"work-hardened"

[benzocaine]

Two seasoned Dan ranks come to mind from this thread.

One a mechanic who spins wrenches all day long. His arms are like friggin' steel.

The other a carpenter who has had to climb up and down a ladder many times..as well as all the other tasks done with the hands. Friggin' steel also

What's funny is that both these guys are unasuming upper- middle-agers with a small layer of pudge. Who'd guess they are so tough?

[jorvik]

the old Okinawan Karate masters would have all been from a farming/fishing agrarrian background, and probably worked in the fields.....I wonder if their karate was superior for it

[Griffin]

All my life I've enjoyed pushing myself beyond limits that I thought I had. I was and still am an endurance freak thanks possibly to genetically larger than normal lungs. I ran, cycled, and played socker. All of this in addition to my Uechi practice. For the first fives years that I spent in the Army I consistently "maxed" the run in my PT test, running the two miles around 12 minutes or less without being winded. Unfortunately, my plica bands (extra tendons on the inside of a growing person's knee that are supposed to dissolve around 18 years of age) never dissolved and started causing serious pain. After surgery on both knees, the pain eased but, was always there. For years I tried to build my legs up using the standard weight training programs (3-5 sets X 10 reps - squats, leg press, etc.) but, never really got any real results. A couple months ago I read an article in Men's Health (I think) about a group of body builders in Florida who have been doing recearch on, what seems to be an endurance work-out, where the trainee works a certain muscle group every hour or half hour for several hours. And, that got me thinking...
Around that time, my knees were feeling especially painful. One day (Friday) I decided I was going to do something. I put 410lbs on my Bowflex and did 10 sets(10 reps) of leg presses. I started at 8AM. I noticed that I fealt stronger near the end. At 9AM I did it again and fealt even better. I repeated this until 5PM. The next day, the pain was incredible, but all in my muscles. But the day after that, I had no pain at all. No pain in my knees or muscles and I didn't have pain in my knees all through the next week. So, the next Friday, I did the work-out again. This time, I had no pain in my muscles and no pain in my knees. I'm starting to do this work-out with 200lbs dead lifts because I don't want to neglect the rest of my body. I can almost make it for the full 10 hour workout and have only rare and minimal pain in my knees. I actually gained almost an inch of muscle on my legs, which never came after years of standard workouts. So here's my question. Are these results possibly because I've trained my muscles for endurance for soo long, making it so that this type of workout (extreme endurance) is what will make them respond the best, or am I just some freak of nature? This is the only resistance work-out I'm doing right now, which should keep me from over training. Any suggestions?

[Bill Glasheen]

It's difficult to comment too specifically on this workout you speak of without thinking of it in a broader context.

The first thing you need to consider is that anything you do for training should not be done ad infinitum. At some point you need to rearrange things. Whether you realize it or not, any one workout that you can do in a reasonable amount of time is not balanced. You do the best you can do.

The farmer and the fisherman have seasons. They aren't doing the exact same chores all year long, every day of the week.

I have one thing I do on my yard that is especially brutal - for me. I core aerate my yard, and do it like no person I have hired ever would do, or ever dare to do. I have hills and burms and such. I take that sucker and go every row on every square foot on an "X" coordinate covering the entire yard - dangerous hills and all. Then I do the same thing in the "Y" direction. If I had to do that every day or even a few times a week, I'd probably kill myself. But I can ****** it up and do it in a full, brutal day of effort. No biggie. I recover. Same with the professionals, by the way. But they put in half the effort (because I've hired them and see what they do) and they only do it for about a month and a half out of the year. Then they do other things.

I have a rule of thumb. You should reshuffle your workout about every 12 weeks or so. And the hardcore folks do "periodization" where they start the 12 weeks with high reps and low weights, and finish with low reps and high weights.

Basically your body was shocked in a way that it hasn't been in a while. Your knees have had a chance to recover from what amounts to a repetitive motion injury. Do this same workout enough times without a change, and something else will creep in. Either that, or you plateau. That's when you should change.

Change is good both for the body and for the soul.

- Bill