Muscle growth

After I got offline last night, I noticed some new muscle in my calves. Doing the Tantrum had made my calves sore, and perhaps it has already played some role in developing my calf muscles. Still, that would be a short time for getting new muscle from an exercise, and I have already been exercising my calves in other ways. I have been climbing a steep hill when I go walking, and I have been doing calf raises with weights. I have also been developing my shins by descending the same steep hill while walking and by pulling on a resistance band with my foot. This is significant, because shins and calves are opposite muscles, and developing a muscle helps its opposite develop further.

The Tantrum is an intense aerobic exercise, and intense aerobic exercise can kill people who are not in good shape. My father died of a heartattack while exercising on a treadmill. The last time I saw him was almost a year before he died. At that time, he had become obese. His stomach stuck out like Fat Albert's. I had never seen him so obese before. When I was growing up, he was interested in exercise, and we would sometimes exercise together. The main things I remember him doing were running and stretching. When I saw him in Providence, he had some light neoprene dumbbells, but he didn't have anything really suitable for serious strength training. His other piece of exercise equipment was a stationary bicycle. So it looks like he was mainly into aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise may be good for the heart, but it is not enough. Strength training is essential for maintaining a high metabolism, which will keep you from getting overweight. It is a myth that metabolism naturally decreases with age. It is an instance of the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Statistically speaking, metabolism decreases as age increases. But this is not because the increase in age causes the decrease in metabolism. It is because most people tend to decrease their activity as they get older, which causes them to lose muscle, which causes the decrease in metabolism. Metabolism is a function of how much muscle someone has, and strength training keeps up the metabolism by keeping up and building new muscle. I suspect my father's obesity was due to a neglect of strength training and to giving up serious aerobic exercise for a period of time. The obesity probably motivated him to throw himself back into exercise. But he threw himself into intense aerobic exercise without preparing himself with strength training, and his heart gave out, and he died. So the moral is not that exercise kills; it is that aerobic exercise needs to be combined with strength training, and when you have been inactive for too long, you need to gradually build up your strength and endurance rather than throwing yourself into hard exercise. Besides not realizing this, I think my father made another mistake, which was to rely on exercise to lose weight. Although exercise does burn calories, the most effective way to lose weight is to build muscle, which causes an increased metabolism that will burn more calories 24/7, not just when you are exercising. Although exercise is required for building muscle, they are not the same thing. Exercise itself does not build muscle; it just stimulates muscle growth. The actual muscle growth happens during rest, not during exercise. Too much exercise inhibits muscle growth by depleting the rest time available for building muscle. If you exercise too much, you will stress out your muscles without developing strength in them. I suspect my father did this, and it led to his heartattack.