Zastria what you suggested is also correct. The additional physical work that is required when constantly changing increases by several orders of magnitude the metabolic load. It then adds to exercises such as shoulder taps, leg raises and kicks additional layers of challenge that have to do with aerobic fitness, endurance and so on. Again, this comes down to specific fitness goals and, obviously, fitness levels. Kicking, for example, when done interchangeably so you're constantly changing sides and kicking leg with each rep increases the amount of oxygen required to perform each rep because the movement recruits more muscles. The proviso is that you maintain the intensity by making the change of position not just accurate but also fast. The same principle applies to almost every other exercise.

Thanks Damer. It did help...and now I am also thinking about bodies in the basement.

There are some bees over on the Help Desk buzzing about creatine supplements, which I've not heard of before. What is it, what does it do? Is it something that might be beneficial to the ordinary bee, or only the elite athlete bees? I tried googling for it but got mostly information from people trying to sell the stuff, so perhaps a teeny bit biased. What's the science?

The way I explain the kicks is by the striking surface, turning kicks are the top of the foot, side kicks are the bottom of the foot and hook kicks are towards the back of the bottom of the foot. In order to strike with those surfaces there is only really one functional way to kick, or maybe I am wrong?

I know that the various Training Plans here have different types of workouts for each day, including Active Rest days, and i understand that rationale.
I am 57 years old and 100 lbs overweight with cranky knees, and longer (20 minutes or more) workouts of any of the different types tend to wear me out. I have instead been aiming for a daily rotation with shorter workouts of each type.
For example:
20 minute walk as warmup
10-15 minutes cardio or hiit
10-15 minutes strength (maybe alternating upper/lower body)
10 minutes stretching or yoga
I enjoy this structure, but my question is: is it (at least somewhat) as effective, or should i work towards something more like the Training Plans?
Thanks!

Hi everyone

Damer There's been a lot of questions about Total WARRIOR program since December, I understand There's a lot of other more important things to work on,in this still very difficult time, and also that to create such a complicated program needs extra care, because every Combat/Martial Arts program is great and when you want to create now something what would somehow follow on FIGHTER'S CODEX but would be level 5, that is extremly hard job
But I believe you can make it to sucessfull completition because Darebee is the best

My question is regarding testing the program or the parts of the program.
I wonder, how is the procedure going? When you create a new program, you send then chapters to volunteers which test is.
Volunteers are still the same ,,testers,, ? From all around the World...or do you test it with group of volunteers,,live,, there where you are?
In case of sending chapters ( or whole program )to volunteers for testing online, they do the workouts and then write you a review or how do you connect with them?

Thanks for answer ....if the answer is not a secret..


Aaand because it's a last day to ask, another question

I have been training on relatively massive cross trainer for 3 month now. ( You change the resistances 1-20 plus degrees there ).
First ca 2-3 weeks I thought I give up because even resistance no 1 was hard for me to ,,run,, even 1 km.
I didn't give up and these days ,,run ,, on it 5km on almost daily basis,with higher resistances and what was hard is now easy. My BPM is lower and to reach ,,cardio or top zone,, I have to work so much more.

How is it possible that my body is so addaptive?? I assume muscles on my legs must be stronger now, however I do not see a much of visual difference .

When I ,,speed,, walk outside, like I used to do before I had this machine, I am always under BPM cardio rate. No chance I get sweaty or so.

So do I have to add more and more all the time? Can't really run (on sidewalk) because of my knees...
My weight is also still the same since using the machine.
I wonder, is it making my body better only in case of endurance??

I am slightly confused..

Miss_Dada great questions to close this thread with and you've asked two. I will address each one separately to allow for more explanation and also so you can ask questions about each specific one.

Every workout and program produced by Darebee has a very similar path: idea/concept>initial plan>in-house testing>adjustments>field testing>adjustments>more field testing>more adjustments>special testing>adjustments>live class testing>adjustments>release. For a single workout this means a journey of about 12 weeks. For a program it is easily twice that. The pandemic has made it harder for us and it has slowed some things down because we don't have enough people in field-testing groups or some of them are currently in suspension as there are lockdowns where they are.

The Total Warrior program is no different. It does have the added issue that it needs to be hard yet still accessible otherwise it is simply a program designed to make everyone who tries it feel inadequate and that is the exact opposite of what we do here. Because of my own deep involvement with it I am also a sticking point at times. My day job absorbs time and effort and, within Darebee I am involved in several projects. Most Darebee workouts and programs are designed collectively with team members adding their expertise. The Total Warrior program is mostly mine so I will be testing it locally in live class at the final stage prior to release. At the moment I am in the process of going through all the volunteer group feedback and making adjustments. The next phase will be for me to then send a few chapters/days' worth of workouts to specific people to try out and I will get feedback from them (each one of them gets specific guidelines to help them with the feedback). It is all done via email and, sometimes, online chat. Then it all comes back to me to synthesize and, in the meantime, all the drawings are finalized so they can be dropped in. Then it gets released.

