#46: Open Ready Part 2: How to train for the Open

Does your gym bag have the tools for you to be, “Open Ready”? PowerDot has integrated both Smart Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) and Transcutaneous Electrical Stimulation (TENS) therapy all into one wireless device for your pre-warm-up, warm-up, training, and recovery to ensure you have the essentials to be “Open Ready”. 

Low back pain or knee pain have you nervous about the Open Season? Use PowerDot’s wireless TENS therapy to relieve pain. 

Want to perform better on each workout? Use PowerDot’s muscle stimulation setting to enhance muscle fiber recruitment and increase power. 

Want to do a workout twice? Too sore to move? Both electrical muscle stimulation and TENS therapy decrease the pain associated with muscle soreness allowing you to perform your best day-in and day-out. 

Now, it seems like just yesterday we had to be “Open Ready” and here we are again. The sport we all compete in during the Open Season requires immense physical exertion and skill. It can be a grueling 5-weeks of competition and we need to be ready. 

Starting Thursday, October 10th, hundreds of thousands of people will compete in the online qualifier with workouts testing multiple components of physical fitness. Whether participating and competing to test your fitness levels, for fun with your gym community, or for a top 20 spot for an invitation to the main stage next summer, you need to be equipped with the best technology to maximize performance during workouts and ensure proper recovery.

At PowerDot, like you, we take performance and recovery seriously. The powerful Smart NMES and TENS technology can be controlled by you in an app on your phone. Since you take your phone everywhere with you, we want you to be able to take PowerDot everywhere with you as well. This is just one of the many things that separates PowerDot vs the competition. 

Here’s how PowerDot technology helps prime your body to perform better, recover faster, and stay healthy this Open Season.

Pre-Warm-Up… Using PowerDot Smart TENS to Minimize Joint Pain

Pre-warm-up? A warm-up before a warm-up? 

Whether rising early in the morning or after a long day at the office, you’re going from 0 to 100 reeeeaaaaallllll fast as you enter the box getting ready to compete in your time slot for the Open.

Maybe it’s your knee or your back that constantly hurts… It just never seems to fully warm-up. And there’s this aching joint pain every time you exercise. 

You’re in the middle of a workout after each rep asking yourself, “Why won’t the pain just go away?” 

Well… Have you tried using TENS before you start your warm-up or workout? 

Now, you may be wondering, “how could the little tingles you feel from a TENS unit decrease pain?” You’d be surprised what these little tingles can do. 

So, your muscles and joints have pain receptors all over that are sensitive to inflammation and other factors. Having some type of inflammation in your knees, back, shoulders, or wrists can signal a pain response. 

TENS therapy as a pre-warm-up shuts down the unnecessary pain signals sent from your muscles and joints to your brain so that you can move and compete pain free. 

Many of us try to reduce the pain we experience by spending a whole bunch of time on various recovery modalities and time-consuming exercises when TENS has been shown to significantly reduce pain more so than exercise programs. Using TENS as a pre-warm-up while you lace up your shoes may help you to move pain free as you jump into your warm-up and onto the competition floor. 

Warm-Up with PowerDot Smart NMES

Transitioning from your pre-warm-up with TENS to your warm-up with NMES is as easy as a tap of the finger on your phone. 

Let’s shoot straight, your 2-minutes on the rower or bike, and a couple minutes of a dynamic warm-up are not going to prepare your body to perform at it’s best. Adding PowerDot to your warm-up can help enhance your standard or dynamic warm-up. You can have way more power and speed while you compete in the Open workout by incorporating NMES into your warm-up…

And here’s how…

You’re general warm-up does not result in post-activation potentiation (PAP). PAP is a physiological phenomenon in which there is an enhancement in force exerted by a muscle due to previous repetitive contractions of that muscle. Meaning, both muscle force production and rate of force development increase as a result of previous muscle activation. 

PAP is typically induced by lifting something really heavy (like a 3RM back squat) and then competing. Sounds crazy right? None of us ever or would ever do that. Then why do Olympians? However, by doing this you run the risk of causing fatigue before you compete. 

NMES is an efficient way to promote the performance benefits of PAP while minimizing the risk of causing fatigue. Using NMES as the conditioning contraction, as opposed to maximal voluntary contractions, may elicit a greater potentiating effect increasing muscular torque and power. NMES also eliminates any potential for central nervous system fatigue as it bypasses the central nervous system and stimulates the Type II muscles fibers of the periphery directly. 

Being properly warmed-up, and using the PowerDot potentiating protocol, your body system is now ready to perform at its highest capacity. But after the warm-up, it’s not time to take off your PowerDot. Keep it on for your strength training. 

Training with PowerDot

Now, you wouldn’t wear PowerDot while you’re competing in your workout. However, there is no off-season when it comes to your training. So, hopefully you have been training with PowerDot Smart NMES technology. And if you haven’t, there’s no better time to start than now. 

To compete at a high level in this sport requires a high aerobic capacity, the ability to delay the onset of fatigue, and pure muscular strength. Not using PowerDot in your training year around places you at a disadvantage to others. Adding PowerDot to your training enhances the benefits of your strength training more so than if you were to train without it.

By maximally improving your strength, you may improve your time to exhaustion (endurance), exercise economy, and your functional aerobic performance by increasing your ventilation threshold (similar to lactate threshold) and aerobic capacity. Essentially, by utilizing the technology of PowerDot, you optimize your training and consequently your performance. 

As you’re putting on your knee sleeves, wrist wraps, and weight-belt think about also placing on your PowerDot as it should be the most utilized tool in your gym bag.

PowerDot NMES and TENS for Recovery

With PowerDot, you just decreased your pain during your Open workout and performed better than you ever could have imagined. But maybe you still want to exercise the next day… or re-do the workout with a friend to try and better your time. 

Sore muscles are impaired muscles. Meaning, they do not contract with as much force or perform as they normally would. This is due to the fact that there is actual microscopic damage to contractile and structural elements of the muscle. Don’t worry, this damage does not mean you’re injured or hurt. It just means that the muscle cell itself needs to recover… you’re fine, just sore.

How can you minimize the soreness and fatigue you may feel over the next few days? 

Two ways!

One, recall, earlier we discussed about pain receptors. The damage to the muscle cell actually sends a pain signal to your brain. Using TENS after a workout may decrease any perception of pain and the perception of pain impairs performance as well as results in improper biomechanical and less efficient movements. 

Two, PowerDot offers four distinct muscle recovery NMES programs designed to enhance blood flow, reduce inflammation, and minimize soreness.