TargetTalk

hello. I want to make body building to develop my biceps and triceps. how will it effect my shooting negative or not. what can you advice.

I know from experience that any heavy lifting has a negative short term impact on my hold stability.

Lifting heavy weights for strength is not needed for shooting, and it caused some shakes even a couple of days after the exercise.

What is more important is muscular stamina, not strenght.

I tend to agree with the last poster. I've always been told to exercise with smaller weights so as not to overbuild muscles. I gather excess muscle (as in weightlifting etc) tends to be less stable and more 'twitchy'

Rob.

Hi

If you're VERY VERY SERIOUS about your shooting, you only want to lift in the off season. You also don't mention your age. If you're under 25 don't lift heavy, in short when you can do 10 reps at a weight, move up 5 pounds. If you can't lift it at least 6-8 times don't lift at that weight, use a lower weight. I don't know how often you plan to shoot, BUT plan to shoot today, do weight lifting tomorrow, and rest a day before you shoot again.

Weight lifting and shooting DO NOT go well together. For increasing you arm strength, you may want to try swimming instead. I would hope that swimming will give you the shakes to a lessor degree, at least after you've been doing it a while.

I shoot and weight lift both, but then I'm still a low level marksman in NRA Conventional Pistol, so it's not a GREAT loss.

I hope this helps.

Mike

I have always read that creating large amounts of muscle raises the "muscle-tone" (I hope that is the right translation).
It is the lowest amount of muscletension or -energy the muscle uses when in rest. The more/stronger the muscle, the higher its tension when in rest.
Albert
(The Netherlands)

RobStubbs wrote:I tend to agree with the last poster. I've always been told to exercise with smaller weights so as not to overbuild muscles. I gather excess muscle (as in weightlifting etc) tends to be less stable and more 'twitchy'

Rob.

HI

It's not the extra (as opposed to excess) muscle that makes it twitch, it's the fact that you made the muscle (however much there is) tired. You can get the same effect by chopping down a tree, hammering nails, hiking or walking more than usual. Weightlifting is SUPPOSED to be a four day a week thing, so one or more muscle groups are ALWAYS tired and twitchy, which leads to shooting worse.

One of our local coaches had a boy who at least had a scholarship a few years ago. He had weight training class in high school while this coach was training him. The coach said he lost at least 15 points in 3-P when he started weights and his scores went back up later.

From my understanding of the size of the problem though, you should be able to weight left and increase weight until you get all of the fundamentals down and can shoot at say 80%, then you MAY be able to maintain your weightlifting, but I wouldn't increase weight.

I expect that everyone else will say don't weight lift at all, especially during the season, and that would work best for your shooting.....

Mike

mikeschroeder wrote:
HI

It's not the extra (as opposed to excess) muscle that makes it twitch, it's the fact that you made the muscle (however much there is) tired. You can get the same effect by chopping down a tree, hammering nails, hiking or walking more than usual. Weightlifting is SUPPOSED to be a four day a week thing, so one or more muscle groups are ALWAYS tired and twitchy, which leads to shooting worse. Mike

Mike,
I think (thought) that the act of weightlifting produces bigger and stronger muscles, whereas the act of repetitive weight lifting with small weights produces just stronger muscles. The nature of the muscles is different phsiologically and you develope more fast twitch muscle fibres in the former.

A quick search on google came up with;

"Various types of exercises can bring about changes in the fibres in a skeletal muscle. Endurance type exercises, such as running or swimming, cause a gradual transformation of type II B fibres into type II A fibres. The transformed muscle fibres show a slight increase in diameter, mitochondria, blood capillaries, and strength. Endurance exercises result in cardiovascular and respiratory changes that cause skeletal muscles to receive better supplies of oxygen and carbohydrates but do not contribute to muscle mass. On the other hand, exercises that require great strength for short periods of time, such as weight lifting, produce an increase in the size and strength of type II B fibres. The increase in size is due to increased synthesis of thin and thick myofilaments. The overall result is that the person develops large muscles."

Type IIb fatigue quickly whereas IIa are more slow to fatigue.

Rob.

Hi all,

I'm just goiing to give you my bit on it all.
I am a sport scientist and the university where i study does alot of research on muscular neuro physiology.
Firstly there is not real research which has shown any muscle fibre transformation; people have what they are born with. That is too say if you are born with alot of type IIb fibres you are goining to stay like that.
That is not what causes twitch following training but it is actually how you recruit your muscles when training.
Low weights and many reps tend to use few motor units and at a lower frequency compared to high intensity low rep weights.
The problem is if you do the big weights your muscular neuro system gets used to recriuting many motor units at a high frequency.
In real terms this means when your body feels some movement and fires some motor units to correct the movement it fires too many for the movement and causes the twitch.
The main form of training which will have this effect is that of maximal lifting. Power exercises where you can only move the weight 3-5 times and quickly are the worst. This is like olympic weight lifting.
If you can do 8-12 reps of a weight then you should not have any detremental side effects as increased stregnth will limit the effects of fatigue and require less enegry to perform the task.
Weights are good but should be only used for stregnth training in the early stages of the season and tapered into endurance work towards match time. That is less weight with more reps(15-30).

Enjoy the weight training.
By the way if you have a twitch from excessive weights it will go by doing normal holding exercises but you will keep the benifits of being stronger.

Magyar

In my experience, a gym workout has improved by consistency and got me shooting at a level close to personal best most of the time.

Unfortunately many people go weights-mad when having a workout and concentrate on exercises which only work the arm and shoulder muscles.

Like Maygar, I believe you need frequent repetitions of light weights to develop muscle tone rather than bulk. You should also be working your whole body including hamstrings, quads, lower back muscles, shoulders and gut muscles {;-)technical term} to build inner core stability and provide your pistol with an ideal shooting platform.

It is not just all triceps and biceps and proving that you can lift X weight. For most males no need to lift more than 15-20kg to enhance your shooting performance.