-: Today, we're gonna take a closer look
at designing some of the different types
of neurological programs,
and kind of looking at the subtleties
that separate the variety of differences
between one type of neurological training
same as versus the other.
More in look at neurological training,
what I will say is that
when we're doing any type of training,
there's always a neurological component.
Meaning, if you're doing an exercise,
you are learning something about that movement pattern.
In some way should it perform.
Like in other qualities that your body's adapting to
in terms of the nervous system,
it is gonna be depending on
what conditions you're doing that workout
in the intent, the tempo, the exercise selection
and all of that.
So you can take a line of what you're gonna learn
in this section,
and also kind of take this information
and apply it to some of your hypertrophy,
your metabolic phases as well.
Knowing that the nervous system is always learning
in some capacity.
Obviously, when we're focused directly
on neurological programming, your nervous system
is going to make the largest improvements,
but that doesn't mean
you can't take some of this information.
To maybe make some of the exercises
that you're incorporating
a little bit more effective
for whatever your client needs to do
both for the motor pattern perspective
as well their physiological goal in your other programs.
As we move forward, first thing you need to ask is
why am I even doing a neurological program
in the first place?
And one of the ones that we use a lot
is actually used in neurological program
is a de-load from metabolic stress
that's probably if you're working with competitors,
you're working with people with physique goals,
or general population.
A lot of times, they don't need necessarily
to be able to lift a certain amount of weight
or have a certain performance goal.
It's more really of a physique-based goal.
And so we're focusing on a lot of metabolic training,
and hypertrophy training over their prioritization.
And what we do is we end up using these neurological phases
it's kind of de-load. It's a way of getting a break
from those metabolic stressers.
As we look, both Kind of walk through like
what's the process of that.
And then we have neurological training with adaptations
that would focus on the performance-based
so you will have those people that do have like,
well I have an external goal.
Whether that's to be better to sports,
or better to certain lift,
or have certain qualities to deal with
the lifestyle things, whether that's
I wanna be able to have a good rebounding
when I'm snowboarding, or whatever it may be,
there are performance qualities that we can gather from this
and then there are performance qualities that we can look at
that are simply going to increase our train ability
for other things.
So they're gonna increase our ability to get outputs
in our hypertrophy training, in our metabolic training,
increase our ability to maintain execution
in certain exercises especially complex exercises
that require a lot of stability or low the spine.
We can to neurological training
to kind of potentiate or improve our ability to get stimulus
in other phases.
And I'm gonna touch on that
in the following group of modules
which is on puridization.
In terms of how this potentiates
but we'll look at that as another goal.
So keep that kind of in the back of your mind
as we're going through the different reasons
that we will do this.
When we look at... okay, we're doing this,
we're at snafford de-load,
we're looking for a specific adaptation.
There's gonna be kind of groupings of adaptations,
or qualities of strengths over performance
that I can get from neurological training .
So one of the main categories
is to focus on that increasing motor unit recruitment
for strength.
The really simple way to look at this is
that some motor units if you remember back
to the neurological, you know the introduction
to this phase.
Remember, we were talking about nervous system
and how it controls the muscles.
Motor units are the grouping of fibers
that are sensually contracted
when basically one nerve comes down and it contracts
like a unit or a grouping of fibers.
And if we wanna be able to move more load at one time,
like increase our 1RM
or increase our ability to be explosive,
what we have to be able to do,
is that we have to be able
to call on more fibers simultaneously, right?
When we'd look at motor unit recruitment,
there's this strength qualities that we can get from that.
This one is maximum strength.
So that's what we're talking about.
Increase in the maximum amount of resistance
that we can overcome.
And that's really about
how many fibers can I call upon at once simultaneously.
That's really... that's the maximum,
the peak amount of strength
that you can produce within the muscles
depending on how many fibers can be active simultaneously.
There's never all of them active.
We could... Like if I do a bicycle, I can train this
so that I contract a hundred percent of my fibers
instantaneously.
There's always some on reserve
which is what allows us to continue producing effort,
because we constantly need to go back and forth between
fibers that are working and resting
and kind of undulating there.
