-: Alright, so now we're gonna talk about tension,
and it kinda deserves its own little section here
because tension is basically the currency
for all that stuff.
So we need tension to get mechanical damage.
We need enough tension and time under that tension
to get to the oxidative stress.
We need enough tension to stimulate mTOR
and we need enough volume of that tension
to stimulate enough mTOR to actually get
a really good protein synthesis signal, right.
So it's probably the most significant signal
for protein synthesis.
It is having adequate tension.
And again, it's going to be this relationship
between the amount of tension and the volume of it, right.
So we need high volume of what I call
significant tension.
So instead of time under tension,
I prefer to say time under significant tension
or when talking about stimulus
because if it's not a significant amount of tension,
then the time doesn't matter.
The volume is insignificant unless
it's at a certain threshold of tension, right.
So if you're gonna use time under tension
as a way of your thinking about like prescribing you know
a set and rep continuum, you need to understand that
like okay, it needs to be at a certain threshold, right.
And for an individual, that threshold is gonna vary, right,
depending on their neurological efficiency
and their metabolic conditioning and what not, right.
Other things that are gonna affect how much tension
you have is gonna be execution
because execution isn't just gonna affect
the amount of tension, but it's gonna affect
where that tension is, right.
So it doesn't matter if the whatever's moving
the weight isn't the muscle that
you're intending to do it, right.
If something else is taking over, guess what?
You're no longer getting significant tension
in the muscle and no mTOR stimulus
and no mechanical damage and what not.
The only thing that you may still get is
a metabolic response because maybe
that muscle is working just enough to spend some energy,
so you get maybe a little bit of psychoplasmic adaptations
which is what most people that are doing poor training
for hypertrophy, but there's a combination
of drug abuse and a lot of metabolic adaptations
to create you know this volume of cell or cell volume
that's really not a lot of healthy contractile tissue.
Rather than just actually using good quality training
and match it with your nutrition
and periodizing your stimulus.
So we need load.
Obviously you know, tension, we can create
more tension with our mind in terms,
it's like getting that muscle to you know,
more isolated, a better execution,
like being able to contract a little bit more.
But it needs to be contracting against something, right.
So part of getting significant tension means using
significant load, right.
And also controlling that load, right.
That load doesn't mean anything without execution.
Or if you're creating a bunch of momentum
with something else, you know.
So throwing weights, guess what?
That's basically decreasing the load
and taking the execution, the tension away from the muscle.
So guess what?
No longer significant tension.
You're not gonna get the stimulus that you wanted.
You're gonna be left with metabolic adaptations only.
Volume is huge.
So you don't one mTOR or one AMPK.
You have tons of these proteins in your cells, right?
And so at any given time, there's a certain amount
of everything on and off, right.
It's either in an inactive or inhibited state, right.
And so having like one awesome rep, right,
where we had great execution and the right
amount of tension is only going to be
enough stress maybe to you know initiate a couple mTORs.
We need to be able to get a lot of that.
So the volume of the stress is there.
Plus the volume is what's gonna accumulate
that mechanical damage and that oxidative response,
you know to get that mononuclear benefit as well.
So you need that volume of tension for everything else.
So we need a threshold of it that you're gonna get
from execution and enough load.
And then you're gonna need to be able to have
enough volume of that, right.
So we're gonna be about that balance.
Intent is gonna play a key too
and we're gonna get more into that
when we talk about the neurological stuff next unit.
But understand that the amount of tension
that you're putting in a muscle
and how much work that muscle's doing has
a lot to do with how hard you're trying
to make it work.
Because if there's a point in the exercise
where it's easy, but you're just like moving
the dumbbell at a constant speed or something like that,
well guess what?
At that point in time, maybe it's no longer
significant tension because the mechanics
of the exercise make it easier in that
one particular area.
So your tempo and your intent play a very integral
portion with this, right.
So you'll have an exercise that will have
a certain resistance profile.
Your intent and your tempo needs to match that
in order to have maximal tension all the time
in that particular exercise.
So I'm gonna try and illustrate to you
that kind of balance between the amount of tension
and the amount of volume for some of these stimuluses.
So I kind of made it like a continuum
for intensity through metabolic, right.
So basically thinking lowest reps, highest load,
to highest reps, lowest load, if you will.
So if we look at, if we look at a hypertrophy thing, right.
When we get to the highest intensity stuff.
So our lowest rep stuff, right,
and say okay, well the tension is gonna be really high.
When we do volume based stuff, right,
well because we're doing either more sets or more reps,
what's gonna happen is the tension is not gonna be as high.
I have no idea how that just happened.
There, there.
So it's gonna get lower.
