-: Alright, now you're in the unit where we're gonna
talk about the nervous system,
and the role it plays in training performance,
and muscle recruitment, and our ability to, basically,
efficiently execute and perform any other stimuluses.
As well as applying to specific neurological goals,
like power, strength, speed development,
those type of things.
So, we're gonna start off,
we're gonna be looking at the neuromuscular system,
and we'll look at the nervous system.
We're gonna, kinda, walk through what it manages,
what it's in control of.
Basically, it controls what we contract,
how much of it we contract, and the way we contract it.
Whether we contract it with an intent to accelerate,
or slow and controlled.
There's a big difference between holding an egg,
versus doing a maximum deadlift,
in terms of the way you're contracting those muscles,
and the way you're coordinating that stuff.
And so, with the intensity and the fiber recruitment.
Because at any given time we could be recruiting
either mostly slow twitch, or we could be incorporating
some fast twitch fibers, in a particular movement,
based off of what we're trying to actually accomplish
with that movement from a neurological perspective.
So, when we get into what we contract and when.
For any given movement, there's gonna be a variety of
muscles that are stabilizing that.
We really don't have any movements where there's one
singular muscle that's the only thing doing work.
So, even if it's something as simple as
elbow flexion in a bicep curl,
you have the agonist of the tricep that's actually needed
for that joint to stay stabilized.
Without the tricep, the bicep would not actually flex
the elbow like we think it is,
because we don't have joints that are locked like a
pin on a door hinge thing, where's it's,
this can only move this way.
A lot of our joints, they're like balls or sockets
or hinge joints, and they're gliding around.
And the thing that actually makes them function like a hinge
is all that tissue that's stabilizing that joint.
So, it's the balance of tension between
the bicep and the tricep that allows the elbow joint to
actually function like a locked hinge.
And then of course we have then, synergist with the other
elbow flexures that are gonna contribute for us to
help the biceps throughout that flexion.
Some of them may even be doing more work than
the biceps when we're using different positions or
different orientations in terms of supination,
pronation, and whatnot.
So we have agonist, we have synergist, antagonist, we have
stabilizers, which can be something on it's own.
For instance, if we're doing something with the bicep curl,
I have to have shoulder stability, specifically at the
scapula to be able to contract that bicep,
'cause the bicep is going to attach to the scapula,
up to the top here.
So, if I don't have stabilization from the lower trap
muscles and the rhomboids, that's gonna affect it.
But then I also have stability coming in from the triceps
and the other elbow flexors.
So, stabilizers can be agonist, antagonist,
or they can be just stabilization all on their own.
So, in terms of what we contract, in any movement,
we're gonna need to coordinate how much of all of those
muscles around that joint, how much are they contracting,
how much movement are they allowing,
how much tension are they generating
to make that movement as efficient as possible?
Because if anything's not doing it's job,
either it's gonna become dysfunctional,
or we're gonna be wasting a lot of energy,
because things are gonna be
pulling against each other unnecessarily.
So, if my bicep and triceps are coordinated,
my tricep provides the least amount of resistance needed
to stabilize that joint.
So, if the bicep has to do the least
amount of work to actually do the curling motion.
If there was any inefficiency in there,
then I would be wasting energy, fighting the tricep,
or if I didn't have stability, I would have to be making
enough with the contraction or overuse of other muscles
that aren't as energy efficient for doing that
job and stabilizing that joint.
So, that's all being managed by my nervous system, and
it's gonna learn every rep that I do,
how to do that better.
The amount of force each of those
muscles is producing, and the amount of movement,
that's basically what's gonna make up the motor pattern
that my body learns.
So, my body's gonna learn,
if I'm doing this movement, these are the muscles and
these are when they contract, and this is how much they
contract, and I learn that pattern.
So then, if you throw a ball, you don't have to
consciously think about the muscles that you're gonna use
to throw the ball.
The body has essentially learned
a pattern of firing muscles that basically becomes
the ball-throwing motion, right?
So it learns that pattern of everything that has
to contract, the order and the magnitude in which it has
to do it, to do that.
So we developed these motor patterns
of what to contract, when to do these movements, and over
time we learn how to do them
more and more and more efficiently.
So, when we look at how we're adapting to a particular
movement, we'll have intrinsic and extrinsic ways
that we kind of change what we're doing.
So the intrinsic stuff is gonna be the things you're
consciously in control of, right?
So we learn how to make things easier for ourselves.
So, you have a way that you would pick something
up off the ground.
The way that you would do that is
based off of the way that you've learned to do that.
As a baby, you kind of learn how to do things easier.
You learn how to get up and down, and crawl, and walk
and all these things.
And so, eventually you learn these things.
Some of them will become subconscious,
some of them are conscious.
If you walk over to something,
and you think it's light, you might bend over and pick
it up differently than if it's heavy.
So, this is the intrinsic stuff, is your conscious control
over form and manipulating your body position and stuff.
Where, the extrinsic is gonna be the stuff that the brain
is doing subconsciously, behind your consciousness.
It's adapting in terms of developing the motor pattern.
So you might decide that, if this is light, I'm just
gonna bend over at the hip and pick it up.
But you're brain is figuring out, okay, if he bends over
at the hip, then what am I gonna use, how much glutes,
how much hamstring, where are they gonna be used,
how much hip flexors, all of these things.
