-: Alright we're continuing on with neurological stimulus.
So just a quick recap here.
So if I'm doing a neurological phase
the stimulus that I'm gonna be getting
is I'm gonna be getting some sort of coordination
and motor learning pattern
and if that's heavy loads it's gonna be
like more motor units, right?
If it's with momentum I'm gonna get
more fast twitch recruitment.
So depends what type
of neurological training am I doing?
Am I doing more kind of speed or explosive work
or I am just doing like really heavy work, alright,
different types of adaptations
and respectively different motor patterns
are going to be learned based off of that activity.
There will be some kind of mechanical
and contractile adaptations that can occur.
So when I'm doing neurological training
I'm gonna get high amounts of tension, right?
And remember tension is like, that's the currency
for, you know, us to be able to produce
all those hypertrophy stimulus, right?
So with enough volume I could get hypertrophy gains
in a neurological phase.
I could get hypertrophy adaptations,
but my threshold has to be fairly low.
So in a person that hasn't been stressed
with a lot of volume, and so their tolerance to volume
is relatively ow.
If they're doing a neurological program
and the reps are kind of we'll say on the higher end
of neurological work, right?
It's very plausible that they could be in,
well we'll say like a power building phase
or whatever where they're getting a lot
of neurological adaptations to recruit
more motor units while also stimulating muscle growth
in the process, right, but also keep in mind
that if that becomes a point where their ability
to recover, they're getting a lot of inflammation,
that is gonna effect their ability
to contract this tissue so it's gonna
decrease their training frequency.
So while it is cool that if their threshold
is really low they could get hypertrophy gains here,
if they're just very undertrained in terms
of being able to deal with volume and dealing
with the amount of mechanical damage
that's gonna occur here, right?
So if they don't have a lot of myonuclei
or they don't have a lot of ribosomes
or their energy production is not very good
so their recovery is poor,
well guess what, that's gonna keep them
from actually getting a lot
of these neurological adaptations.
It's gonna change this to a different stimulus,
if you will, so it'll turn this into basically
being a, instead of a really good program
for neurological with some hypertrophy benefits,
it'll change it into a really crappy hypertrophy program
with very little neurological benefits, right?
So it's one thing if that threshold
is just kinda low, it's another thing
if it's like low because your recovery is very poor
in terms of recovering from volume
or mechanical damage, right?
So moving on here.
If we kind of look at our stress table
that we're looking at, a lot of green
here on the neurological.
So, this tends to be a break for a lot
of the biochemical systems of the body, right?
It's not very stressful to the liver,
it's not very stressful on blood sugar,
but it is stressful to the neurotransmitters, right?
So we're gonna, if we're doing that, guess what,
that's a lot of work for the brain
because the more tissue working
and the harder it's working
the more times my brain is having
to communicate, the stronger the impulses
have to be, right?
So I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna pour out
more neurotransmitters, I'm gonna go through
more dopamine and acetylcholine in my brain,
I'm gonna move more, move more electrolytes
within those synapses and all that stuff's
gonna have to be rebalanced, right?
The tissue damage inflammation is gonna be again,
proportionate to that ratio of intensity and volume, right?
So if intensity is really, really high,
maybe the volume won't be so high
so in that case then there won't be much tissue trauma.
You know if the intensity is too low
well then we're not even in a neurological phase
anymore, but if you're in kind of like the,
we'll say the closer to hypertrophy range
of neurological work where it's like high intensity
and still a pretty decent amount of volume,
then you will have some mechanical damage stuff
in there as well, right?
So depending on what your goal is for that person,
whether you're trying to use this as a break
from like taxing that system,
then, you know, shifting closer to the intensity,
less volume, will be ideal if you're trying
to avoid those mechanical things.
If you're trying to kind of double dip
in a little bit of hypertrophy stimulus
with some neurological adaptations,
then that's probably perfectly plausible,
you just have to look at how trainable that is
for the individual on whether or not
that's something that you can accomplish.
So if you've seen this picture before,
in terms of these neurological adaptations, right?
So we have all these different motor units
that we can recruit, right, so the big adaptations
that we're gonna get in terms of being able
to move more weight regardless of the speed,
is being able to recruit
more motor units simultaneously at the same time, right?
So that means more muscle fibers can be contracted
at the same time, that also means more energy
can be expended at the same time
which is gonna transfer over
to better metabolic work, it means more tension
can be created which is gonna transfer over
to hypertrophy workout and more force can be produced
which is going to transfer over to performance-based gains
and strength and speed, okay?
I'm gonna get that increase energy production,
more ATP, more neurotransmitter recycling storage
and release, right, and increased capacity
of high intensity work.
So they better I get at being able to generate
new ATP and replenish those neurotransmitters,
the more I'm gonna have a tolerance to being able
to repeat high-intensity contractions
so my rest periods can get smaller
and the amount of work that I can do
in a session can become larger
when that nervous system gets trained.
Like I said, when you get to the point
where you're pretty well-trained
in hypertrophy and metabolic training
almost always the muscle is gonna fatigue
way before the system but when you're doing
straight neurological work, like if you're doing
a lot of dynamic lifts like power cleans,
and snatches and stuff, the amount of work
the nervous system is doing is gonna now
supersede what the muscle is having to do
so you will be stressing the energy system
of the nervous system maybe, at least equally,
as much as the muscular system.
