-: Alright, now we're going to talk about starting strengths.
We're not going to spend a lot of time on this,
cause it's not really applicable to most of our
body composition, hypertrophy goals.
It tends to be more of a sport specific thing.
We will touch on all of the things that you need,
like if you are working with athletes and stuff,
but we will get more advanced in
this in sports specific courses.
But, so our goal here, wanna increase that motor
unit recruitment to start that initiation.
So, the starting strength, initiation strength,
either of those could be good nomenclature for this,
either occurring from a dead stop
or at least a paused stop where you've eliminated
the amount of passive tension or elastic energy
that could contribute to this.
So this is usually, we're trying to create the ability
to generate force with the muscle contraction alone,
no passive tissue, alright?
So the most important thing for this,
is to make sure that once you start, you start at 100%.
So this is the opposite of acceleration.
Acceleration you're trying to push harder
and harder as the rep goes on.
Here it's all about as hard as you can in the first
instance and then sometimes you can let off.
You won't have to necessarily grind through these
contractions, a lot of these times we're generating
momentum that's going to the rest of the rep significantly
easier, so the main thing is that it's maximum
intensity right from that dead stop
or right from that initiation point.
This is a very important quality for power lifting,
olympic lifts, anything were generating momentum is going
to massively increase the performance in that skill.
So for instance, if you're looking at like really good
lifters that don't grind and fumble around reps,
but they have good clean reps, you'll notice that like
that first inch is where they win, right?
If they generate enough momentum there, the rest
of the rep is clean and easy, okay.
Same thing for the olympic lifts, alright.
If they can get that thing moving hard
and fast the first inch off the floor,
provided their technique is good,
they're going to win the lift.
You don't want to depend on having to generate
your momentum 2/3's of the way through the lift
that's where we end up in those grindy reps.
And now obviously there's no such things as
grindy reps in olympic training, but in power lifting still
if we can generate momentum at the beginning,
you're gonna like, that's massively in
your favor in terms of getting that load
moved throughout that entire rep.
This requires a reduction or elimination of
that passive tension, so we're going to use pauses
complete stops, we don't want to get into the stretch
shortening cycle for this particular training stimulus.
When we look at exercise selection, because this is
dead stop or pauses, obviously if it's a dead stop
the resistance profile doesn't matter that much
because if it's at a dead stop, so if you're doing
a deadlift, like when the weights on the floor
your backs not having to support it,
there's no stability issues or anything like that.
But if you are doing something where you are going
to do a pause stop you need to take that in to consideration
of what kind of work is being done at that pause,
how's that going to affect the outcome,
how long can I pause there?
So, we'll look at, when we get into tempo,
how long those pauses should be, but the stimulus
will be different if we're doing a dead stop versus
we're coming from a loaded position.
So a dead stop obviously removes all passive
tension as long as we stay there,
whereas if we're staying there loaded we don't
necessarily eliminate all but we can eliminate
a significant amount, but because we are doing that pause
what happens is we're expending energy there.
And since this is like a maximal intensity contraction
we're looking for, if we're expending energy that's
drastically gonna decrease the output
that we can get on that initiation.
So what tends to happen is I can't use the same loads
or same number of reps if I'm having to carry that weight.
So for this time of stimulus you're not going to use
a lot of reps anyway, cause your goal like
'I need to be maximal explosive, once I can't be
maximally explosive out of the bottom, there's no
point in going more.' So we look at starting strength,
and we look at speed strength, those are probably
going to be the lowest reps, right?
And you can do a lot of sets because they may be
submaximal loads, but you start to slow
down very, very fast in both in this and in speed.
So usually sets of three are about what taps it out.
So if I'm looking at I'm at the bottom there,
I may only be able to do two reps instead of three
because of that extra time under tension
that I'm having carrying that load.
That being said, you may be focusing for some specific
outcome where the goal that you need is that you need
to be able to explode from a position of tension.
