Hello and welcome to another edition of the Lounge Fitness roundup. Here at Lounge, we take your training very seriously, so we try and bring you the best workout advice. And in case you missed the best of our stories this past week, here’s a re-cap.
This week, we have three very interesting stories for you. The first is a primer on hamstring injuries, the second a fascinating story on how ultracyclists train for a high altitude race, and finally a story on the ‘time under tension’ method to acing your workouts.
If you like football, then you would know how players are often sidelined for months at a time with hamstring injuries. But while you may have seen many a footballer hobble off the field in pain, clutching their butts, do you really know what causes it, and how it could also happen to you.
In this useful primer, writer Shrenik Avlani reviews some cutting edge fitness studies and speaks to doctors to demystify the hamstring injury. As you’ll find out, it could strike anyone who plays a running sport, even as an amateur. If you want to know how to treat it, or prevent it, read on.
Here at Lounge, we have written often about ultracycling and the effort it takes to complete an ultracycling race. Now imagine a gruelling race of 600km, and that too in the high altitudes of Ladakh? Welcome to the Great Himalayan Ultra, the world’s highest ultracycling race.
As writer Shail Desai writes, given the additional factor of altitude, the way that athletes train for the race would be different from the norm. And you can learn a lot about how to train from their experience. Desai speaks to three Indian cyclists and brings you their training stories.
One of the key tricks to ensure that you don’t plateau in your weight training, is to keep mixing things up and challenging your body. But you need do it smartly, by tweaking your exercises, instead of going for wholesale changes that could be counteractive.
As Pulasta Dhar writes in this excellent story, the trick to challenging yourself is to try the Time Under Tension (TUT) method of doing your exercises. Read the story to better understand how to do it right and see your gains increase.
