Thought you guys might find this interesting

S

Sun-Tzu

New Member
This was an article about 2007 JP's Fitness Summit.

"I think the BIG NEWS came as Chad Waterbury explained Motor Unit recruitment and muscle growth. .

I'll try to pare it down to simple:

1) We have 3 types of Motor Units - small, medium and large and they tend to innervate muscle corresponding in size . .small, medium and large

2) Once a motor unit stops firing, so does the muscle . .you're no longer training it ! ( re-read that). AND the failure occurs biggest to smallest.

3) So in a bench press, when the big motor units stops firing, so do your pecs . .so your bench now start to bear down on delts, tris and rotator cuff . .keep that set going and the big delts shut down and now you invite injury as the rotator cuff, small muscles around the forearm and core try to keep control of the weight.

4) YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED THE SET WHEN THE FAST/ BIG MOTOR UNITS STOPPED FIRING

5) How do we know when this is ? . .movement speed is directly correlated to the MU firing . .so when your movement slows . .stop the set ( re-read that ) . . .
...this means we want speed (under control) in our concentric . .1-3 sec depending on range of motion of course

6) By using 80% of 1RM, you're pretty much guaranteed they strength and hypertophic response you want . .the cool thing is this system is autoregulating ( think about it )
Fast twitch guys will fail at 5 reps, slow twitch guys will keep the speed up for 12 reps

For muscle growth you want to hit a rep total of about 24-36 reps/ muscle
So the fast twitch guy naturally ends up doing 10 x 3 and the slow twitch guy keeps his speed longer and does 3x12


NOW BEFORE WE RUN OFF AND OVERDO IT . .

Step in Bill Hartman . .the Orthopaedic trainer/ guru that did the Inside Out DVD with Mike Robertson.

"Until a client can perform:
Plank: 2 minutes
Isometric held hyperextension: 2 minutes
Side Plank: 90 sec.
They are not allowed to load more than 20% of their bodyweight in external lifting"

This pretty much supports the view held by Back and core guru Stu McGill.
But HOLY SMOKES . .best not neglect that core training !!

Charles Stayley and a few of us were chatting in the hall and he kept spitting out quotes of note, but to this he added:

"Most people are not as elite as they think they are"

and

"Guys assume that everytime they touch a weight, there's going to be a benefit"

Guys, that's two very important take home messages !

Bill and Charles both concurred with Chad, that as soon as movement loses speed, or technique, stop the set, regardless of thee predetermined number of reps you wrote down . .you've accomplished the growth stimulus.

FOLLOWING THE ABOVE ADVICE BY THREE TOP GUNS WILL PREVENT OVERLOADING THE CNS AND THE INJURIES AND HORMONAL DEPLETION THAT ENSUES."

So for years now Brian has been preaching not going to failure, keeping the volume as low as possible, etc. and just now the top guys are making this statement. "DONT GO TO FAILURE." Keep in mind most if not all we heard from these seminars in the past was mainly HIT principles.

I also found it interesting that even Ellington Darden (pretty much the number 1 HIT advocate) is starting to preach not going to failure every workout.

Keep in mind guys even if you follow these HST principles and don't go to failure, etc. You still have to have your diet together to put on muscle mass and lose fat.

Anyway thought you might like to hear that.
 
One word takes care of all that....

MAX-STIMULATION. Dan Moore is my guru.
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Very soon I will be dropping all my sets to 5s, then 3s, then max-stim as the loads progress.
 
Theres still the question of endurance strength. You may have taken care of growth and kept fatigue down, but how is that going to translate to real life when you need to carry something for longer than 4 seconds? You're going to end up being really strong but fatigueing quickly.

I do agree Dan has a great program for adding absolute strength and size if you are eating right, but not ever getting fatigued has it's draw backs. Even he says that if you're worried about endurance to just keep shrinking the m-time down, but if thats the case you'll eventually just end up doing a normal set with 0 m-time. Which begs the question, why even have an M-time then? I guess it all comes down to goals, but I don't think I'll ever drop endurance training like his program suggests.
 
