-: Now we're gonna go a little bit more in depth
on the programs that we're focusing
on motor unit recruitment,
and we're talking about getting more motor units involved,
so we went through a few different kinds of those.
The first one we talked about was maximal strength,
so when we're talking about improving maximal strength,
our goal is, remember, increasing the total number
of motor units that can contribute to that contraction
simultaneously, right, that's what's going to improve
how much resistance I can move in a single rep
or handle at one given time, and then, we,
if our goal is maximal load, we definitely wanna make sure
we're also increasing as much high or fast twitch
or high threshold fibers, right.
Basically, that means the same thing,
so when our nervous system contracts at a higher frequency,
we get into those higher threshold fibers
which are the faster twitch fibers,
and they get involved when the nervous system demands more,
because they're not as energy-efficient,
so if we're gonna use those, there better be a good reason
to use those, and so, that usually comes
from either fatigue or from a demand
of a maximum amount of load or resistance
that we have to overcome, so, our main stimulus
is intensity of contraction, if we're talking
about maximal strength training.
Now, we can't get maximal intensity without load,
so there's no amount of intent, there's no amount
of intent up here that can get us maximal intensity
if we do not have that resistance, so, in order to get that,
it's resistance, execution, and intent, combined,
to get that maximal intensity contraction,
so a lot of people think, like, load doesn't matter,
if you have a lot of intent or you're squeezing it,
that's not true, right, you can squeeze a muscle
in its shortest position, you can squeeze it hard,
but there's nowhere else that you can squeeze it efficiently
without creating what we call a co-contraction
where you're kind of correcting the antagonist,
and that in itself has an inhibitory reaction,
so if I sit here and I just contract my bicep and tricep,
and I contract them as hard as I can,
I'm not getting maximum intensity
because I'm basically trying to create tension
on both sides of that joint.
What's gonna happen is my body's actually gonna get
less efficient, it's gonna stop trying to waste energy,
'cause that's essentially what I'm doing,
if I'm just sitting there squeezing for no reason,
I'm wasting fuel and so my body's gonna say,
how can we do this a little bit, you know, less wasteful?
And it's gonna decrease the intensity of those,
so, this is where kind of like those purposefully slow reps
and stuff like that can kind of take away
from our performance and strength or ability
to recruit more muscle fibers and more motor units, right?
So of all of the stimuli, this requires the heaviest load
because we need a lot of resistance to overcome
to get those maximal intensity contractions,
to demand the most amount of muscle fibers
to be contributing to that work, right?
This is because it requires so much muscle tissue
this usually requires full rest intervals, all right?
I put in there, usually, with a little asterisk in there,
meaning that there are ways to get my body
to reach out to additional motor units
because of fatigue, right, so,
once certain muscle fibers are no longer available,
the nervous system will have to reach out and find more,
but what happens is, my body over time will learn
to differentiate and, like, spread the load more,
rather than just increase the amount it's contracting
simultaneously, if I do that in, like, a high rep fashion,
but there are some instances,
we're not gonna get into a ton of them here
because these are very advanced things
that you're not gonna use very often.
We'll touch on them briefly in the advanced courses,
but for the most part, this is gonna be heavy stuff,
right, the heaviest loads that you can use
while maintaining execution, with a very intense intent.
Right, so we're talking higher sets, lower reps,
pretty much if we're going to get this type of a stimulus,
we're gonna need at least six sets or more,
doing at least or less than or equal to six reps.
The more advanced you are, the lower that rep range
is going to get, and the higher that set range
is going to tend to be, and then also, exercises
like the exercise selection will come into play.
So, the more complete a resistance profile,
the more you, or, the less reps,
but also, possibly the less sets, right,
so you tend to be able to get by with less volume
if the exercise provides more work
throughout the entire range of motion,
so let's go ahead and go into our next thing,
which is actually what type of exercise selection
are we looking for when our goal is maximal strength,
so, as I was saying, resistance profile,
so my first thing is choose
an appropriate resistance profile,
and what that's gonna mean is, I need to avoid big gaps
so I don't wanna have an exercise
where there's dead spots, where there's no load.