The brain is doing all of that
extrinsic stuff, unconsciously.
If you had to think about all the muscles
and how much all of them are working at every given
portion of the range, your brain would just explode
whenever you tried to move.
In reality, movement is actually
one of the most complex things that our brain does
in terms of having to work and how much firing it does.
So, it is learning movement patterns and stuff, is actually
more intense for our brain than trying to master a skill,
to actually learn something.
You learn knowledge to go to school and obtain knowledge.
That programming, that
type of memory is at a much lower threshold in terms of
how much your brain has to work, versus when it's moving,
because it is managing
all those muscles and all of those joints.
In terms of the calculations that it's making,
it's way, way more complex and to a much higher degree
than when we think about learning something that we're
gonna memorize, or concept that we're gonna have.
All the stuff that we know consciously is at such a low
threshold compared to what our brain is doing subconsciously
behind us, especially with movement.
So, if we look at kinda how this works, if we look at
coordination, our ability to
become efficient in a movement, intrinsically,
we'll learn how to make that movement easier.
So, with your squat, you kind of learn
some postural things, like okay,
I'm gonna bend my knees here and whatnot.
Like the picking up a box thing,
you learn, well okay if I reach around here that makes it
a little bit easier.
So that's my ability to manipulate
my levers, my mechanics,
and whatnot, based off of my experience.
So I'm basically changing my execution.
So we think of the lifestyle stuff, but in the gym if
we're doing exercises and we're focusing on a muscle or
we're learning how to isolate things, unlearning how to
manipulate what's going on by changing my execution,
by changing my intent, and what I'm focusing on with these
types of exercises and types of movements, and that's all
intrinsically happening.
So, I'm having, when I have
an intent, my brain is saying,
hey, I wanna accomplish this.
And so my brain will start to learn what an
appropriate response is when I want this out of it.
So, if I'm focusing on isolating a muscle, that's not
necessarily the easiest way for me to do something, but
my brain learns the desire that I have, and I'm trying
to isolate that muscle because of all of the intense and
internal cues that I'm providing myself
to be able to do that isolation.
And then, on the extrinsic side,
it's gonna learn how to use everything I have available as
efficiently as possible, that kind of matches that intrinsic
request, if you will.
So I'm saying to the nervous system,
I want you to do this, I want to
do this movement in this way.
Then the brain is figuring out, okay, he wants
to do it this way.
What's the cheapest way, the most
efficient way we can do it that way?
So that's, when do I recruit which muscles the most,
because maybe at a certain point, one muscle will have
better leverage than the other,
so it doesn't have to work as hard.
It expends less energy.
I can coordinate those stabilizers.
What do I need to do
to make sure I have maximum stability at every inch of
range of motion for this?
The brain is learning all of those things in alignment
with what you want to do intrinsically.
So this is where, not everybody necessarily
ends up at the same perfect form, but what you will figure
out is that most people cheat in the same ways.
They subconsciously do the same cheats because the body
is coming up with the same solutions to whatever types
of poor form or poor execution that you have.
So you'll see that, when people are doing things,
the body is continually trying to get
to what's mechanically the easiest.
So when we look at nervous system training,
your execution and the intent that
you apply is gonna be huge,
because we have to have a
really big intrinsic influence over
how we're gonna do something.
If we want to train specifically for
hypertrophy, or we want to train for speed and
power development, versus just getting metabolically
efficient in a particular movement.
So, we have to, form and intent, execution is gonna be huge
in terms of getting the appropriate neurological adaptations
for a given phase.
So continuing on this, what we contract when thing.
The largest neurological adaptation that you get when you
start training is this, like learning how to be more
efficient with what you're contracting and when,
wasting less energy.
So the improvements that we get and strength.
And the reason that things feel easier once we start
doing them is we're not necessarily gaining more
muscle tissue, we're not necessarily gaining the ability
to contract way more muscle fibers.
What we're learning is how to actually use the least amount
of energy and do the least amount of work in that movement.
How does the body fight itself less when
doing that movement?
And that's what those beginner gains
in terms of strength and endurance right away when you start
an activity are.
So you can take people that are extremely
conditioned, like you take a runner that's extremely
conditioned at running, and all of a sudden
you throw them into cycling.
What will happen is their cardiovascular
system might not get that text, but muscularly they'll
fatigue in the cycling, even though they are extremely
conditioned in running, and the reason is they may not have
very efficient motor patterns for cycling.
You can flip that upside down, same thing would happen.
So, the movements that you're doing, you learn how to
make them cheaper.
You learn how to be more efficient at them.
And so regardless of what your actual fitness level
is, or regardless of how good your energy production is,
you're wasteful in movements that you're not efficient in.
Meaning, that your body is fighting itself more.
So even if you're great conditioned, you're gonna fatigue
sooner, you're gonna perform to a lower degree.
But, you learn this process really fast, so the fastest
neurological adaptation we get is learning how to make
things cheaper and easier by gaining efficiency
in that motor pattern.
We're looking at that, this is just kind of a summary,
but we're trying to reduce the
amount of tension that anything that doesn't need to be
making tension makes, and learn how to use tension
in the most mechanically advantaged stuff, which is gonna
decrease the amount of energy and maximize my
force capabilities at every point of the movement.