Now Miss_Dada for your strength/endurance question. Your observations are totally on-point and congratulations on getting fitter as well . To better answer what is happening to your body it is important to explain what the body is supposed to do: help us survive. To do that it applies a simple and ancient evolutionary principle: it constantly optimizes its function to help it use up less energy than what it gets from food. From its perspective if it can ensure that the energy output in each environment it finds itself in is as low as possible then it is meeting its target. To do that it adapts at a mechanical, neurological and biochemical level. That's a fancy way of saying that it adapts physically, mentally and chemically. Some of those changes are visible to us, i.e. our muscles may get bigger or harder. Many however are not.

In truth, the visible effects we see in bigger muscles are only a small portion of what is really happening when we exercise and get fitter. The real changes take place at a cellular level within the muscles themselves where ATP production (which is the fuel the muscles run on). This is what usually makes muscles stronger and more durable and these changes take, on average, three months to occur. As these changes happen other changes also take place. The lungs, which have a total surface area of a tennis court (195.62 sq m) and have airways that if they were placed end-to-end would stretch 1,500 miles, the distance between Prague and Casablanca also change as fresh capillaries open up and relatively unused airways are stretched. Just like a muscle the lungs then become more flexible and agile and stronger. At the same time the heart muscle (myocardial muscle) undergoes changes that enable the heart to increase its volume of blood per beat and also to be able to beat faster for longer. All of these are purely physical changes, the mechanical part of the equation that allows muscles to get stronger and output more work. To do that, individual muscles undergo a few more changes that biopsies can reveal. First they learn to engage more filaments per movement/load. These sarcomeres (as they're called) then become responsible for the ability of muscle to increase strength without a correlative increase in size. (A study covering most of these is here.) There is one additional mechanism that we know that helps muscles become stronger and that is the angle at which the muscle fibers attach to the bone and twist as they contract in the joint. Scientifically this is called pennation (there is a study on that effect here.) What this does is it can make seemingly small muscles generate a much greater torque that it looks possible, thereby increasing their strength output. (Think ballet dancers, martial artists and even gymnasts who may look strong but what they can output is way greater than let's say bodybuilders who have way bigger muscles).

As you can see strength is complicated and this is before we look at the neurological component. Basically the central nervous system has to adapt. When it does it makes it easier to control the muscles and how they are activated. This is what makes us 'faster' when we increase our speed and stronger when we increase our strength and it even plays a role in endurance. If the central nervous system gets fatigued it cannot command the muscles to contract and we cannot then be as fast or as strong as we need to. The neurological component also makes it possible to activate what we call the body's kinetic chain. Depending on how we decide to organize the body it has either five distinct kinetic chains that can overlap in specific activities or two (upper body and lower body) which still need to work together to transfer power and maintain balance.

As our coordination improves (because the neural connections that help our brain control our body improve) our strength, speed, balance and agility also improve and the various kinetic chains work smoothly together.

The neurochemical component of strength is the trickiest one to explain. Obviously there are chemical messengers that are activated every time the body makes a move. But in order to keep maintaining the pressure, as you have done, and improve, we need to be aware of motivation and how that works.

You take all that now. Put it together and you can see that you are stronger as well as having greater endurance. Your weight hasn't changed much because you have, at a guess, substituted some body fat for muscle (which is heavier) and also your muscular changes are the result of other processes not hypertrophy (the process through which muscle size increases).

Your heart rate is lower and it is harder to challenge your aerobic capacity because as the lungs can pump more air with each breath and the heart pump more volume with each beat they are doing what the body is designed to do: conserve energy so it can do what is a difficult physical task with the minimum effort. As you get fitter it becomes harder to challenge your body (and mind) to change. This is one of the reasons Darebee produces so many workouts. We constantly want to keep the body and mind guessing and at an energetic high level, that way adaptations are always triggered and it becomes easier to be fit because the body doesn't get used to the exercises and optimizes to do them at little energetic cost to itself. To answer whether you need to add more volume each time you exercise now, yes, that is one option though it has some drawbacks. Because of the repetition of movements you may cause muscle/tendon strength imbalance and sustain an injury. Also there is a ceiling to what you can do in terms of time. Marathon runners, for instance, don't run marathons to train. They run shorter distances and mic things up with speed and load (like going uphill).

