Training should be effective. That is, it should get trainees what they want out of it, provided they put in the work. Figuring out how to do that depends on their goals, and where the lifter is coming from. Usually, these constraints make things a little more complicated than we'd like, but success is not merely a consequence of willpower alone.
But how do we know if a program is effective? Early in a trainee’s experience, weight on the bar is a simple way to measure, even enforce, progress. This might seduce us into thinking that displaying our strength through a feat like a new rep-max (RM) is the same thing as developing strength, but we would mistake the thing we want for the way to get it. A display of strength relies on a collection of physiological adaptations that are subject to their own limits and respond differently to the same stimulus. For a novice, most lifting will have a positive effect on all of these adaptations, but as the trainee advances, the differences are amplified. Learning how these adaptations work and respond to training is essential if we want to be effective. Applying these lessons will necessarily complicate things a little.
Recruitment is to the ability to effectively engage motor units within a muscle, causing it to contract. Motor units can be classified as “low threshold,” meaning they are easily recruited to perform low-force movements, and “high threshold” units which require greater exertion to activate. Each motor unit contains its own complement of contractile tissue, so increasing the number of motor units involved in a movement can dramatically increase the force potential of that movement. The big physiological adaptation here involves “learning” how to effectively recruit “unfamiliar” motor units. Essentially, a novice with little exposure to loaded movement will have inconsistent innervation of the higher threshold motor units, but this connection improves with training. An individual has a fixed number of motor units, however, and that does not change with training.
Intensity drives neurological adaptations and muscular hypertrophy responds to repetition. Simply adding weight to the bar every time works for someone who still has a lot of neurological adaptations to develop, but manipulating intensity alone fails to adequately stress muscular hypertrophy.
Personal Records (PRs) come regularly for novices. But that shouldn’t be surprising, because they’re rapidly gaining both muscular and neurological adaptations. Our tendency to fixate on this aspect of novice training stems more from the subjective importance it carries than from its actual utility in training. Regular PRs help trainees push themselves, and might keep some of them motivated. But this can become addictive, and give us the idea that consistent PRs are the most important attribute of a training program, when in reality, they are just the fruits of our labor.
Any novice program that emphasizes low rep work at a low volume will disproportionately stress the neurological aspects of strength. That’s not a bad thing. It essentially means that the lifter quickly learns coordination, develops better recruitment, and gets accustomed to hard training. It also means that the trainee learns how to better display the strength developed during training. We want trainees to lift with proper form and learn how to produce force. However, the nature of this approach has the potential to end badly. Our post-novice trainee is disproportionately closer to the ceiling for neurological adaptations than he is for muscular hypertrophy, he’s measured progress solely through the manipulation of intensity, and he’s potentially addicted to PRs. Every RM PR effort for this more efficient lifter represents a disproportionate strain on the neurological (and peripheral tissue) components of strength, with insufficient stimulus for hypertrophy. At this stage, hypertrophy is the one attribute that has the most untapped potential, best recovery resources, and the biggest impact on performance. In order to get stronger, our lifter needs to shift training focus.
For post-novice trainees, maintaining a very high proficiency in any aspect of strength becomes extremely costly, and it can detract from effective training. A high neurological proficiency is the ability to maximally use the available muscle. Muscular hypertrophy is the way to increase what’s potentially available. If a lifter maintains proportionally equal utility (coordination and recruitment) of his CSA while increasing the total CSA, he will get stronger. Some degree of overall proficiency is necessary to train effectively, but the only time we need all of them at their peak is when we want to display the strength we’ve developed through training. But if a trainee is already highly proficient at recruiting muscle, getting better at recruiting it will only provide a marginal increase, at a prohibitive cost. Performing a RM is a very neurologically taxing event that does little to stimulate hypertrophy. And to produce more CSA, a lifter must stress the contractile capacity of a muscle.
Diversified approaches to training, that use different rep ranges and greater volume, apply these ideas to build more muscle and then hone neurological adaptations to better utilize that additional muscle, either in competition or in support of more training. It’s not complexity for its own sake, but a recognition of competing demands and an intelligent approach to address natural limitations in a way the best culminates in improved performance.
Specialization deals with how narrowly aligned the different neuromuscular adaptations need to be to perform a given task. Squatting 200 pounds for most healthy males under the age of 40 is not all that specialized, even though it may be uncommon. The coordination, recruitment and muscle mass demands of such a feat are trivial and most young men with limited lifting experience could perform it without special preparation; and they would be able to repeat it immediately. Squatting 600 pounds, on the other hand, represents a high degree of specialization for most people. Even among those who have done it, repeating it would require careful preparation. This is why world-class athletes carefully plan their training to support their competition schedule, and highly specialized competitions, like powerlifting, see the highest performance among competitors who rarely lift maximal loads. Novices have not specialized to the degree that maintaining new adaptations represents much physiological cost, and performing PRs does not require very precise alignment of physiological adaptations. At higher levels of performance, lifters must decompose strength into its constituent parts and apply appropriate stress to maximize their contributions in competition. More advanced lifters need to plan their training to develop the disparate physiological adaptations in a way that effectively culminates in improved performance. In this way, successful competitive lifters become targeted specialists.