HIIT Writing

Things are Like Muscles

        Many people have said that things are like 
muscles, meaning the more you practice, the more you use 
them, the stronger they will become. From time 
management, to habits, to writing to literal exercise, it all 
comes easier with practice. In my anatomy and physiology class, we’re learning about 70 of the over 600 muscles in 
the human body (1). Therefore, I’ve realized some things 
about muscles, or more specifically what things are like 
muscles. Sand, pebbles, and leaves are like muscles, 
because they all look nearly exactly the same and differ 
very little from each other. 

Classification

                Imagine that it’s Fall and someone goes outside. They have trees at the back of their property,
 whose leaves have scattered all over their lawn. Evidently, this person is a scientist, because they name 
every single leaf that has fallen onto their yard in Latin with words describing them and their approximate location in the yard. One is named Surrexerunt sinistram quercu* for left oak rose,  meaning that it is an 
oak tree leaf to the left of the rose. When you, the scientist’s student, go to study around 70 of the leaves, you don’t know latin, and have to use black and white diagrams to memorize their names and location. So you start examining each leaf in incredible detail. You ask yourself questions trying to figure out the 
differences. Does this one turn? Does it have a point? Is it short or tall?  Thin or thick? 

There’s Too Many of Them!

               Eventually, you realize that when looking at 70 leaves, asking whether it turns narrows it down 
to about 60, because practically all of them turn in one way or another. Furthermore short doesn't help, 
because yes it's shorter than these two, but it's almost the exact same length as that other one you keep 
confusing it with. Naturally, it's easiest to tell which are oaks, and which are aspens, and which are 
birches. But it's difficult to be more exact than that, as the oak beside the rose looks nearly identical to the one by the south side of the garden. All of this to say: I'm very thankful for my muscles; they do a great 
job. But I'm also thankful I don't need to know each of their names and locations for them to work 
properly.

Growing Muscles

           Before we started learning the names and locations of more than 70 of the muscles, we went over 
the general information about muscles, the different categories, how they contract and other specifics. 
There are smooth, skeletal, and cardiac muscles, which contract in a very complicated way that I still don't understand, but it involves words like tropomyosin, neuromuscular junction, sarcomeres and many 
others, In the other specifics section, one topic was the structure of muscles. We learned muscles are made up of cells called myocytes, which unlike other tissue cells (skin cells, bone cells) do not grow through 
dividing into two. Instead myocytes grow by enlarging. This means that someone who can lift their body weight has as many muscle cells as someone who can barely lift 20lbs. We all have the ability to be strong and fit. We just need to grow our muscles through exercise. 

If Things ARE Like Muscles

            Therefore, if writing and time management is truly like a muscle, that means we all have nearly the same amount of cells. We just need to grow our time management and writing muscles through exercise. One of the most effective methods of exercise is HIIT, or high-intensity interval training. It increases your metabolism, your heart rate, and the amount of fat burned. (2) As I’ve, unfortunately, fallen behind in writing for an hour every day,** the day I’m writing this I have decided to do a writing HIIT catch up session. Technically, HIIT is supposed to be used as a regular workout method, but I’m using the principle to help me catch up. The plan is to do varying lengths of writing in order to catch up the most amount of time, without turning my brain to mush. So far the plan, where W = writing, B= break, and all units are minutes, is 15 W, 5 B, 30 W, 5 B, 60 W, 10 B, 30 W, 5 B, 30 W. That still looks like a lot though. I’ll let you know how it goes in next week’s post. All this writing is actually one big B from studying. I think I’ve earned it. The timer just went off so it’s time for my second 5-minute break.

Notes:

* Translation through probably rather inaccurate Google translate

**Can’t figure out why. It’s not like I just had an exam with 321 terms in it, and one on Tuesday of over 70 muscles or anything. Weird.

Sources:
Image Credit:

“Writing? Yeah”by Caleb Roenig. Reducedbrightness to -45. 

“Timer” by MITOIET. Applied “CALI” Filter. 

(1) Brooks, Susan V. “Current Topics for Teaching Skeletal Muscle Physiology”. In Advances in Physiology Education from SemanticScholar.org

(2) Schlinger, Amy. “HIIT Workout: What It Is and Why It Works”. On Huffingtonpost.com