-: So now how about high intensity, okay?
So we look at high intensity.
The first thing I want you guys to understand
is that even if we're thinking about
getting the body to recruit more muscle fibers
or thinking about getting
the body to recruit more fast twitch,
the only way that we're gonna get
your nervous system to say that's a good idea
is that we find a way that
that also somehow conserves energy, okay?
And so your brain doesn't know that we have this
performance goal, this explosiveness goal,
or this power goal, that the brain has no idea
that we need to be able to bench press more
or squat more or run faster or jump higher, okay?
So it can't conceive of these things
that you want to accomplish.
The only thing that we can argue with it is, like, hey,
if you give me a little bit more power,
we're actually gonna save energy in the long run here.
If you give me some performance now,
it's gonna cost you less in the future.
So how do we get that?
How do we get our body to recruit more fast twitch fibers?
How do we get it to burn more energy
but also think that it's saving more energy by doing so?
Well, what we have to do is we have to basically
get the body to need that
extra recruitment in order to do it.
Or we have to trick it.
So the first thing we can do to get
fast twitch involved is just with load.
So if it's a high amount of load,
the slow twitch can't do it on its own
and the fast twitch can contract a little bit harder,
a little bit more aggressively,
so it tends to do better against really heavy loads.
So if we use more load,
the load forces us to recruit more fibers.
So we're gonna get some more fast twitch
and we're gonna get overall more motor units recruiting,
more things being stimulated simultaneously
simply to overcome that load.
So at this point, we're training the fast twitch fibers,
but we really haven't convinced the body to use them.
As soon as that load goes down,
it would go right back to the slow twitch fibers.
So we haven't created the need yet.
We've just found a way that if I use a heavy enough load,
I can bring these guys into the workout,
and now I can get a higher volume
of fast twitch work in the workout.
So if I'm always using loads that
require some fast twitch, guess what?
I'm still gonna use as much slow twitch as possible.
I'm just gonna use also a lot more fast twitch.
So the load has to be greater than
the slow twitch capacity for this to work.
And then I'm getting it accomplished in training.
But I haven't quite corniced my body yet.
The intent is going to be huge.
So in terms of actually training
the body to use more fast twitch,
without necessarily the maximal load being placed on it,
is we need to have this basically explosive
or accelerating type of intent where
I'm convincing the body that I need to create momentum.
So when the load is significant enough
and I create momentum with those fast twitch fibers,
what will actually happen is the amount of energy
needed to do the entire movement will become less.
So I want you to think of two scenarios.
So I want you to think of a guy that is picking up,
he's doing a heavy deadlift.
Guy or girl, doesn't matter.
So you got one guy and he's gonna pick it up,
nice, slow and controlled.
So he's gonna be picking it up nice,
slow, controlled, set it back down.
Okay, don't even worry about the essentials.
Just think about him lifting it up nice and slow.
Now let's think of another guy that goes up to the deadlift
and he is going to jerk that weight up off the floor.
And so when he grabs that bar,
he's gonna (exhaling sharply)
and he's gonna pop up with it, right?
Now the first guy,
he was working less to get the bar off the floor
but because he did it slow,
he was working decently hard
the entire time he was lifting the bar.
The guy that was able to lift it
with generating some momentum,
once he generated that momentum,
the work actually became easier.
It was easier to do the lift, the top 90%.
So he invested a lot of energy to get that
bar moving fast right from the get-go,
but then by generating that momentum,
the overall energy expenditure of that lift
actually ended up being cheaper
than the guy that lifted it slow.
So now we have a situation where we have made
recruiting fast twitch fibers a energy-saving mechanism.
And so the key with this is in order
to get those fast twitch fibers in,
we actually have to decrease the total energy
of expenditure when they get involved.
And in order to do that, we have to have momentum,
so we have to maximally contract at the beginning
of that concentric so that we get to a point
where we're generating as much momentum as possible
because that momentum is then going
to carry the exercise into,
or that movement of the weight is gonna make it
so the rest of the exercise is a lot less work.
A lot less metabolic work.
So that is the most important thing for
training your body to be able to use more fast twitch.
So what's gonna happen is if I do this
and it's like okay, when I'm doing this type of an intent,
my brain thinks we're generating momentum
so let's use fast twitch because that's gonna get us
this momentum and save us energy.
So this intrinsic idea,
this conscious idea of maximal intent,
my brain learns that's this momentum-generating system.
If I recruit fast twitch here first, I'm gonna save energy.
And when I get to the point where loads are really heavy,
then if I didn't have this there,
I would still use as much slow twitch first.
Which is why it is important to train explosively
if your end goal is recruiting
more fast twitch for sports performance.
If you're just trying to get hypertrophy,
then maybe just using load most of the time
to make the fast twitch have to recruit out of necessary
is enough to hypertrophy those,
but it won't necessarily carry over to
being able to jump higher, run faster,
or lift more in a power lifting meet, so to speak.
You need to also train the body that momentum
through fast twitch recruitment is this energy-saving tool.
