Examining wear and tear on your body
Personal trainer Alison Storey’s weekly column, answers your questions on fitness and wellbeing.
Q: Is it okay to do weights just once a week or do you have to do them more to achieve anything? A: There is substantial evidence that doing resistance training work, and so putting your muscles under more pressure than they encounter in our everyday environment, raises your metabolic rate (so you burn more calories just standing still), increases insulin receptors on muscle tissue (so you use glucose more effectively) and keeps joints and tendons strong (so helps prevent injury).
Weight training can also elevate your heart rate and so work your cardiovascular system if designed accordingly, and so can somewhat do both muscle work and cardio work at the same time.
Current recommendations are that resistance training is performed on three occasions per Do you have a question for Alison? You can contact her via her website,
or email her on: alison@storeysport.co.nz and recovery (sleep) and most certainly how promptly you got any injuries seen to, and if you did the exercises the physio would have given you like your life depended on it.
If any of these were substandard then that could have made the wear and tear worse than it needed to be, to be honest.
Most sports don’t create unwieldy imbalances and if they do, the body usually rectifies them to a degree when you cease those repetitive movement patterns. Worth noting is that if you suffered a major injury during that time, any residual effect may be something that needs to be well managed through particular exercises.
-Cambridge’s Alison Storey is a personal trainer who has represented New Zealand in beach volleyball, rowing and rhythmic gymnastics. She has been awarded New Zealand Personal Trainer of the Year twice and runs Storey Sport, a mobile personal and sports training business which provides a range of services that optimise the fitness and wellbeing of its clients.