Jordan: Building fast-twitch muscles?

[Guest guest]

I came across this article in the Fortune magazine, and I was hoping

to get some comments from other people.

As a martial arts practitioner, I currently suffer from 2 problems:

pain and lack of speed.

Performing a whipping or snapping punch or a kick at medium speed

resulted in pain at elbows or hips, but thanks to Ashtanga yoga, the

pain is now gone. I can now move without pain at slow to medium

speed, even with extreme movements like high side kicks.

But I still cannot perform them at maximum speed for the pain comes

back or I just cannot go as fast as I used to, as if all my muscles

are now slow-twitch fibres. So performing maximum speed drills or

high-impact plyometrics right now are too painful.

I thought that I would embark on a regimen of ballistic weight-

training to regain that explosiveness, but this article threw some

doubt upon it. I am 30 years old, so due to my relatively younger

age, maybe weight training will restore explosiveness into my

training, but then maybe not.

Any comments?

http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?

channel=artcol.jhtml & doc_id=205777 & page=2 & _DARGS=%

2Fartcol.jhtml.4_A & _DAV=artcol.jhtml

Somewhere between those poles there must be a sensible approach, but

even fitness trainers are having to find their way in the dark. When

Tim Grover got his master's in exercise physiology in 1989, he

says, " What you did was, you either learned to train the athlete in

his prime or you learned geriatric fitness, which is people over 65. "

Today he is the trainer on whose shoulders rest the hopes of a

generation. That is, he's Jordan's fitness coach.

Grover says he uses " two totally different programs " depending on

whether an athlete is in his prime or past it. " You're going from a

low-rep, quick type of movement to more reps, lower weights. We're

saying, Okay, your body's got a lot of wear and tear. Stabilize those

muscles. " Jordan, he says, is " in the older guy's regimen, " and while

he won't disclose training secrets, he says " we are trying some new

techniques. " Assuming Jordan's knee gets better, this could be fun to

watch. Says Grover, tantalizingly: " We should know in a couple of

months whether we have found a way to rebuild some of those fast-

twitch muscles. "

What he's referring to is the problem of muscle loss, which affects

sedentary people at the rate of about 1% a year. Muscles can be

rebuilt with weight training and other sorts of exercise, but the

tissue that's restored tends to be of the slow-twitch, not the fast-

twitch, variety, which is why geezers play sneaky tennis.

Bob Yu

Montreal, Canada