Alright, will we get hypertrophy adaptations?
Okay, the high tension there can stimulate
a protein synthesis, alright,
so remember I drew that little z-line thing
where the two sarcomeres meet, okay,
when there's tension there, I,
those mechanoreceptors there that actually
sense that tension between those two sarcomeres, right,
and that activates what's called a HIPPO pathway
which is a upstream pathway
that can stimulate mTOR, right?
So that's that anticipation that muscular damage
is going to occur so protein synthesis
is going to need to be on, right?
So depending on how well adapted I am,
if I've been doing a ton of higher intensity
hypertrophy phase work well I'm probably,
this probably isn't gonna be an adequate stimulus.
If I haven't been doing that then this might be
an adequate stimulus, right?
See, I hope you guys are starting to see
that as a person becomes more trained,
they're gonna be able to double dip a lot less.
They're gonna be able to get multiple benefits
in many fewer instances.
The more trained you become the more you really need
to be focusing on one stimulus,
you're not gonna get a lot.
But the more untrained you are
then you can maybe count on some of these things
happening simultaneously which will then effect
what you need to do nutritionally and with volume
and so on and so forth, and we'll get to that
when we look at specific workouts.
NeuroEndocrine mechanisms, so there is a little bit
of stimulus in terms of hypertrophy
that we get from the nervous systems
like in terms of systemically so when the nervous system
is contracted and we talked about systemically
how that activity combined with maybe like
some lactic acid, or whatever, leads
to overall increases in things
like testosterone production, right?
So you can still get that
we just won't have the lactic acid component, right?
But we can still get, if we have enough volume
of neurological work here, we can stimulate
testosterone production, right?
Performance, right, that's gonna be
the main thing that we're gonna get
from a neurological phase, okay.
We're gonna learn how to contract more muscle fibers
and if we train with momentum we're gonna learn
how to contract things faster and more explosively
by using more fast twitch right away.
Those are not just good for sports,
remember they are good to increase your ability
to train in those other phases
which makes hypertrophy programs more trainable
and metabolic programs more trainable
because you can achieve the stimulus
with less volume and less unnecessary stress, right?
So the better your nervous system
the more surgical you can be in your hypertrophy
and your metabolic training because
you can accomplish that with less overall work
which means, and dipping into the amount of recovery
that I need, so in terms of like my trainability,
if the stress needed is here and my recovery is here
as I'm getting more neurological efficient
what basically is it's doing this here, right,
so making the gap bigger because I can get
to that stimulus with less work, less reps,
less sets, less volumes which means I have
more energy, more resources to invest
into the recovery response.
Because again, the goal of a training system
is to get that stimulus and then recover from it
and make those adaptations, right?
So the easier I can make that stimulus
either by taking time away and detraining it,
or getting better at the performance aspect
I need to achieve it, both of those
are gonna increase the trainability
to those other systems.
So the nervous system is very integral
to being good at all other systems, okay?
Biochemical, barely any, right?
And this, there's the time under tension,
the length of the sets is very low,
so really no biochemical stress.
Systemic, right?
We're gonna actually get some local stuff
so we're gonna get extrinsic adaptations, right?
My body is gonna learn those motor patterns,
that happens at the brain, right?
The muscle doesn't learn the motor patterns,
centrally I'm learning those motor patterns
which is gonna transfer to efficiency
in not just the muscle
but all other movement as well, right?
And so we get improved coordination and stability.
So if you only ever do really light loads,
you might not see weaknesses that otherwise
would've showed up.
So you might, it might be harder for you to find
imbalances in musculature or stabilizers
or antagonists that need to show up,
but when that joint, when you have multiple joints loaded
you might say, oh, that shoulder does this,
or I've, I'm struggling with this,
or wow I got sore in this weird spot,
that, that may only show up on heavier loads
'cause that's, the heavy load was needed
for you to expose that weakness that you may
have otherwise found like a way to work around
and make it look correct even though
it wasn't quite optimal yet.
So doing, doing heavy training
is a great way of kind of exposing those weaknesses
so that you know some things that you need
to improve on with your accessory work
or when you go into hypertrophy phases
or metabolic phases and you can throw in some more
kinda like pre-hab, rehab exercises or what not
that you have some stabilizer stuff
that you know you can improve on.
From a recovery perspective,
during the nervous system training
is the only one that really isn't gonna improve recovery.
So the nervous system stuff,
if you get efficient neurologically
it improves your trainability on lowering
the threshold perspective, where as hypertrophy training
and metabolic training, those adaptations,
are gonna improve trainability by bringing up
the recovery end of things for the most part, right?
So no real benefits, like if you do,
if you do a neuro phase you're not gonna be
better at recovering from anything else
but if you remember all of the green
that was on the stress assessment for neurological phase,
the nervous system is a great time
to kind of detrain and recover from being
in other phases, right?
So the nervous system training is a great way
to deload from metabolic stuff, right,
or deload from a lot of inflammatory stuff.