So one of the things that I can do is train my body
kind of the depth end to more motoring units
to call upon more strength.
Obviously, the side effect of that
is I will fatigue faster
which is why we can't do the same amount of weight
for three reps and then do the same thing for twenty reps.
If we're contracting more muscle tissue,
we're gonna fatigue faster.
It's kind of like,
when we look at our training variables for that for example.
This is just... it's just a number, right?
That's slow twitch, that's fast twitch,
that's medium twitch, that's everything.
I just need as much possible contributing to that.
There is a greater load or greater amount of force
to be able to be produced from those faster twitch fibers.
Obviously if I have a performance goal,
I don't need to move a maximum amount of load.
I will also be trying to do things
to increase the amount of fast switch fibers
that are involved.
Moving in to speed strength,
then fast twitch is the thing that I really wanna focus on.
Because my goal here is the velocity
or the speed of the movement, right?
So when I control the muscle,
I wanna be able to keep contracting and producing force
at higher rates.
And one of the things that happens
when we look at muscle contractions is
the faster we tend to be moving,
the less tension we are able to produce
because it's a lot harder
to coordinate a really fast movement
than it is a slow movement.
So we have to train our body
to continue to dig and then contract, contract, contract
under higher speeds or higher velocity contractions.
We're looking at getting more fast twitch involved
to basically just make a faster contraction.
But we're also looking at the rate of the recruitment.
The ability to contract more, more, more, more
as we go through that and keep contracting
that settle for the fact that we got movement
and then kind of pitter down.
We have to be able to maintain that speed.
With any speed, there's gonna be somethings
that overlap with that
especially when we talk about the performance application
of speed-based training.
And that's gonna cover these next couple here.
Starting strength.. MUR by the way,
if you guys see that or hear that,
that's my little abbreviation for muscle unit recruitment.
So I don't have to write that five thousand times.
Starting strength is essentially our ability
to call upon fibers from that point of initiation.
So that would be coming from a dead stop.
What we need to initiate the movement.
A sprinter needs this to come out of the blocks.
But he needs this to maintain, strive frequency.
So they need starting strength and speed strength
and there's different ways that you would kind of program
to accentuate those qualities.
So, if you're looking here and you're evaluating an athlete,
if you're gonna... what do we need to bring out the most?
Is it coming out of the blocks more?
Or is it a strive frequency or what not?
What stuff am I gonna take care of?
Like, in the actual sport, what stuff am I going to work on?
In the gym, sitting in the weight training sessions.
We also have then explosive strength
which I will call acceleration strength more often
because that's just a little bit more clear
of what the goal is.
Some of these terms here,
I have used the same kind of normal criteria
that Charles Poliquin used.
So, I've kind of included two definitions for some of these
starting strength, initiation strength, explosive strength,
acceleration strength.
Coz really, when talking about explosive strengths,
sometimes people confuse that with starting strength.
So they explosion like floats from the bottom.
But what we really mean here is the ability to accelerate.
And so what that means is once movement has occurred,
the ability to call upon more fibers
and they keep contracting harder and harder and harder,
especially against resistance.
So, speed strength is the ability
that keeps those fibers kind of working at high velocity.
But acceleration is the ability
to continue generating velocity as you go.
So if you think that somebody pulling in an Olympic lift,
like they're doing the snatch,
they have that starting strength.
They have to break the inertia, right?
But then what they're trying to do is,
they're still trying to create as much momentum.
The trainer add momentum to that bar as much as possible.
And that little short range of movement
before they go under.
And so, they need to be able to continue accelerating
through that, right?
So they're not quite getting to that speed.
So you're not getting the term of velocity.
They're still accelerating, trying to move that load
faster and faster and faster.
They never really get to peak velocity especially
unless it's a super light load.
So that's about increasing our motor unit recruitment
within the motion. Right?
So that's the different stimulus.
Do you remember your nervous system learns movement,
it learns the quality of like, how to respond
to certain types of resistance and force,
and your mental intent?
And so all of these are skills that your brain is learning
like, okay, if this is the situation,
here is how I respond to that.
And so we're gonna have to figure out
how do we create this situations in traning
in a way that promotes a positive adaptation.
