-: All right, so if we look at the exercise selection
and the order that we would do our exercises
for neurological training,
you'll see some of the same similarities
from the metabolic system.
My A1 exercise should really emphasize
the initiation, right?
So the bulk of your neurological adaptations
are gonna be from that intent of starting the exercise,
whether it's load-based or speed-based,
but even more importantly, if it's speed-based, right?
But so your best potential to improve recruitment
is to start with an exercise
that allows you to focus on initiation.
That does not mean the exercise needs to start
in the length and position, right?
So, like a bench press starts at the top,
and it goes down.
It just needs to be an exercise where it's probably hardest
at whatever the stretch, the lengthened portion
of the muscle is, right?
You know, so a squat and a bench both start at the top,
but they are both hardest at the bottom, okay?
So those would qualify for that, right?
Exercises that are difficult
through their entire range of motion,
so this was the Number One exercise for hypertrophy.
For neurological, this actually
is probably the second thing.
So you first need to tax that lengthened position,
focus on initiation, and then you move to an exercise
that kinda is hard, the entire exercise,
there has some sort of, you know, compensation,
resistant, you using, combining resistance or something
to make that hard the entire portion of the range, right?
And then, if we go into C, right,
and sometimes, these could be the same exercise, right,
so not that you would do it twice,
but you could accomplish both of these things
with one exercise, is that you have an exercise
that resists acceleration, especially,
you know, it goes for both,
both for the momentum and the load-based
if you've already established some fast-twitch adaptations.
If you have not, if you've never actually gotten
any adaptations for speed work or fast-twitch development,
then maybe you don't throw all this in here.
You won't need that much volume, period.
But what you could do is then you switch to an exercise
where now, even though you're a little bit more fatigued,
you could still accelerate, you could still initiate
with maximal intent,
but because the amount of load
that you'd be able to move is so minimal there,
now you pick an exercise that's gonna,
say, if I was doin' a bench press,
is light at the bottom, but it's getting it harder.
So I can contract as hard as I can,
then so my intent is recruit as many
of those fast-twitch fibers as possible still,
but now, instead of being able
to throw up a light weight fast, right,
the resistance is gonna increase and slow down, right?
So what it's gonna do is it's gonna force the recruitment
of more and more musculature
throughout the rest of the range
that otherwise would have not been able to be accomplished
because I was too weak at the initiation point from fatigue
at this point in the workout, right?
So it allows me to get more work in,
especially in the rest of that range,
even though the point of initiation is gonna be
pretty fatigued at this point, okay?
And then, you know, like I said, some of these exercises
will accomplish the Bs and the Cs,
so Exercise Two and Three, at the same time
relatively well, right?
So if we were saying, okay, I was gonna do a squat here
with a pause at the bottom
and then, you know, explode out of it, right,
well, then I could come over here and I could do
like a banded hack squat,
so that's gonna be difficult,
like if I set that up right,
I could make it so it's hard,
pretty much the entire range of motion, right?
And so now, I have something that resists acceleration
and is pretty darned hard the whole way through,
so I'm able to accomplish all these goals in two exercises.
You don't need three exercises.
So when you're doing neurological work,
you're gonna use the fewest exercises of any program
because we're really trying to just train that muscle
from its fully lengthened position
to create as much tension,
recruit as much fast-twitch stuff as possible,
and we don't need 15 different exercises
to accomplish that,
a lot of times, we can do it, you know, in one or two.
All right, so if we look at, you know,
the way that we organize things, right,
ideally, it's the most neurologically complex first, right?
So when we look at neurological complexity,
things that make something more complex
to the nervous system
are gonna be, one, load, right,
so that's the amount of tension I need to generate, right,
so the more muscle tissue that I'm havin' to contract,
the more motor neurons I'm having to recruit,
so that makes it more complex.
The greater the range of motion, right,
well, okay, that's more contraction.
I have to control more lengthening, more shortening, right,
that's a degree of complexity.
The number of joints and muscles that my brain
has to manage, right,
so, you know, a squat is more complex than a hack squat
because it's going to, like my spine
is more loaded in a squat, right,
so I have to control balance and stuff.
There's more joints that I have to control
when I have to stabilize and balance my body.
The amount of stability needed, right,
so if my stabilization is a big part of that exercise,
well, then my nervous system is gonna have
to focus on those so that load is gonna
have to be spread out, right?
So it's, think of it's like, how many things
is my brain having to do,
and how hard is each of those things,
and that's kind of making up
this total neurological complexity thing, right?
So technically, if I'm curling a dumbbell over here, right,
and I try and sign my name over here,
I just made that exercise more neurologically complex
just by adding in extra joints and extra stuff.
If I were doing a curl over here,
and all I did was squeeze my fist in my right hand,
I still made it more neurologically complex.
I didn't add movement, but I added some contraction
and stuff over here.
If I'm curling over here,
and I'm squeezing the dumbbell handle really hard
while I'm doing it,
guess what, that's more neurologically complex, right?
I mean, those are small, minute things,
but so, like, so the harder you're working,
the more complex it is, the more tissue that's working,
the more range of motion,
the more stabilizers that are needed,
all that stuff is gonna add to complexity.
So when you're comparing exercises,
you don't look at just any one of these things.
You look at all of them.
And the last one here,
the percent of the range of motion
where the muscle is loaded,
so in an exercise where the muscle's only really loaded
in a small portion,
well, then the load, like the tension needed,
is only high in that small portion, right?
It's only high in that small portion of range of motion,
so that's less complex than an exercise
that is hard everywhere, right?
That being said, our first goal is to lengthen position,
so even though you could say, like,
well, if my second exercise is as harder everywhere, right,
that's more complex than an exercise
that's only hard in lengthened position,
but remember what we're trying to achieve, right,
as we're trying to get that maximal contraction here.
So it's just if I was comparing two exercises
for, say, Bs and Cs, you know,
maybe I look at that,
or if I was, you know, potentially,
I'm not doing this for performance
and I'm doing it just to benefit multiple programs,
so maybe I'm doing more exercises than two or three, right,
then I would look at, kind of, using this
as another way of kind of figuring out
where those exercises happen after the As.