We have three kinds of muscle tissue in our body - striated, or skeletal muscle and non-striated, or smooth muscle, as well as cardiac muscle. Striated muscles are under voluntary control - like our biceps or hamstrings. Your non-striated muscle is involuntary and present in your organs, like your intestines, and is also present in the lining of arteries. Cardiac muscle is present in the heart, pulmonary veins and superior vena cava.
Striated muscles are easy to exercise. Lifting weights, walking, running, etc., are all great ways to train striated muscle. When it comes to striated muscle, there are usually two or three main goals: increasing strength, increasing speed, or increasing endurance. How you need to train depends on what you want your outcome to be. You can read these posts for how to increase strength, speed or endurance for striated muscles. In general, the idea is you want to increase the number of filaments per muscles fibre to increase strength by weight lifting, train which muscle fibres contract during the activity for speed versus endurance, but also to increase the number of mitochondria per muscle fibre.
When it comes to smooth muscle, exercise in general is a great way to have a positive effect on smooth muscles. The mini stabilization contractions that your smooth muscles will have to do in response to the movement of exercise helps to maintain their tone. Vibration platform devices are also very helpful for toning smooth muscle as it increases the number of times your smooth muscles have to make these contractions. You can also do the ‘hot cold’ contrast exercise to help your arterial and capillary beds strengthen (see this post here) for proper response to hot and cold.
When it comes to cardiac muscle, the main way to maintain proper heart muscle tone is through cardiovascular exercise. Think of it like doing chin-ups for your heart. The more ‘reps’ you do, the more you’re going to tone your muscle. It’s not about building bulk - you’re not looking to break muscle filaments to build muscle size - you want to enhance endurance functioning. Which is why they say at least 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a day is the minimum to maintain heart health. Otherwise, your heart muscles get flabby and can be at risk of ‘stretching out’. When other muscles in the body get saggy and weak, you just get ‘mom butt’. When your heart gets weak, you get congestive heart failure. So maintaining the proper tone in the walls of your heart is extremely important.
Haven’t exercised in a while? Sometimes people can make the mistake of going ‘all out’ when first starting to exercise after a long absence. Understanding that the muscles in the walls of your heart can get weaker during a prolonged period of inactivity is important to prevent problems when getting back into it. It can be just as harmful to exercise too intensely too fast as it can be not to exercise at all. As Valentin Fuster, M.D., Ph.D., Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiologists explains, “The greatest benefit is to simply exercise, regardless of the intensity, while the danger is two-fold: to not exercise at all or to exercise intensely, without due preparation.”
So what’s a good amount to aim for? The American Heart Association recommends that people perform moderately-intense exercise for at least 30 minutes on most days of the week, a recommendation echoed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American College of Sports Medicine. You know you’re at a moderately-intense level of exercise when you can still carry on a conversation with a friend, but you couldn’t sing.
Can’t do a full 30 minutes? Research also shows that breaking it up into 10 or 15 minute sessions can be just as beneficial. A nice easy way of increasing your activity during your day is to get up from your desk every half hour and take a quick lap around your office; take the long way to the bathroom; take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator; park as far away from the doors as you can; make 3 trips instead of one to bring in the groceries, etc. Build up to including an evening walk, and then maybe add in a 15 minute strengthening routine in the mornings that includes lunges, push ups, etc. There are plenty of Youtube videos and quick workouts on websites that are short and easily fit into your day. You can find some recommendations here. Make it fun and interesting and you’ll keep it up.
Til next time, folks!