12/22/11. About a month ago, Tony read that exercise done very slowly with a light weight will build slow-twitch muscles and increase mitochondrial density. At that time, I converted the last set of both my calisthenics and my weight lifting to these slow-twitch exercises. A couple of weeks later I changed my Wednesday and Thursday sets back to regular exercises, both because I thought I might be overtraining, and because I didn't want to lose my faster-twitch abilities.
Basically, for the last set, I decrease the weight by 30% to 50% and decrease the speed of the exercise to about two seconds up and two seconds down. I think of them as moving isometrics (which is silly!) For body-weight exercises such as leg lifts, I could not decrease the weight, so I just do them until technical failure.
Boy, have I noticed a difference! I can FEEL the difference. And although my weight is not changing, my belly is smaller, so I'm pretty sure I'm losing fat. I've weighed myself on our body composition scale a couple of times since starting this program, and it says I've lost about 2% of my fat. Since the error in the scale is about 2%, I'll wait a bit to really believe I've lost 3 lb of fat and gained 3 lb of muscle in about a month.
Oh, yes. It's been a couple of months since we started taking green tea phytosome. It's supposed to increase a person's HGH, so my increased muscle density could be partially or fully caused by this instead of the exercise change. Tony is feeling it, and I'm seeing it in his muscles as well.