I wanna try and avoid those, because essentially here,
I wanna be maximally contracting almost the entire time
or as close to it as I come, right?
Now, that doesn't mean that the resistance
has to be perfect, but it needs to be good enough
that you know, if I'm using a heavy load,
'cause when you're using a heavy enough load,
an imperfect resistance profile still becomes
a work throughout the majority of the range,
if it's close, right, or if it's at least appropriate.
So the right resistance profile, done properly,
can basically allow us to use E, or A,
either a higher rep range, or lower reps,
within that range, so when I say higher reps,
I mean like we're talking closer to six and less of two,
if it's a good thing, right, because what can happen,
when we look at resistance profiles,
so if we have something that's very complete,
we can use lower reps, but, there are instances
so when I say this, the right resistance profile
can allow higher reps, what that's gonna mean is,
it's a resistance profile where, so let's take for example
a banded hack squat versus a regular hack squat, right.
So, with the banded hack squat, all of,
or with a regular hack squat, all of the load
is at the bottom, so as soon as you do that initial work,
then it, like, kind of comes off, okay,
so, you can produce a maximal effort contraction
but at the top, it kind of eases off, so what that means is,
you can do a little bit higher reps there.
We can take this again to something that has the flip,
right, so something that maybe isn't as hard
in the lengthen, but it gets harder towards the top,
so we have, we add a band there,
and so now, depending on how we do this,
so if I take that band and I set it up so that it makes it,
like, gruelingly hard, throughout the entire hack squat,
what's gonna happen is my rep range
should probably get lower, okay?
However, if I take a little bit of load off the bottom,
and use more band tension so that the bottom
of that hack squat is not quite as difficult,
it's a little sub-maximal, but the top
is really, really heavy, so I've used more band tension
and a little less, which basically makes it easier
for me to get out of the bottom, but, because I can't,
because it's still gonna be pretty heavy,
if I apply maximal intent, and that band resistance
picks up pretty quick, what I can do then is,
I tend to be able to do a little bit higher rep
because what'll happen is, I will be able to continue on
because I don't fail in that very bottom position,
so, with a regular hack squat, with no bands,
as soon as I can't do that bottom position, it's done,
'cause the set cannot go on any further,
because if I don't have enough muscle fibers
ready to go right there, the set is over.
If I band it so that it's pretty much perfect, right,
or I should say, it's very hard the entire way through,
the same situation arises so, like, but there,
because it's so much more work over time,
it's probably even less reps than the prior.
However, if I flip that around
and I give myself just a little bit of, like, a de-load
in that lengthened position, so I have the ability
to, like, contract harder, maybe generate a little bit
of momentum and those bands are just gonna take it
right away from me, but those bands are gonna make it
maximal intensity, the midrange throughout,
because I won't necessarily fail at the bottom,
I'll be able to keep, like, fighting and grinding
a little bit, that's the time where maybe I could get away
with a little bit higher rep range,
because my point of failure is not
that fully lengthened position, or we'll say the bottom
of the lift, so you could apply this to a bench press,
the same thing, where obviously once you fail
at the bottom of a bench, you're never getting it back up,
but you can, if it's easy here, like, you can fight your way
through the top of those things, so I'm not talking
about, like, losing execution fighting your way through,
but I'm talking, and you guys, if you've used bands
in a common resist, you know what it's like
when that load's coming on, but you're gaining
a little bit of mechanical advantage,
of kind of grinding through that, but with good execution
and keeping the tension where you want it.
Sometimes I can get away with a higher rep range there,
it's actually more productive, because I can,
you know, I have that, like, I have the ability
to not have to worry about getting stuck at the bottom.
That's the practical application of it,
and then when we look at, because there is that little bit
of gap, I can do more reps before I'm completely exhausted
and that mechanical advantage allows it to be a safe place
to really take myself to total fatigue,
whereas the bottom, like the bottom of a squat,
once you hit 100% of fatigue, you're not coming up, right?