So, when we look at the next grouping,
we have the stretch and shortening cycle
that we can consider.
So, we talk about speed strength, starting strength,
and explosive strength.
That's pretty all kind of what I'm talking about.
Like, gain things, moving them, maximum velocity.
When we look at the stretch shortening cycle,
we're looking at that transition between
eccentric and concentric
which is very important when you need to have
the quality of reaction or changing direction
in the sport.
For instance, you have a sprint,
a hundred meter sprinter,
I mean, you have that there's a little stretch short cycle
that occurs through the strike frequency.
But that's much less of a demand than
say you have a football player or soccer player,
or somebody who has a sport that requires lots of change
of direction because they need to like,
build up tension.
And then use that to change direction.
So that'll be the ability
to switch from eccentric to concentric
and make use of elastic energy.
Now, we talk about hypertrophy training,
we kind of look at this elastic energy
or passive tension
and it's kind of an enemy to the stimulus.
That being said, there's applications for this
that are extremely beneficial
from a performance perspective, right?
You're not going to be a max performance athlete
in any sport if you do not know how to use
that elastic energy.
Obviously, more muscular strength we have,
the better we can perform.
But if you're not using this,
you're the huge disadvantage of being good.
Being able to control that transition
of eccentric to concentric can be very valuable for athlete.
The other thing that we'll talk about is
how that is a very important skill
for the nervous system to have
as a safety mechanism both in the gym
and when you take all that strength
that you gain in the gym and you're doing activities
outside the gym, like recreational sporting activities,
or just something as simple as like slipping on some ice
or what not.
Being able to manage that, it's very important
for maintaining joint integrity and tissue health
and those instances where you need it in real life scenarios
And then another part of the stretch shortening cycle
that we'll talk about, so we have reactive strength,
and then we'll talk about deceleration.
So, basically the difference between these two
is this is about that transition between eccentric
and concentric.
And deceleration is more about absorbing load.
So that's like, you jump off on something
and you land and you have to absorb that.
That would be a quality of deceleration and strength.
When we talk about eccentric overloading,
that kind of fits in the concept of
deceleration-based strength.
That's the ability that increase motor unit recruitment
as force is being applied to us.
So that's like we're just sitting here
and something happens like, urgh!
And then we'd have to be able to ring out
and overcome that but not necessarily jump back into it
but just kind of stop it, right?
So we talk about anything where we'll be doing catches,
or jumps where there's no rebounds, like all types of stuff.
That'll be kind of like the momentum-based.
And then we have straight eccentric overload training
where we're just training the body to resist force
especially on the eccentric training.
The ability to resist that external force can be
also very valuable when we talk about injury prevention,
and it can also be really good for improving our ability
to do things like hypertrophy training,
or focusing on my canonical damage,
or we're gonna try to do a lot of loading
and the eccentric portion or the lengthened portion.
Being very strong there
and being able to recruit a lot of fibers
can make it so that I can use more load
and that work on lower rep ranges
and ultimately getting faster response
so I could get more stimulus.
And those kind of mechanical damage phases
where I'm focusing on.
That lengthened our eccentric portion of the rep
and those hypertrophy phases.
The last group of stimuli we have for
the neurological training is coordination-based.
And what we're gonna look at
is the difference between local and global
neuromuscular coordination
and that's basically gonna mean like,
are we trying to improve the efficiency of the contraction
around the single joint,
or kind of like focusing on the direct fiber
and its antagonist and kind of stabilize us right there?
Or we're looking at stabilizing a complex movement
and increasing the efficiency of my body
to coordinate multiple muscles that are acting
to produce some source of either sports specific movement
or complex lifting movement
or something that requires a lot of stability.
And then on balance training, but just something
that requires me to stabilize my own joint entirely.
So looking at those two things,
this is something that can be very helpful
when somebody is learning exercises
and needs to improve execution.
These are what we really need to talk about,
implementing these coordination phases
and really these usually are often gonna overlap
or some form of like, physiological stimuli
either metabolic or hypertrophy phase.
But we are going to try and take some time
to focus on improving the outcome of those exercises.
To improving execution.