And so if you start applying that,
then when you do those,
like if you've learned this system
and then you use heavier loads that would slow you down,
like minimize the momentum you could generate
'cause you're working towards your 1RM or whatnot.
Like on loads where you can't generate significant momentum,
if the intent is still there,
you're still gonna recruit
those fast twitch at the beginning
which is gonna give you maximal performance
in terms of during that intense work.
Doing that explosive or strength, power-based work.
So but you need this as a foundational skill to get there.
Otherwise, you're just simply learning how to
contract more than everything with repeated heavy load,
heavy load, heavy load, heavy load.
If you wanna start biasing
more fast twitch, more fast twitch
right from the get-go,
you have to do the system where you're using a load
where you're able to generate enough momentum
that the exercise actually ends up being cheaper.
That doesn't mean that the exercise needs to be effortless
like throughout the whole range.
It just means that initially it needs to be
something where you generate enough momentum
that it becomes lighter in the rest of the portion.
It's finding that balance of not so light
that I'm not recruiting a lot of,
that I don't need to recruit a lot of fast twitch.
But light enough that if I do this explosively,
I can generate some of my momentum
and makes this is cheaper than if I were to do it slow.
So if we look at this fast twitch thing,
we're looking at aesthetic, right?
We can use slow twitch fatigue as a way of getting it.
We can use just weights that are exceeding
the slow twitch capacity,
but if we want fast twitch to
come in as a functional quality
the load has to be greater than slow twitch
plus we have to have that maximal intent.
We have to do some momentum-based training,
and then we have to have intent
be a huge part of our training thing.
So that's why that intrinsic portion of strength training,
when you look at Olympic lifters
or power lifters or whatnot,
one of the reasons that they need so many reps
and so many sets is they have to train.
This system and train that system,
and they have to also then train,
like ingrain the ability to do that maximal intent.
To consciously call on their body
and say hey, I need everything in this instant,
and convince it that
that's a good idea from an energy perspective.
If we look at the adaptations that we're gonna get
from this power and intensity type adaptations,
whether it's from a load or the momentum generation or stuff
we're gonna get increased recruitment
to maximize speed and force contraction.
Which is really good in terms of we're looking at
hypertrophy and metabolic training.
If I get the ability to contract more muscle tissue,
well then I can create more tension and hypertrophy,
and I can be loading more fibers.
Therefore, I can stimulate more of those fibers
with less volume, or less reps.
If I'm in a metabolic phase,
the more tissue I can contract,
the faster I can burn through energy
so the easier it is for me to get a metabolic effect
in a shorter set or fewer sets within a workout.
So I want to learn how to
train a lot of fibers simultaneously.
This is gonna happen, like, the ability to do that
with speed and force
and fast twitch movement is gonna come
a lot from the momentum training,
but simply using the load is gonna get us
the ability to contract more fibers period.
We're gonna learn how to
contract more tissues simultaneously
regardless of slow or fast
if we're doing heavy base training.
We just aren't gonna learn how to do that
fast twitch dominant unless we do
the momentum training as well.
We're gonna get faster integration of those
fast twitch fibers if we do the momentum stuff.
And the nice thing about that is
if we can get fast twitch dominant,
if you're looking at something like a hypertrophy thing,
fast twitch fibers have a greater potential
for hypertrophy than slow twitch stuff does.
So if I do a neurological phase where I'm convincing my body
to use more fast twitch when I'm applying maximal intent.
And then I go to any other phase.
I go to a hypertrophy phase per se, right?
And I apply a more maximal intent,
even though I'm using lighter loads or whatnot,
but I do it in a banded hack squat or something
that's gonna prevent me from getting a lot of momentum
and make sure that the tension stays there.
But now by applying that maximal intent,
I'm able to get higher volume of fast twitch work
in my workout, which means more of the training
that I'm doing is affecting the muscles' tissues,
the muscle fibers, that hypertrophy to the greatest degree.
So this will allow me to hypertrophy fast twitch more
in my hypertrophy program if my body has learned
that through intent, I am going to recruit those
fast twitch fibers to a greater degree.
Earlier in every rep, earlier in every set.
Now a higher volume of that workout
will be done via those fast twitch fibers.
But as you're in a metabolic phase
or you're in a hypertrophy phase,
understand that if you are there too long,
you will start to reverse this adaptation.
Your body will be like, aha, I see what you did there.
This is no longer energy efficient,
because you're reverse banding this or whatever.
Like, you're decelerating.
You're keeping the tension.
This isn't really cheaper anymore,
and it will start to learn to make
that motor pattern more efficient for
the new type of training that you're doing.
So you will have to kind of repeatedly go back
and reeducate the nervous system to maintain that effect.
It's not like you do that once
and then you have fast twitch recruitment forever.
You periodically need to go back there.
If you are a performance-based athlete,
and you spend too much time away from that,
you start to make your
contractions more slow twitch dominant
because your body is learning how to make that cheaper.
So you have to kinda use physics to your advantage there
and convince them that high investment
of energy in fast twitch recruitment at the beginning
will save energy over time by training with momentum.