But if you have something with accommodating resistance,
you can kind of fight through a little bit deeper
into fatigue than you normally would, so,
little bit of higher reps are on the table.
Doesn't mean you have to use higher reps.
It just becomes an option, okay?
So, we still want that, you know, six or less range,
but if you were looking at kind of like
the same output effort, you might be able to say, hey,
you know, normally I would do this for four reps,
but I'm gonna band it this way, you know,
giving myself a little bit of a break at the bottom
but a lot more intensity at the top,
and then maybe take it up to six to kind of equal that out.
Okay, there needs to be enough resistance
that limits momentum, but it doesn't eliminate it,
or it should tell you, it doesn't need to eliminate it,
so, when we're looking at neurological adaptations,
you have to understand, there needs to be a reason
that the body's gonna create this adaptation,
and in these cases, when we're talking
about maximal strength or speed,
we're asking the body to say, hey, we need to expend
more energy when this is called upon,
because the body doesn't know that we're trying
to bench press more or we're trying to run faster,
like, there's no concept of predicting the future
in terms of our nervous system, other than understanding
what are the current stresses being put upon me?
Do I need to be better at that for survival?
How is that helping me, and so in the terms
of maximal strength, right, what we have to do is,
we have to make it so that, like, okay,
the reason that my body's gonna say,
we should recruit more muscle fibers,
is almost like this fear of not being able to move
because of so much load, so it's like, okay,
let's recruit more, all right, next time,
to make that a little bit easier.
The other thing is, when you do, when you're able
to generate a little bit more momentum,
you're able to make it a little cheaper
from an energy perspective, remember that talk,
you know, in the earlier unit.
Momentum is a good thing in terms of neurological training,
in terms of currency of how much energy is being used,
right, so if I generate momentum, it says, hey,
by investing a lot of energy into that initial contraction,
we kind of save some, so there becomes a point
of diminishing return, where these reps get really slow
and grindy, where one, like, you're not keeping the tension
where you want it, and then two,
the whole reason that my body should say yeah,
it's a good idea, let's contract more fibers,
it kind of gets blurred a little bit,
and so we may not actually get, so having more weight
on the bar may not make you stronger faster,
versus having just enough weight and producing
the highest amount of, like, contraction,
but getting that tiny bit of momentum reward,
right, like, being able to have the rep be smooth.
Like, the rep I mean I'm at, these are heavy sets.
They're not gonna look explosive.
They're not gonna look fast, but there shouldn't be, like,
you know, you got stuck and then you twisted and turned
and, like, oh yeah, I got it,
like, those reps do not make you stronger.
The reps that make you stronger are basically,
you moved this as fast as you could,
without it coming to a stop, right?
There should be no stops, no sticking points,
on any of these reps, right, so if you're,
if you're hitting loads here where, like,
if you're doing this for heavy squats and you're like,
(grunts) and a stop and a go,
that's not a load where you're,
that's not a rep that you're gonna improve from, okay?
That was a miss, in terms of training effect,
right, you may have actually, you may have gotten the weight
from point A to B, but we missed the training effect
in that case, right, so, unless you're trying to focus,
you know, on like, today is the competition,
then focus on the adaptation, and make sure
that you can get, you use enough resistance
that you can't fling the weight, but there's not so much
that you end up getting stuck or you lose the ability
to keep contracting and pushing with the muscles
that you're supposed to, right, so if you're doing,
you know, if you're doing a hack squat here, right,
like, you should be maintaining execution,
your butt shouldn't by flying off the pad,
it shouldn't be becoming an adductor exercise
with your knees caving in, or anything like that.
It's maximal tension, maximal intensity of contraction
in the muscle we want, with that magical, or that,
I shouldn't say magical, but with enough load
to limit momentum but not get rid of it altogether.
You need to be able to generate a tiny bit of momentum,
not excessive, but just enough, okay.
