-: So in terms of priming, and getting warmed up
and ready to go for a hypertrophy workout,
I came up with this
AMPS acronym here, which is activate, where it's,
okay, so to activate a muscle,
wanna get our mind-muscle connection going.
So for hypertrophy training it's very important
that we get the tension where we want it to go.
'Cause tension is the only thing that's
really working for us here, right?
So we have to get a good feel for that,
getting that muscle, squeezing it in the short position,
wires our brain into that muscle,
gets that muscle contracting,
gets the nervous system wired into that muscle.
Alright, so that gets us activated, that improves
our mind-muscle connection and it can start
increasing our nervous system activity towards that muscle.
But then we need to take it a little bit further.
The nervous system needs to know a few things.
It needs to know what you're gonna use,
how you're gonna use it, and to what degree.
So in how we're gonna use it means the range of motion
that we're gonna train it in.
So, we squeeze, like okay,
I'm gonna use biceps today, right?
I don't know if you guys can see there's
a tiny little bicep here.
So if I squeeze that, brain's like okay, biceps are working.
Let's start with a little bit more feedback
with the bicep and the elbow flexors, and triceps,
and everything that's stabilizing that joint.
But then it's like, okay, but where are the biceps going?
I have to do the range of motion that I'm gonna do.
I have to get my nervous system prepared for the
range of motion I'm gonna use so it can control
all the joints, the stabilizers around that,
especially if loads are gonna be high.
Then what I need to do, is I need to prepare it
for the amount of work that it's gonna have to do
within that range.
So I want to potentiate it.
I wanna do something that makes that muscle
have to contract a lot of fibers.
And that could be doing a hard isometric, or isometronic.
It could just actually be having a heavier load set,
that's not really the failure.
So, if I'm gonna do,
if I'm gonna do, four sets of eight on something,
I might pick, I might be going to this and
I do the short position, and I go through my thing,
and then I'm like slowly working up in load.
But before I actually get to my working sets,
maybe I pick a weight that I would only
be able to do three or four times, and I just do that once.
Like one rep.
And I do that to potentiate, so now when I go pick
the load that I'm gonna do for those four sets of eight,
now my nervous system is even primed beyond that load,
so it's gonna be more likely to recruit some of those
fast twitch fibers.
And that's especially important when you're doing
more intensity based work.
The more you get towards the metabolic, then this becomes
less of a factor, in terms of how you're gonna perform
during that workout and it's more just about these two.
Then lastly, we need to stimulate it.
So we need to then now, now I need to actually
place the metabolic demand that's gonna be used on it.
And that's where we start with our first working sets.
If you're on the very metabolic phase,
you may do, instead of focusing on this potentiation,
you may take, okay, if I'm doing say, instead of the
four sets of eight, say I'm doing three sets of 12,
or I'm doing some sort of superset or something.
I may initially do something that's just
a little bit longer than that, or close to it.
In terms of the amount of time under tension,
the amount of metabolic work that it's gonna take.
And then take a rest, allow my body to actually start
revving up that mitochondria and whatnot,
so that when I get into my first set, metabolically,
that muscle's already ready to go.
Kind of similar to what we talked about when we
talked about priming for a metabolic workout.
But not as much time spent there, maybe like one set.
So now, let's talk about exercise order.
If we're doing straight sets, right?
So, we're not gonna get into supersets yet,
but if I was just designing a program,
I'm gonna do one exercise, then I'm gonna move to the next,
and so on and so forth, once I've completed
all the exercises, right?
So we need tension at all lengths,
really if we want a lot of hypertrophy.
Meaning that, we need to train a muscle in its
short position, in its mid position, in its length position,
and so, a shortened bicep is up here.
A lengthened bicep is gonna be stretched back here.
So, it stretches the shoulder, it's lengthened at the elbow.
So all of your muscles have
shortened and lengthened positions,
and within a workout or at least within a phase,
you need to make sure you're training
a muscle throughout its entire range of motion.
And then, you're not just getting it there,
but you're also challenging it there.
So you doing something where it's
hard to get the muscle fully shortened.
Where it's hard when the muscles lengthened, and where
it's hard in the middle.
So, what we'll talk about is, and we get into
the mechanics stuff, I'll refer to this
maximum tension curve.
But that's basically when you have an exercise
and you've set it up so that it is as hard as possible
for your muscle at every point.
So that would be the perfect thing.
So, there's a device you can use, it's called an
isokinetic device that they'll have at like certain labs,
and it'll have an arm curl or a leg extension in there.
And the thing just moves at a set speed.
So you contract as hard as you possibly can
and it just moves at a set speed,
regardless of how hard you contract.
So that would be what we'd be trying to replicate.
It's like pick an exercise where you can contract
as hard as you can and you're just able to move it
without creating too much momentum,
but not going too slow that it becomes metabolic.
That's when we're gonna be maximizing the tension.
That would be what we'd like to be getting.
So our first working exercise,
if we're just doing all straight sets,
should be the exercise that I have that makes me
have to work the hardest for every inch of that rep.
So some exercises are only hard at the bottom,
or they're only hard at the top.
Or, they're only hard in one little spot, and there will be
dead spots or light spots.
So we wanna avoid those here, we wanna focus on that.
If you were gonna focus on one of the extremes here
for hypertrophy I would say you would focus on
the lengthened position,
because that's better for mechanical damage.