<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">5) How do we know when this is ? . .movement speed is directly correlated to the MU firing . .so when your movement slows . .stop the set ( re-read that ) . . .
...this means we want speed (under control) in our concentric . .1-3 sec depending on range of motion of course</div>

Another word or acryonym takes care of that: HST. Under HST principals, we stop just short of failure when the speed of our concentric movements start slowing down.
 
How would I do heavy carpentry without endurance? Or climb up and down stairs for tools and materials on our apartment jobs? Of course, most of you have desk jobs, and sometimes I do, but there are a lot of functional needs for overall fitness. I also tend to put on too much fat trying to bulk on strength routines. I need the HST break to get fit.
Of course, then there's the bedroom...deadlifting isn't what I do with the wife.
 
I absolutely love this, HST's proving itself without having to touch a feather, now isn't that great?

The gurus are starting to get around the idea of failure and starting to think CNS failure = bad news for growth and everything else in the weight room.

Endurance vs. power/strength? Well, I do think and many will agree that having overall fitness is important for agility and mobility, after all we don't do even half of the movements of the weight room during real life.

Being supple, fast and agile is most important at least to me! Others?
 
Anyone actually try Bill Hartman's standards for core strength/endurance?

I've done the plank before for over 2 minutes, haven't tried the side plank for that long, but only managed like ~80-85 seconds holding the top of a back extension (mild arch) before my hammies/glutes quit. Guess I should stop lifting heavy things!
 
Like I said, endurance is important to me outside the weight room, not in it. I am really not concerned with doing squats for 50 reps straight, or see how many dips I can do until failure. I would much rather see how much I can lift in one rep or in a short set.

Plus, at max-stim we have found that the endurance part of training adaptation happens very quickly. Guys who are doing max-stim may lose their strength endurance temporarily, but as soon as the start doing high-rep sets, they get it back in a couple of weeks, plus with the aded benefit of using much heavier loads than they were previously capable of.

Going to failure in a set is obviously NOT important to strength/size adaptation. Otherwise people wouldn't be growing doing max-stim all the time, and they are. To me it is simply a matter of: progressive load, relatively high mechanical load, enough volume to induce signalling.
 
Actually how true the diffrences between MS and other paradigms in SE aren't quite settled.

Many have reported very nice SE increases, such as Blade, Coach Hale, Sci Muscle among others. All have increased their previous relative max.

In a small trial conducted by Drew Baye, in which young female twins used a conventional consecutive set scheme compared to a MS type routine the differences in SE where insignificant.

<span style='color:red'>NOTE: these were young untrained girls so obviously I'm not relying heavily on the results seen here....by far. But still rather interesting.</span>

Strength Endurance Changes -
Obviously the only indication that MS suffered any significant disadvantage was in the SE change for Leg Curl, other than that no differnece between measures. So I don't think SE will be all that different but future studies (yes, actually studies are being comtemplated and are in the works) will tell.

2_Kara_Kelsey_1.jpg
 
<div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 19 2007,18:55)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">2) Once a motor unit stops firing, so does the muscle . .you're no longer training it ! ( re-read that). AND the failure occurs biggest to smallest.

3) So in a bench press, when the big motor units stops firing, so do your pecs . .so your bench now start to bear down on delts, tris and rotator cuff . .keep that set going and the big delts shut down and now you invite injury as the rotator cuff, small muscles around the forearm and core try to keep control of the weight.</div>
2-Wrong

3-Wrong

Somone needs to learn a bit more on recruitment and neural firing and fatigue.
 
<div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 19 2007,19:16)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">Even he says that if you're worried about endurance to just keep shrinking the m-time down, but if thats the case you'll eventually just end up doing a normal set with 0 m-time.  Which begs the question, why even have an M-time then?</div>
Yes, I did.

