Can increased muscle mass improve circulation of blood lymph?
Can increased muscle mass improve circulation of blood lymph?
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a fitness question? Email Kevin at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com or leave us a voicemail at (510) 353-3014.
Find Get-Fit Guy on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to the newsletter for more fitness tips.
Get-Fit Guy is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com
https://www.facebook.com/GetFitGuy
https://twitter.com/GetFitGuy
https://www.kevindon.com/
Hi and welcome back to Get-Fit Guy, I’m your host Kevin Don and this week, let’s talk about circulation and training. Circulation is what gets blood, oxygen and nutrients through our bodies and removes waste, and as we age, it's almost unavoidable that our circulation is impacted in a negative way. This happens both in terms of the circulatory system, which would be the heart, blood vessels and the blood itself and the lymphatic system, consisting of lymphatic vessels, organs, nodes and lymphatic fluid.
As we age, the body undergoes various changes to these systems, including (but not limited to):
Receptor downgrading, making it harder to regulate blood pressure
Thickening and stiffening of blood vessels
Reduction of total water volume in the body
Slower replenishment of red blood cells
Decrease in number of lymphatic cells in muscles
Shrinking of lymph nodes
Now, whilst still being ‘young’ myself, I am still very interested in what I can do now that mitigates future decline. I understand that entropy gets us all, but there are still things we can do that can help us resist!
Now, a little story. Back in 2012, I was having some episodes of lightheadedness, typically when I was at the grocery store and most commonly when standing in line. So, I decided to go see the doctor. I was referred to a vascular specialist and had an ultrasound done on the veins in my legs. This is the first time I learned that the heart isn’t the only thing moving blood round the body! I think it's normal for us to think that our heart pumps and blood fires all the way round the circulatory system. Well, according to the doctor, several of the valves in the veins in my legs had degraded (probably from being repeatedly kicked in the legs in karate) and the blood was now pooling in my legs. The reason I wasn’t getting this issue at work was because I was moving around and so the muscles in my legs were busy contracting and pushing the blood back up, not allowing it to collect. But in line at the grocery store, I was standing still and so the muscles weren’t assisting me in pushing blood.
Amazing! So, I mean first off, I had some leg surgery to help address the issue, but secondly, I retired from competing in martial arts so I wasn’t being kicked in the legs! I then started to work on developing the muscles in my legs more to support the circulatory system.
Blood flow is incredibly important. For my own clients, there is one day a week (at least) where the goal is just to move blood. If you are coming back from injuries, recovering from training or you just want to be healthy, improved circulation is the name of the game! Now, usually when people think about circulating blood flow, they think about aerobic activity. They would be right, aerobic activity increases heart rate and that enhances blood flow. Furthermore, if you can avoid being a mouth breather, there are great benefits! Nasal breathing releases Nitric Oxide, which dilates blood vessels and improves blood flow!
But is there a role for resistance training in improving blood flow? Well, my story about the muscles pushing blood would say yes. But is that really the case? Well, yes. The very first thing that happens when you build muscle is that your body lays down a transport network for the new tissue being built. Just like when a new development or a new mall is being built, the company first of all has to build a network of roads to transport the building materials to the site and remove the by-products of the construction. Likewise, when we send a signal to the body with resistance training that we need new tissue to be built to cope with this new demand, the first thing it does is lay down a network of capillaries. This new network will deliver oxygen and nutrients to the area and carry away waste. More oxygen delivery means more reps before fatigue, and better waste transportation means better recovery.
During strength training we contract our muscles to move our joints and therefore move load. When we do this, the blood vessels embedded in the muscle are compressed. When compressed, the blood pressure inside the vessels increases and this pressure drives the blood back towards the heart. So, we can say for sure that muscle has a function in the regulation of a healthy circulatory system!
But what about the complementary lymphatic system? Well, unlike the circulatory system, which has the heart to pump blood through it, the lymphatic system relies entirely on pressure gradients created by the action of skeletal muscle. To quote a doctor from the British Cancer Association: “The lymphatic system is stimulated by moving your muscles and increasing your heart rate.” Muscular contraction is the pump that helps lymphatic fluid move around the body. So it follows that if you have more muscle mass and use it regularly in resistance training, you will see benefits to the lymphatic system. It will also help to keep your body fat mass lower, with obesity one of the major contributors to lymphedema where lymphatic fluid gets stuck and cannot drain from certain parts of the body.
So, what would a training plan to increase muscle mass look like? Well, long time listeners will know that I can’t really answer that question as well as I would like because of the whole individuality thing. But of course, there are some overarching concepts. First of all, it's really useful to have functional muscle contractions. What does that mean? Well these muscle contractions have to have a function for you. For example: for a triathlete, cycling is a functional contraction. It pushes an adaptation to a defined function of that organism. For a gymnast, cycling is not a functional contraction, because the desired function of a gymnast does not involve cycling.
So, a functional muscle contraction will be one which creates an adaptation according to your desired function. If you are listening to this and your desired function is to resist entropy and improve markers of aging like circulatory issues, then your functional contractions are less specific and more general. You will want to build functional contraction capabilities across all of the movement patterns which we use in human environmental interaction.
It's really common to bias certain movements we enjoy and ignore others we don’t. For example, every morning at the gym I see an older gentleman training, and whilst I love that he is in there getting after it, every day he does some bench press, some bicep and then walks on the treadmill and leaves. So, we have some pushing and some aerobic movement. No squats, no bending, no pulling, and the pushing he is doing seems to be in a range that is limited and maybe less reflective of real life.
So, not only should we look at using as many of the movement patterns as we can to build functional contraction capabilities, but we need to expose ourselves to variety within those. If we are talking about GPP (general physical preparedness) then exposure to new objects will be an important factor. So, if we are going to press, then sure we can bench press, but we can also floor press, overhead press, push press, Arnold press, landmine press, Z press and the list goes on. Ditto for squats. We can back squat, front squat, overhead squat, pistol squat, shrimp squat, zercher squat. All of these variants have great ability to be a stimulus to muscle adaptation and therefore circulatory system adaptation.
My advice this week to anyone listening will be to look up a variant of something you normally do and see how it goes. So, if you usually bench press, go do strict press. If you back squat, why not try some single arm overhead squats? Deadlift day, how about trying some rack pulls instead? That’s the challenge! If you do, email me and let me know what you did differently and how you got on.
If you have a question or just want to say hi, then email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com and you too can be featured on the show. Don’t forget to share the podcast with your friends!
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips: Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, Kamryn Lacey, and our new Director of Podcasts, Brannan Goetschius. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at
getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app