If you were focusing on oxydative stress or metabolic work,
then we talked about a short position exercise
might actually be better here.
But for hypertrophy, the more complete that exercise,
the better to have that exercise here.
Because you're gonna have the highest performance,
the most metabolic energy to expend there,
so put your biggest bang for your buck exercise
is the first one in your workout.
From there, then we'd like to overload the extreme.
So pick an exercise that's hard where the muscle's short,
and an exercise that's hard where the muscle's lengthened.
Now, in terms of whether you do the short as the B's or
the short as the C's can kind of differ
depending on the muscle group.
But, as a training stimulus, as a training variable,
this is where I would actually start to play with things,
in terms of, there are reasons for certain muscles
where you may bias them more than the other,
but that's kind of beyond on the scope of this module.
But, for all muscles, at some point, you should flip this.
So that you're training the different extremes
under different degrees of fatigue.
So I would do short and then lengthened,
while the short gets trained in a
fresher position than the lengthened.
Especially when we compare it to how fatigued
was I coming out of that first exercise?
If I flip that, now it's a little bit of
a different stimulus, right, and remember we talked about
fatigue as a factor for the oxidative stress and
mechanical damage that's going to occur.
So if I'm training at a certain position
and it's hard at that position,
under a certain degree of fatigue,
that will affect how much of a stimulus I am getting there.
And then, optional.
If a person needs the volume, a lot of people,
that's enough.
But some people will need a fourth exercise,
or multiple other exercises for some types of
hypertrophy programs, but, usually a D is about as
far as it will go for most muscle groups.
And that would be an opportunity to then actually load
the mid range, or return to an exercise that works
either these three, either full hard everywhere,
or more time in one extreme that maybe you need to
work on a little bit more.
It's a little bit weaker, a little bit more underdeveloped
and you need to bring that up.
But, ideally we'd pick something probably that's
different than these and we'd overload the mid range.
Pick something that's harder in the middle of the rep,
or at least very challenging there.
When we look at the phases of a rep,
we have concentric and the eccentric.
We have, friction plays an important part for how much
those are gonna be loaded.
So if we look at pulleys vs. free weights, vs. plate loaded,
because pulleys have a actual cable and pulley
and something has to spin, there's friction
that is formed on that.
And so what that friction is gonna do,
is it's gonna provide more resistance on the
concentric than the eccentric.
So if I was rowing, here and I'm using a cable,
when I go to pull that friction technically makes the
weight feel heavier than it really is.
Because I'm not just pulling the weight.
I'm pulling the weight and dealing with the friction.
As I let it out, the friction is now gonna act on
that weight pulling against me, making the weight lighter.
So, in terms of concentric vs eccentric,
when I'm doing a pulley or a machine like
a selectorized machine that works on a pulley,
the friction on that is actually gonna make
it concentrically biased.
Which is great for and enhancing metabolic work.
But it's not very good when I want mechanical damage.
So I have to bias the eccentric more and
those type of things, or what I would do,
is I would put those things at the end of my workout
when I'm more fatigued.
So I would do my pulley work last and
focus on my free weight work early.
Because the free weight, there's not gonna be a difference,
there's no friction, so everything's gonna be balanced.
So then my tempo is really the thing that's dictating
which phase is being focused on more.
If I'm doing a four-zero-one-zero tempo then I'm spending
four seconds eccentric, one second on the concentric.
This can be very important when we're trying to
really emphasize either a lot of
mechanical damage, or very little.
So if you're goal for hypertrophy seamless is
mechanical damage, well then obviously I wanna find
any way that I can make that eccentric
have a greater impact.
So whether that is having a trainer there with you
to actually be able to give more resistance on
the eccentric, or going even slower.
If I have to use a machine, or simply, picking exercises
like, so a machine, like a plate loaded machine is gonna
have less friction than a cable by far.
It's gonna be really close to a free weight,
so that would be a better option than a cable machine
when my goal is that mechanical damage.
And then the other thing is when I'm really trying
to avoid inflammation while accomplishing more of
a metabolic effect, which may happen, I use this a lot
for peaking people for shows and stuff, is we get to
that end I'm trying to make their workouts
as concentric dominant as possible.
And so, guess what they're gonna use?
They're gonna us a lot of pulleys, right?
If I'm trying to cause a lot of trauma to somebody's tissue,
we're not gonna use a lot of pulleys.
Now, I will say that if you're limited on
exercise selection, the thing that has the
best biomechanics, that allows you to make the muscle
you want to work work, that fits your body the best,
and that you can execute the best, well then you do that.
So if the only good solution for this particular muscle
is a cable exercise based off of the equipment
that you have available or it's just so much better,
that's gonna trump this tiny detail.
But this tiny detail, when added up over
hundreds of workouts, will make a difference in the
amount of net progress that you can make.
And it also makes a difference in the amount of volume
that you need to spend in a given workout.
So your workouts can be shorter if your stimulus
can be more precise.
So picking the right types of resistance,
in additions to the resistance profile, but just simply
the right type of resistance.
Whether it's something that has friction or does not,
will impact your ability to get that stimulus and
how much work it takes to get that stimulus.
Because if I'm trying to do mechanical damage, guess what,
it's gonna take way more pulley work than it
will free weight work in order to get
that mechanical damage, and I will have to be more
metabolically conditioned because it's gonna take
more metabolic work to be able to provide enough
eccentric volume in the session.