The condition in which our connective tissue depends on two factors is how old we are and what we have done in our lives to keep our tissue healthy, hydrated and flexible.
The health of your connective tissue is a serious concern especially for older people, as movement restrictions can make it hard for them to perform simple activities of daily living. While personal trainers often develop flexibility programs and modify exercises to help senior clients succeed, there is another valuable technique to improve seniors’ range of motion.
That technique is self-myofascial release which works with the clients of any ages and might need to be somewhat modified for older adults to satisfy the physical changes of aging. For example, a typical SMR technique for the hamstrings involves resting the backs of the thighs on a foam roller and using the upper body to pull the legs across the roller. This works fine for clients with strong upper bodies, real core strength, sufficient wrist flexibility and good shoulder stability, but it is not a viable option for many older adults.
Sports
Athletes in any sports and at any levels can benefit from the Stick Roller. Over thousands of high school, college, university and Olympic athletes follow the lead of numerous professionals including New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls, Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos, Baltimore Orioles, and the San Diego Padres.
Some of the Stick Roller benefits include:
Warms muscle without expending your vital energy stores
Performs both general and segments of necessary stretching procedures
Removes any trigger point barriers to peak athletic performance
Enhances strength, flexibility, and endurance
Accelerates muscle recovery and relieves pain
The Q-10 Effect
Warm muscles perform better than relaxed muscles, Traditionally over the years, athletes would have to do light exercise to raise their muscle temperature and enhance their enzyme activity. This came about at the expense of energy stores that could make the difference between being in first place or second place. Intracell Technology allows an athlete to warm-up without expending energy reserves.
Speed, Strength, and Endurance
Emphasis on flexibility training by most athletes is almost non-existent. However, flexibility is very crucial for developments in your speed, strength, and endurance. The most common approach to flexibility is less than optimal since those muscles rarely stiffen. Typically, isolated segments of muscle become chronically shortened. Intracell Technology allows an athlete to perform general stretching as well as segmental stretching procedures with a high degree of precision.
Growth, Repair, and Glycogen
Restricted blood flow to the muscles following exercise could hinder your muscle growth, your muscle repair, and your glycogen repletion. Blood flow restrictions are also due to generalized muscle tightness and barrier trigger points. Intracell Technology relaxes tight muscle to enhance muscle growth, improves tissue and augments glycogen repletion following heavy exercise.
Enhanced Lactic Acid Removal
During your exercise, lactic acid can build to critical levels where optimal performance might be sacrificed, Intracell Technology expedites the discharge of your lactic acid from your muscles, and it encourages the conversion into glucose by the liver. Intracell Technology appears to be very promising in the arena of enhanced sports performance. Look for more research along these lines in the future.
There are so many myths about what lactic acid actually is. Perhaps the greatest of all is the notion that there is lactic acid in the human body. There is not. The body produces lactate, which is lactic acid minus one proton.
The difference between lactic acid and lactate is, for all practical purposes, semantic. But other popular beliefs about lactic acid are about as wrong as wrong can be. Most triathletes believe that lactate is found to be an end product of anaerobic muscle metabolism that causes som local muscle fatigue by increasing the acidity of the tissues to the point where they will no longer function effectively. In fact, we now know that lactate is considered to be an intermediate link between anaerobic and aerobic muscle metabolism that serves as both a direct and indirect fuel for muscle contraction and delays fatigue in a couple of different ways.
Our new understanding of the nature and function of lactate is rather appealing to every athlete who is curious about how the human body works. But does it make any difference? Do the new ideas in a science of lactate suggest a different approach to training than the old science did? Many would indicate that it does call for a subtle changing of the standard approach to your endurance training, but no major overhaul. However, let’s take a closer look at how some traditional beliefs about lactate were exposed as myths and replaced by an almost different explanation.
The perfect description of lactate in exercise dates back to about the early 1920s when researchers showed that the exposure of frog legs to levels of lactic acid interfered with the ability of the muscles to contract in response to electrical stimulation. Later some research had determined that lactate was actually produced through the anaerobic glycolysis or the breakdown of glucose or glycogen molecules for energy without the help of oxygen. This is what concluded that fatigue occurred at intense exercises because the cardiovascular system could no longer supply the muscles with enough oxygen to keep pace with strong energy demands, resulting in higher reliance on anaerobic glycolysis, meaning lactate buildup.
How exactly did lactate buildup cause the muscles to fatigue? Biochemists believed that lactate was originally created in the body by the removal of a proton from the lactic acid. When protons start to accumulate in living tissues, the tissues become more acidic. And when muscles become too acidic, they lose their ability to contract.
This overall explanation began to unravel in 1977 when South African biochemist Wieland Gevers showed that the reaction that produces lactate consumes a pair of free protons. This meaning that it may impede muscular acidosis rather than promoting it. More recently, scientists have found that while protons do actually accumulate in the muscles during a high-intensity exercise, increasing muscle acidity, these protons are normally produced through a type of reaction that is completely separate from that which produces lactate.