When we get to metabolic, we need a lot more time
under fatigue, right, which means the loads are gonna get
even a little bit lower, right.
So we're gonna see this trend of the loads decreasing
as we go from maximal intensity to focusing more
on volume to focusing more on metabolic, right.
So but because the amount of time is going up as I go there,
we're gonna kind of balance out
and get this stimulus right.
So the higher my intensity, well the less time I need
because the extra load and the extra tension is
gonna cause more damage and burn more fuel, right.
If I bring that down, the volume's gotta come up, right.
If I bring it down more, well then I have
to actually extend those sets further into fatigue
so I'm getting to those reps where the mechanical damage
and the oxidation is occurring.
So I've got to spend more time at failure
so my sets gotta come a little bit longer.
I've got to be using super sets or trisets or dropsets
or some sort of method to accomplish that, right.
So if I kind of look at volume.
The amount of volume that you would use
when you're programming these is actually going
to then look a little bit different.
So instead of a curve like this, right,
if I look at just volume for the type of workout,
it's gonna actually do that, okay.
That should be a little bit more in the middle.
But so my intensity...
I'm gonna draw a better version of that line.
My intensity should basically be
higher, volume highest, and then metabolic the lowest.
That's a much, much better line, right.
So we got highest, second highest,
and then third.
So in terms of the stimulus, if I'm doing more heavy,
more functional based work because the loads are
really high, I'm gonna need a decent amount of volume,
but not as much as if I'm doing volume.
But I'm gonna need more volume
in terms of like number of sets
than I am if I'm doing metabolic work.
When I'm doing the metabolic stuff,
I don't need necessarily volume of sets, right.
I don't need a lot of repeated effort.
What I need is some time in that fatigue state, right.
So that's the most important thing.
And because I'm getting that extra oxidative stress
and that extra metabolic demand,
I'm gonna be running into this kind of crossover
with metabolic stress as well.
So the amount of volume that I have here is
actually gonna be pretty darn low.
So that might even be a little too high still
for that line.
So in terms of comparative right.
Whereas this kind of midrange where it's kind of like
it's not too heavy and it's not too long,
that's the sweet spot for doing
like volume based hypertrophy.
And there's gonna be different reasons
that I would go from one end of the spectrum or the other.
So say I was actually trying to minimize inflammation.
Well if that was the case, maybe I'm gonna want
to work more over this way and avoid
the oxidative stress component and focus more
on just the tension.
I'm gonna focus more on using tension
for the mTOR component and just a little bit
of the myonuclear portion right.
If I want to maximize mechanical damage,
well then maybe it's gonna be like,
alright it's gonna be some sweet spot
where it's like I need significant loads
and volume, right.
That's gonna be where I want to be, right.
If I really want to tax that oxidative system,
for the most part you're gonna want to train
as far over to that direction as you can.
If a person handles inflammation really well,
then you could maybe potentially bring it back here.
But for the most part, and I kind of talked
a little bit about this in the metabolic phase,
if you're using oxidative stress,
like go all out, use it.
But don't overdo the volume and don't do
that stimulus too long.
Get the benefits and then get out.
Get some of those myonuclear adaptations
or those metabolic adaptations depending on the phase
and then jump back into something else
that doesn't quite tax that system as much.
So I bring up another color here.
We kind of look at the different stimulus
and stuff that I'm gonna get.
So I was to look at myonuclear, right.
So we'll call that MyoN.
We're gonna see that happens a lot at that point
and this point, right.
So the extra long sets and that sweet spot
where I'm kind of maximizing that mechanical damage.
Whereas my mTOR, ribosomal response, right, is gonna
happen mostly in here where I'm getting
that highest kind of volume of still significant tension.
So it's gonna kind of be in this area here, right.
So we've got the mTOR stuff in the middle
and then kind of on either side of that bell,
it's gonna switch over and be a little bit
more myonuclear, right, per se.
But there's always gonna be some crossover right?
So here you're probably still creating
some mechanical stress where you're gonna get some of that.
If you start shifting it over, sure you'll
still get some mTOR, but you might also get
some oxidative stress.
But there becomes a point where these two things
kind of start to fight each other, right,
and you get this kind of argument going back and forth
between the stress response and the hypertrophy response.
Remember that's what's going on inside the cell
whereas the inflammatory system that's sending for help
form the satellite cells, right,
the inflammation in the cell is not gonna mess
with that response.
That satellite cell is gonna come
and donate its contents.
But in terms of the cell being to switch over
to protein synthesis, too much oxidative stress,
too much metabolic stress is gonna stop you
from running this, right.
So which is a big part of why it's like
if you're gonna do the oxidative thing, just do it.
Do it for a short period of time, get the benefits,
and then go back to something else.