Because, strength endurance is a relationship. How strong are you within a certain number of reps within a certain amount of time is a matter of specificity. And if this is your goal one way to increase it would be to use much heavier weight with adequate time in between reps and gradually decrease this time.

Like I said earlier many have found that their relative strength and hence endurance has gone up. For example and illustration only, some have said that the load used in their previous 6RM can now be done for 12 or 15 reps.

<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">My experience is kind of the opposite. After doing a about 2 weeks of MS workouts, I tried some regular reps today, and could either do more reps at the same load than before, or do higher loads at the same amount of reps than only 2-3 weeks ago.

-Blade
</div>

<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">i have been using maxstim for past couple of months with my back training

i decided today to test my premaxstim 6rm on lat pulldown

guess what my new 6rm is now my 10rm on lat pulldown

-Coach Hale
</div>

This is what Blade said when I asked how his training system (based on fatigue management) is going, he's calling it Myo-Reps BTW.

<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">it’s been nothing short of amazing. Guys and girls with years of failure training are lifting weights they didn’t think was possible after only 4 weeks (!) of doing one of my training programs.

-Blade
</div>

This is from another forum and Pauly used to post here regularly a few years back

<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">FWIW, Ive been using MS type woprkouts for a few months now and am very pleased with results.

It initially allowed me to get more reps in total with the same max weights I was using with conventional sets, whilst reducing total fatigue at the same time. This led to strength increases, so i am now lifting more weight for more reps than I was previously (I'd kind of stalled out on squats/inc bench for a bit), whilst feeling less fatigued. Gotta be a good thing!

Ive always had the tendency to push too close to failure without realising, in an attempt to make progress compared to last week, and MS has helped me with this (EDIT - thats Max-Stim, not Muscular Dystrophy!)

-Pauly</div>
 
<div>
(Dan Moore @ Apr. 20 2007,08:01)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE"><div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 19 2007,18:55)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">2) Once a motor unit stops firing, so does the muscle . .you're no longer training it ! ( re-read that). AND the failure occurs biggest to smallest.

3) So in a bench press, when the big motor units stops firing, so do your pecs . .so your bench now start to bear down on delts, tris and rotator cuff . .keep that set going and the big delts shut down and now you invite injury as the rotator cuff, small muscles around the forearm and core try to keep control of the weight.</div>
2-Wrong

3-Wrong

Somone needs to learn a bit more on recruitment and neural firing and fatigue.</div>
Sounds like you need to be going to these summits then. I wish they would get some people that aren't in the fitness clique anyway to give these people a different view of what else is out there.

Chad Waterbury is considered a top strength training coach in the nation. These statements were also paraphrased by someone at the summit not Chad himself, so he could have worded it differently then what Chad actually said. Regardless I'd like to get your point of view on how this if you would care to elaborate? Are you also stating that his idea of stopping as the movement slows down is inaccurate as well?
 
<div>
(scientific muscle @ Apr. 20 2007,07:02)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">Like I said, endurance is important to me outside the weight room, not in it.  I am really not concerned with doing squats for 50 reps straight, or see how many dips I can do until failure.  I would much rather see how much I can lift in one rep or in a short set.

Plus, at max-stim we have found that the endurance part of training adaptation happens very quickly.  Guys who are doing max-stim may lose their strength endurance temporarily, but as soon as the start doing high-rep sets, they get it back in a couple of weeks, plus with the aded benefit of using much heavier loads than they were previously capable of.

Going to failure in a set is obviously NOT important to strength/size adaptation.  Otherwise people wouldn't be growing doing max-stim all the time, and they are.  To me it is simply a matter of: progressive load, relatively high mechanical load, enough volume to induce signalling.</div>
So you don't think a surplus of calories is necessary for muscle growth? Just progressive load, relatively high mechanical load, enough volume to induce signalling.
 