So depending on what the quality is that you're going for,
if it's a performance based quality, and that's the
environment that the person is going to be performing in,
then by all means you may actually bias
towards those stops or those pauses instead of those stops.
There needs to be significant enough resistance,
in this case inertia, to overcome, starting strength,
where essentially we're trying to break inertia,
overcome that inertia from the lengthened position.
But that doesn't mean that it has to always be
highest in that lengthened position.
And this can be very valuable for what we were just talking
about in terms of the distance between doing a dead stop
versus something that's paused.
So if I'm doing a dead stop exercise,
so if I'm doing a dead lift, it doesn't matter that the
dead lift is heaviest at the bottom in this case
because my goal is maximum contraction right there.
I don't care about the rest of the rep,
I care about what am I overcoming at the bottom
so having that ton of inertia to overcome
it at the bottom, awesome, that's great.
Where as an exercise where I'm going to have to hold a pause
maybe it's best if it isn't completely over lengthened there
or overloaded in that length and position,
because then that gives me something to kind of fight into
and essentially maybe even improve the ability
or the safety of the exercise because it
kind of decelerates me a little bit.
So I still have to have that maximal intensity
of contraction but it could be more of a mid-range
or a short positioned exercise where I'm pausing
and then trying to explode through it.
But it de-loads that paused position, so I'm going to
have to expend as much energy there while I'm waiting
for that passive tension to dissipate.
You should be able to generate momentum,
a significant amount of momentum here, right?
This isn't acceleration, we're not trying to slow you down,
we're not trying to grind the rep,
it's all about that explosive, that first tension.
Essentially we're training that, and the weight is
going for a ride in this type of training.
So that's what it should be focused on.
If you're not generating momentum, it's too much load
and you're loosing this effect and you're probably
getting closer to acceleration or maximal strength training.
Generating momentum is the key factor for your
body to decide that it should invest
more energy into that initiation.
So think back to what we had talked about in terms of
how we adapt to neurological responses,
the reason that my body is going to say
'Hey, let's recruit more fast twitch in the beginning,
let's recruit more muscle fibers to get this going.'
is because if it does that then the rest
of the rep is cheaper, right? It doesn't cost as much
energy because the momentum is moving the weight,
I'm not having to contract and expend ATP
to continue moving that weight.
So if no momentum, not a lot of adaptations
to improve my starting strength.
Tempo, it's a consistent theme here, right guys?
Maximal X, emphasis on the initiation here.
The resistance will drop off,
not necessarily from the resistance profile,
but because we are generating momentum.
So there's no need to do anything to expend extra
energy or use accommodating resistance
unless it adds to safety or efficiency of the exercise.
If we are overlapping this with a speed goal,
we may try and do something that helps us maintain
maximal velocity, so instead of exploding and coasting,
you may put a little effort into doing,
once you overcome that momentum,
doing a full speed contraction for the rest of the rep.
Eccentrics should be minimized or eliminated on this as well
So your olympic lifting training comes into here,
your throws come into here, and then what we talked
about earlier is if I'm doing any centric,
I'm able to explode through this but if I have to carry
it back down the weight doesn't need to come down fast,
it doesn't need to come down slow,
it just needs to be controlled.
Since my goal is overcoming inertia,
that peak resistance of overcoming inertia
should be in excess of what controlling
that weight coming down should be.
So we should still be biasing that concentric.
There should either be a reset in a dead stop,
so you don't just stop and then go,
you stop and there needs to be a bit of a pause
especially cause usually when we get to a stop
where the weights are landing on something
you need to reset your posture so that execution
is going to be on point for that next contraction
and tension is going to be where you want it.
Or there is going to be a pause of two to four seconds,
it has to be at least two in this case
if we're focusing on starting strength.
If you use less than two seconds, that stretch shortening
cycle is starting to get trained more and the
starting strength is getting trained less.
So we need those paused in that lengthened position
to dissipate that passive tension,
so that it is the muscular work that is going
to contribute to that starting strength.