s on fire, lot of people with greater bone density, lot of happy people out there. Some people are just higher performing athletes because they’re fracture resistant who use Osteostrong. But the people who I care most about are the ones like my mother, which is why I invented it. These are the people who had a real need. They were at-risk of fracture, and are no longer at risk of fracture, because they have strong bone. So, Osteostrong delivers.

So thanks for tuning in, I know this is a quick one, I’ll have time for questions probably the next Falsehoods of Fitness, have a great weekend.

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