Just because those guys are respected national fitness 'gurus' doesn't mean much.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered a fitness guru, what a joke. His training methods are borderline retarded. But magnificent structure and tons of juice can take you a long way, and with a physique like his it is easy to convince people you know what you are talking about. How many hordes of trainees over the years bought his &quot;Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding&quot;? I know people who still take it as the ultimate truth....HA!
laugh.gif
They think if they do 10 sets of concentration curls that they can change the shape of their bicep peak and all sorts of crap like that.
 
<div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 20 2007,17:52)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">These statements were also paraphrased by someone at the summit not Chad himself, so he could have worded it differently then what Chad actually said. Regardless I'd like to get your point of view on how this if you would care to elaborate? Are you also stating that his idea of stopping as the movement slows down is inaccurate as well?</div>
That is exactly what I was wondering, if it was Chad himself who had said this or was it simply misinterpreted.

When muscles are activated it's the MU (motor units) that are receiving the signal from the nervous system, at no time does this cease to occur, in fact right before failure the firing frequency (the frequency at which the pulses are occuring) is at it's highest. Now once fatigue is maxed there is a reduction in firing rate but again it doesn't stop, ever.

All muscle has some active units all the time, this is what creates the passive tension needed to keep the skeletal system aligned.

So Number 2 is obviously incorrect as the MU never stops firing. Number 3 is also incorrect as the MU in the pecs will never stop firing (whether large or small units) and as long as the load is sufficient to recruit all MU then all are firing away.

The only incidences of what is called a &quot;silent&quot; period from a motor unit have been documented in the hand muscles, not the larger peripheral muscles. Even if this were the case in larger muscles it's a means of allowing fatigued MU to refresh but at the same time a fresher MU is recruited so force is maintained.

Back to number three. The idea that all of a sudden your pecs will quit producing force and all of that weight that is on the bar is suddenly borne onto your delts and such is way wrong. Before this were to occur the weight would come down as the maximum force that the entire shoulder girdle and arm muscles is what is holding up that force. Remove largest synergist = weight gonna be on your pecs
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I don't disagree with his presumption, in fact I have advocated the very same thing for some time now.

Where he is speaking of sets, I speak in the term of reps.

<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">Sounds like you need to be going to these summits then.</div>I'm not trying to sell you anything, I tend to try and educate you, big difference
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Plus I didn't get an invitation
sad.gif
 
<div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 20 2007,17:58)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">So you don't think a surplus of calories is necessary for muscle growth?</div>
Funny you mention this.

In several animal models the muscle under examination grew just fine (100% increase in wet weight) with no additional nutritonal support.

Now I'm not saying a caloric surplus isn't needed but just throwing out some more &quot;food for thought&quot;.
 
<div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 20 2007,17:52)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE"><div>
(Dan Moore @ Apr. 20 2007,08:01)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE"><div>
(Sun-Tzu @ Apr. 19 2007,18:55)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">2) Once a motor unit stops firing, so does the muscle . .you're no longer training it ! ( re-read that). AND the failure occurs biggest to smallest.

3) So in a bench press, when the big motor units stops firing, so do your pecs . .so your bench now start to bear down on delts, tris and rotator cuff . .keep that set going and the big delts shut down and now you invite injury as the rotator cuff, small muscles around the forearm and core try to keep control of the weight.</div>
2-Wrong

3-Wrong

Somone needs to learn a bit more on recruitment and neural firing and fatigue.</div>
Sounds like you need to be going to these summits then. I wish they would get some people that aren't in the fitness clique anyway to give these people a different view of what else is out there.

Chad Waterbury is considered a top strength training coach in the nation. These statements were also paraphrased by someone at the summit not Chad himself, so he could have worded it differently then what Chad actually said. Regardless I'd like to get your point of view on how this if you would care to elaborate? Are you also stating that his idea of stopping as the movement slows down is inaccurate as well?</div>
Waterbury is considered a top strength coach in the country? By whom, his fellow T-mag authors?

Waterbury writes some of the stupidest **** on t-mag, which is quite an accomplishment. His articles on figure training and MMA are all very el oh el worthy.
 
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