Mark Vande Hei is an American astronaut who just made history. He set the record for the longest spaceflight, spending 355 days in space on a spaceship. 

GQ interviewed Vande Hei once he got his sea legs back after returning to earth to talk about how he was able to do any workout and what his fitness regimen was like for the almost full calendar year he was floating around the galaxy. 

Here’s how he described his daily fitness routine to GQ.

“I woke up at 5:00 AM every day. Our first meeting of the day was at 7:30 in the morning. Between then, I’d be lifting weights, which sounds like a lot, but the time would go by pretty quick.

“Then the morning meeting would be done by 7:45. Then, ideally, my next event would be some cardiovascular training from 7:45 to 8:45. Three days of the week, I would use that to do high-intensity interval training on either the bike or the treadmill. It eventually worked up to being 30 seconds of high intensity with 15 seconds of rest over 20 minutes. Once a week, I would take off completely.”

Did you know he had access to a treadmill and bike in space? The best part of the interview was how he described lifting weights in a zero-gravity environment. 

“It’s a very interesting system. The way I like to describe it is if you imagine a seesaw and your job is to lift up your end of the seesaw. You can do it in such a way that you can do a bench press to lift up your end of the seesaw, or you can do a shoulder press or a squat or a deadlift. But instead of another person sitting down on the seesaw, imagine someone else pulling up on the seesaw—that’s shoving your end down while they’re pulling up.

“That person always applies the same amount of force, so that’s not really very useful with the wide variety of exercises you want to do. But what you do is you shift where the fulcrum is. So you change the lever arm so you can give more or less mechanical advantage to you versus the resistive force. That’s how we can adjust for anywhere between 20 pounds of force to 600 pounds of force.”

The post You Think It’s Hard Working Out On Earth? Imagine Being In Space for 355 Days! appeared first on VTPost.com.

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