A much easier option is to add activities or exercises that are hard for you to do. I will give you an example from my training routine to help illustrate it. I can do 1,000 sidekicks in approximately twenty minutes. That is not enough to tire me out because, impressive as it my sound, I have trained myself to do this for many, many years. To up the level of difficulty I could double the amount (it will get harder, especially as the muscles and the central nervous system get fatigued) but my hip and knee joints may also get damaged and the adductors used to stabilize the standing leg may also suffer injury. So instead I add 5lbs leg weights. Slow the kick down to a slow motion one so it is technically correct and there is no speed to overload the joints and I take an hour or an hour 15 minutes to finish it. At other times I simply mix sidekicks with squats and jumping knee tucks or jumping lunges, activities that use many of the same muscles in a much different format and then I do sidekicks (usually about half the number in this case). That way the body is constantly challenged without having to spend hours and hours exercising and it also minimizes the possibilities for injury.

I hope I have answered your question fully but please don't hesitate to get back to me if not. I will keep this thread open until the end of today.

CaptainCanuck the way you explain the kick is OK-ish. There is a front-kick type of kick called a push-kick where the knee is pulled up almost to the chest and then the leg is pushed out and the impact point can be the heel of the foot or the entire bottom of the foot, depending. Think of it as the way U.S. Marines are trained to kick a door in. So, it's worth bearing that in mind.

Damer on the note of new programs and testing: Is there a list or a sign up of some sort that people can add their name into the hat to become a tester? While I'm way over here across the pond I would love to help out where possible to keep Darebee growing as I'm sure many others are. I wouldn't be able to help with the final stages but I could help with some of the earlier testing.

Damer, did you miss Mamatigerj's question, at post number 50?

Thank you very much Damer for your time , you answered all my questions into details !

I understand much more now what's going on with my body and am feeling happier cause I know how to continue on my fitness journey.
*and you also motivated me *

Thank you for the links, will study those ,studies, to learn about a human body as much as possible .


And mind versus body = Interesting is, that all that hard workouts we do, to reach better look or ,perfection, we do that all because we want to be happy a satisfied in our minds...

CarbonaraTamara supplementation is always an issue for reasons that have more to do with commercial gain. I will unpack both that and the health angle here. First, let's start with creatine monohydrate which is the form of creatine that brings the most benefits. Because it occurs naturally in the body and is found predominantly in the muscles it has been around, as a supplement, long enough for more than 1,000 studies to have been carried out. Creatine is what scientifically we call an ergogenic substance, meaning that it is performance-enhancing. It increases the ability of muscles to work harder, repair themselves faster and grow bigger.

Taken in a proper form, using correct doses as part of a physically intense, high-performance lifestyle it can provide specific benefits in performance, recovery and even neuroprotection. One study that carries a detailed review of this is found here. A review of many studies on creatine and its effects on the human body is here. Finally an explanation of its mechanism can be found here.

To answer your question directly creatine supplements can help anyone who is exercising. However, like with vitamin supplements you need to make sure the brand you take is high-quality and from a reputable company and you need to make sure you don't get caught in an over-supplementation loop as it does have side effects (just as vitamin overdose does). Creatine doesn't help reduce oxidative stress effects on the body so it's of little use to those who want to increase their aerobic performance though, even in that context, it will assist with rapid recovery of muscle damage and it will assist with muscle performance in the anaerobic cycle that is part of every type of physical activity.

I hope this helps provide better understanding of this.

Mamatigerj thank you for bringing up the Training Plan vs Daily Workouts routine question. I almost missed it so thank you to CarbonaraTamara for the prompt. Every person's physical profile is unique. We provide Training Plans because some people who are new to all this find it difficult to create a workout pattern that will benefit them. Their knowledge is not yet where it should be and without a daily activity to follow as part of a plan it is easy to become over-tired (because we are all really bad at pacing ourselves) become demotivated, maybe get injured and then drop out entirely from exercising.

So, plans are there to address that. What you're doing sounds great to me. You're listening to your body. You are providing novelty and mental stimulation, which is great, and you're actively thinking about your fitness. Following a specific plan won't benefit you more unless you want to train for something specific (like strength, in one of our strength-training plans) or want to make sure you're getting the balance of activity/recovery right. By the sound of it you are so I will say continue to do what works for you.

I hope this helps.

Guys, I'd like to take a moment before closing this thread to say a big "Thank You" for all your questions and for just being here and taking part in the thread. This has been an awesome experience for me and I think we will all benefit if I do this again in a month or so. So, do start getting your questions ready This is not to say you can't ask questions at any time. Indeed, The Hive is the perfect questions & answers place. I think, however, it is of great benefit to have a thread to reference in your replies to others that covers as many topics in detail as possible and, from my end, it has been easier to reply when I have already planned my time in advance so that I can go into depth and detail in my answers. Something that is not always possible on other occasions. If any of you discover a means of adding more hours to each day without relocating planets please ping me, I will be your first test subject.