So, when you look at what exercises you're choosing,
unless you have a specific lift that you're prepping for
because you're a power lifter or there's a predictor lift
for the sport you're doing or something like that,
you're gonna focus less on, okay, like,
if my goal is to improve maximal strength in the squat,
then maybe I'm going to squat, I'm not always gonna squat,
sometimes it's gonna be better to do other things,
but you may choose more stable stuff
if you don't have that external outcome,
so hack squat over squat, may be a better choice,
like a machine press over a dumbbell or barbell press
may be a better choice because then,
all of that execution stuff becomes easier and it's,
you can focus more on the intensity of the contraction
and the load, getting those two factors right,
rather than having to worry about execution breakdown, okay.
We wanna avoid excessive overloading
of the lengthen position, right, of certain exercises
where there's a significant biomechanical or stability
disadvantage in that position, so,
these are very heavy exercises
and so when we get to that terminal lengthen position,
that would be where the exercise is the most unsafe,
the most unstable, and so when you have exercises,
where we tend to get very weak at that very same position,
so, a good example of this would be, like,
a preacher dumbbell curl, so as we're lengthening here,
right, my bicep's going from it has pretty good leverage,
to in the lengthened position, it has very poor leverage,
so like from here to here, the mechanical advantage
of my bicep drops off significantly,
so if I'm using a very heavy load,
that makes the ability to, like, get down here
and then safely do that last little bit,
you know, a little prohibitive, like,
I have way more risk of injury, by taking that there,
so either one, I could restrict that range of motion,
or I could pick an exercise that would load the bicep
a little bit more matched to what its ability
to produce force is, so I would match the strength curve
a little bit better, so I wouldn't pick something
that was as hard, in the length, and I would pick something
that was a little harder in the midrange
where it's gonna have better mechanics,
and that's gonna be true for anything
where that's kind of a compromised position,
so if we take for instance, like, squatting in the quads,
the quads get pretty darned good mechanics
in the lengthened position, because of the patella,
like, even though, like, the lever, so the resistance
on the quads, you know, becomes good, the muscles themselves
are pretty good, stability is pretty good, you know,
when we get to the bottom there, so as long as somebody
has healthy knee joints, like, training a lengthened quad,
no problem at all in, like, a hack squat, now,
but you take that over to a leg extension,
where now our foot is no longer on the ground
and we don't have the stability of the calf
to stabilize the knee, now that's no longer a place to do,
to, like, have that heavy in the lengthened position,
right, because now we're increasing the risk
of injury there for very little reward, so pick exercises,
if you're gonna load that lengthened position,
it needs to be something where
you can easily stabilize there,
and the muscle doesn't lose all of its mechanical advantage
because we don't wanna have, like, this, like,
all right, we're fairly balanced,
and then there's a huge spike, right?
Remember, we're going for avoiding big gaps,
that also means avoiding, like, huge peaks, right, as well,
'cause if you have peaks, there's gonna be gaps,
all right, so anything where all of a sudden, like,
that becomes extremely hard,
and that very stretched position is gonna be
the riskiest place for these type of training programs.
When we look at tempo, for these, our eccentrics, right,
it's better if our focus is maximal strength,
it's better to mechanically overload the eccentric
than to do it with longer time under tension,
so we're not necessarily looking, if we're doing, you know,
five, six second long eccentrics, in this particular phase,
even if you're doing an eccentric overload method,
to increase the resistance, you don't wanna do it
with time because our goal here is,
we want as many fibers recruiting as possible,
and the longer we go, the less likely that's a possibility,
the more likely we're working at a sub-maximal load
or a lower intensity.
