What is suppleness?

The ability to achieve a full range of movements “to turn, stretch, twist and bend” without any stiffness, aching or suffering a spine or joint injury is defined as suppleness. It is also known as flexibility.

What about it?

Suppleness or flexibility is an important part of your everyday life. Being supple means that you can reach up to take an item down from a bookshelf, for example, or bend down to tie your shoe laces, without feeling that your movements are restricted in any way. When you are young, you tend to take suppleness for granted. But as and when you start growing older, you need to spend a bit of time enhancing and maintaining your suppleness.

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Muscle-toning exercises won’t turn you into a mean looking body builder. Instead they will ensure that your muscles stay in good shape and can work more efficiently so that you can do everyday tasks for longer.

To avoid developing imbalanced muscles, you need to do a range of muscle-toning exercises. These can be included with the aerobic and other exercise as a part of a general fitness routine. If you are a bit new to exercising, do a few of each muscle toning exercise and slowly build up the number. Always do a warm-up routine before you start and a cool-down at the end to reduce the risk of injury and post exercise aches and pains. To refresh your muscles, march on the spot between exercises to help prevent a build-up of lactic acid.

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Always aim to alternate resistance exercises with aerobic or the stamina building exercises. This will give your muscle a chance to recover from the build of the lactic acid in your body, which is a common side effect of high intensity activities such as weight lifting or sprinting. In these anaerobic activities, oxygen cannot be delivered to the muscles in time to assist with the breakdown of glycogen (the form in which glucose is stored as energy in muscles). If there is no presence of oxygen, then these glycogens breakdown produces lactic acid. It is build of this lactic acid in the muscles that causes a burning sensation in your body after you do an intense activity.

The pain eventually builds up to the point where you must rest. As soon as you stop, muscles start to use oxygen to break down the lactic acid. The more lactic acid that is built up, the more the oxygen required to break it down. This is called the oxygen debt’ and this why you pant for breath after sprinting. By alternating aerobic exercises with resistance activities you enable the muscles to disperse the lactic acid rather than accumulating it. You will then not have to stop doing strength exercises prematurely because if either fatigue or a muscle pain.

You can also train yourself to improve your recovery rate by timing each stop to allow yourself just enough time to breathe evenly and deeply before repeating the exercise. With practice this will enable you and your body to recover faster and therefore improving your stamina.

Muscular endurance refers to a muscle’s ability to work repeatedly for an external period of time. Endurance is needed for tasks that do not pose much of resistance challenge but require repetitive movements for example, the repeated brush strokes required when painting a ceiling or a wall, the arm movements involved when polishing a car and the leg power used when climbing long flights of stairs, actually all require muscular endurance. The ability to maintain a good posture throughout the day, whether sitting, standing or on the move, is also dependent upon muscle endurance.

In order to build endurance, you need to do exercises that require the muscles not only to overcome moderate resistance but also to continue doing so for an extended period of time. In other words, while strength training involves heavier weights but fewer repetitions, preferably continued over 20 minutes. Before you start regular strength and endurance exercises, it might help to gauge your current level by doing the abdominal curl test (explained below) so that you can pinpoint and make a note of your improvements. Your abdominal muscles help you to maintain your posture during various physical activities and thus are good indicators of overall muscular fitness.

Abdominal Crunch Test And Abdominal Muscle Strength Rating Chart

The abdominal curl (or crunch) test is a good way to help you determine as how strong you are and also it determines your current level of muscular ability. As far as doing an abdominal curl is concerned, lie on your back with your shoulder resting on floor and your arms by your sides. After that lift your shoulders and head off the floor so that hands slide forwards towards your knees and then carefully lower your head and shoulders back to floor. Keep in mind that you have to breathe out as you curl up and breathe in as you come down. Do as many as you can in 1 minute and then compare the results with the standards given below.

In Women:

Age           Very Fit           Fit             Average          Unfit

40-50 35+ 31-35 24-30 Less Than 23

51-60 30+ 26-30 20-25 Less Than 19

60+ 25+ 21-25 15-20 Less Than 14

In Men:

Age                             Very Fit                   Fit                   Average          Unfit

40-50              39+                 35-39              29-34              Less Than 28

50-60              34+                 30-34             24-29              Less Than 23

60+                  29+                 25-29              19-24              Less Than 18