Muscle Building Workout Plans

When you take exercise at the moment of increased physical activity, the pulse quickens, cardiac output increases, blood pressure widens and breathing accelerates both in rate and depth.

These changes are attempts by these organs to pick up and deliver more atmospheric oxygen to the muscles. The efficiency of this process is far greater in physically fit people. Extra blood flow due to increased cardiac output is selective as to delivery sites. The perfusion of the body a saw hole does not increase. The lion’s share of increased blood flow goes to the muscles. Moreover, blood is actively shunted away from organs whose functions are unnecessary during exercise. At rest the kidneys normally commandeer about 20 percent of the cardiac output.

But during exercise this drops almost to zero, the blood being diverted to the muscles. For all practical purposes, kidney function ceases temporarily.
After exercise, pulse and respiration return to normal more quickly in the trained subject. Medically this is called “a shortened recovery time.”

Contrary to general belief, there is no such entity as “athlete’s heart.” The old notion was that habitual exercise caused the heart to inflate and become enlarged. Athletes and former athletes were thought to have large hearts. This is not true. Medically, in fact, there is no surer way to improve cardiac function than by exercise. In addition, another positive benefit to the heart of an athlete is an unusually richly developed capillary network in the heart muscle or myocardium. An augmented coronary capillary network is found in exercised animals, too.

On the other hand, a heart condition has recently been discovered in sedentary persons. This abnormal situation is uncharitably classified in medical literature as “Loafer’s Heart.” Highly developed parasympathetic nervous system responses by the heart of a trained sportsman give way to overly active sympathetic nervous system responses in the heart of a “loafer”.

Evidences of “Loafer’s Heart” with its sympathetic over activity are rapid pulse rate at rest, marked acceleration under physical and emotional stress, sluggish increase in cardiac output, abnormalities in the electrocardiogram or EKG during exercise, and prolonged deceleration after exercise has ceased.

Dr. Wilhelm Raab, Chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine and Cardiovascular Research Unit at DeGoesbriand Memorial Hospital, University of Vermont College of Medicine, says that cardiac degeneration in modern Western civilization is the culmination of combining maximal technical perfection of labor-saving devices with their maximal mass distribution.

“Somatic and psychic phenomena are no longer separable. If the degenerative features of ‘loafer’s heart’ are, at least in part, initiated by lack of muscular exercise, the psychic implications of the latter must not be left unnoticed.

An all-embracing philosophy of both physical and mental take-it-easy-ism deprives human life of most of its higher values and incentives. It leads to unimaginative boredom and breeds addiction to cheap entertainment and to the various commercially available substitutes for mental stability and spiritual creativeness.

Such tendencies, combined with the frantic striving for material ‘success’ in a conformist competitive society, add frustrations and anxieties whose cortical and hypothalamic mechanisms cannot remain without detrimental effects on the neuro vegetative biochemical equilibrium in the cardiovascular system.

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