Our concentrics basically need to be maximal intent, right,
or the whole purpose of this training phase
is maximum intensity, remember, so, unless we're using
what we call, like, an acceleration technique,
because there's either a complication with the exercise
or there's something I need to bias that muscle,
so an example would be in, like, the lying leg curl,
if you're in the leg curl in that fully stretched position
the calf is a really strong knee flexor there
where you get to that 15 degrees and then the hamstring
becomes much more of a strong knee flexor
and the calf starts to drop off, so in those instances,
we could use that like acceleration technique
where we would come up, like, 15 degrees slower
and then accelerate right when we got to that 15 degrees,
so we'd apply our X intent, so like our maximal
contraction intent, at that point where the muscle
we're trying to load becomes the more mechanically favorable
and likely to take all of the tension
and fight that resistance, so, most of the time,
if, you know, there's not any sort of limitation
from the exercise, we're gonna be explosive intent,
like maximal intensity right from the point of initiation
unless we're using something
where that's biomechanically unfavorable, another example
would be the leg extension, if we're trying to not overload
that lengthened position and we say we picked a,
you know, if you have like the prime leg extension,
for example, and you can load the top
or you're able to band or whatever it is
to get that leg extension really hard on the top
where we'd like it to be, you don't wanna fling it up there
from the bottom and generate a lot of momentum,
especially because that's gonna put all of the work
in that lengthened unstable position,
so what you'll probably do is come up a bit,
and then accelerate into the midrange,
you know, trying to explode where the quads
are gonna be more active
and the knee is gonna be more stable.
We're gonna look at using pauses here.
So pauses in the lengthened position, all right,
can remove passive tension, which can be very valuable
because if we take away passive tension,
that means more motor units, more muscle fibers,
have to be recruited to get out of that lengthened position
to initiate that contraction, right?
So it requires more motor units to initiate that,
so that can be a very valuable tool.
However, right, that can become counterproductive
if the exercise is also, like, really heavy there,
because what could happen is, one,
we can either lose stability there,
or what could happen is that lengthened position
is where we also get the most mechanical trauma,
is that we can start, like,
losing efficiency throughout the workout,
and not actually be able to do the volume of sets
because of all the mechanical trauma that we are producing.
So you need to understand, like, how that exercise
is loaded, so if I'm gonna do pauses at the bottom,
so say we take the hack squat for instance, right,
and we're gonna do pauses at the bottom of the hack squat,
where it's like, all right, the quads are lengthened,
they're in a stretch position, and it's heaviest there,
it's putting the most resistance there.
If I do that and I do that for long pauses,
I'm likely gonna get a lot of mechanical trauma.
What I need to know is, what is my ability to deal with that
right, am I pretty conditioned in terms of, like,
mechanical damage and inflammatory programming,
where if I do that, I'm gonna recover fast enough
that, you know, I can come back and do this program again
at the frequency that I can do it for a neurological
and not be limited by the mechanical damage,
and for the volume that I need to do today?
Am I gonna drop off in that workout early,
because of the inflammation that starts accumulating
from that, and the mechanical trauma that's happening
that's going to create basically a little bit
of an inhibition effect?
If that's the case, then that may not be a better option,
right, so, how would you remedy that?
So you could either, well, okay, we're not gonna do
as long of pauses, but, what if I really wanted
to take advantage of getting rid of that passive tension?
Well, that's again where something
like accommodating resistance could come in.
I could de-load that lengthened position
by using some accommodating resistance and taking
a little load off of the bottom,
and adding it to the mid and the top portion
of that exercise, and now that pause is not gonna be
mechanically, as mechanically damaging,
because I've kind of taken away some of the load there,
but I'm still able to use high intensity contractions
because I've adjusted the resistance profile to be heavier
in that middle and top end of the range,
so, there's ways around this.
You've gotta kind of figure out that sweet spot
that's gonna be good for what you need
and where you are in terms of your ability to recover
and handle those things, right, and then stability of course
would be a thing, right, so obviously,
if we're in an exercise where stability would be a factor,
so in a hack squat, the spine's not loaded,
if we take a squat, okay, and we're pausing at the bottom
when somebody's got a lot of forward lean, so,
depending on their mechanics,
if their torso's not very upright in those bottom pauses,
you have to remember, well, that's a pause
where they're holding the weight with their lower back
and their trunk as well, so that could fatigue out
before their legs do, right, or before their quads
or their hips, or whatever you wanna train,
so that may not be the best option if there's something else
that's being loaded or there's a stability challenge
in that lengthened position, all right,
so, just take those things into context.