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Article under development.

Being Out of Shape is Relative
“Out of shape” has a lot of different meaning to different folks. To a marathon runner it is missing a day or two of distance running. To the disinterested couch potato it is a way of life. In between are people who have missed a few weeks, a few months, or a few years of regular exercise.

Exercise Physiologists call being out of shape deconditioning or detraining. People who are exercising should know there are two main kinds of deconditioning: strength and cardiovascular. If a person stops lifting weights, they really don’t lose any strength on Day 1 or Day 2 … 3 … or even Day 10. In fact, within a three to ten-day period of rest, a person might get stronger. If you can do 10 reps of a certain heavy weight, there is a pretty good chance you can do at least 7 or 8 reps and maybe even still 10 reps of the same weight after no workouts for up to 10 days. You might even be able to lift a heavier weight, but probably fewer reps within that 10-day rest. But after 10 days to 14 days, then you will start to see a decline in strength.

Cardio is a different story. Stopping cardiovascular training results in a significant decrease in conditioning immediately. Cardiovascular detraining primarily causes drops in blood volume and mitochondrial enzyme activity — that’s the activity that gets energy to repeatedly contracting muscles from the combination of food and oxygen at the cellular level. Most endurance runners can feel a disappointing loss of power, endurance and speed with associated discomfort in as little as three days of absolute rest. Athletes with adaptations of heart size and muscle capillarization with years of development seem to hold their morphological or structural adaptations for about three months. But the blood volume and mitochondrial activity starts discharging like a cell phone battery in 2 or 3 days. Twelve days of detraining takes about 36 days of re-training to restore the body to the trained levels of mitochondrial activity. In studies involving complete rest of trained individuals, the mitochondrial activity has been shown to have a 50% decline in 12 days. Note that reduced training or moderate training keeps the loss of conditioned cellular physiology (mitochondrial activity) from being so severe.

Article under development.

Action:
Elbow flexion brings the forearm up at the elbow joint with the wrist and hand in either supinated, pronated or neutral range or any degree in between.

Forward flexion at the glenohumeral joint brings the arm straight up in front of the body in the sagittal plane.

Supination of the forearm at the proximal radioulnar joint rotates the forearm outward as in turning the palm upward or turning the thumb away from the midline of the body.

Lesser Actions:
In Horizontal adduction the biceps brachii helps bring the arms together, as in a dumbbell chest fly.

In Shoulder abduction, the biceps brachii helps raise the arms to the side, as in a standing dumbbell fly or lateral raise.

EXPANDED REPORT …

Action:
The muscle as a single unit causes both hip extension and knee flexion. Both heads of the Biceps Femoris cause knee flexion. Only the long head of the biceps femoris, which originates in the pelvis — and therefore crosses the hip joint — causes hip extension. The long head of the bicep femoris is a weaker knee flexor when the hip is extended, and a weaker hip extender when the knee is flexed because of active insufficiency. Active insufficiency is the inability to produce maximal measurable tension (actively) because joint angles and levers put a muscle in a slackened position. The slackened position causes a less-than-optimal length-tension relationship of the muscle. Muscles generate less force when overstretched, as when origins and insertions are spread too far, or when the muscles are allowed too much slack, as when origins and insertions get too close. The length-tension relationship is measured from a percentage of 100% resting length of a muscle. The biceps femoris in exercise is an excellent example of active insufficiency, which explains one of the reasons leg curl strength can be stronger in a seated leg curl (hips in flexion) when compared to a prone leg curl on a flat bench (hips in extension). Consider also the effects of standing leg curl machines and prone leg curl machines with slightly flexed body boards.

When the knee is semi flexed, the Biceps femoris has a tendency to rotate the leg slightly outward — external rotation. The external rotation can cause the feet to turn outward and seems to be a common sign of fatigue, visible by observing a walking gait.

EXPANDED REPORT …

Article in development … The Semimembranosus muscle shapes the medial part of the hamstring muscles.

The Triceps Brachii muscle shapes the lateral part of the upper arm and causes elbow extension, which which straightens the arm at the elbow …