Seductive Simplicity
Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:07 am
1. Efficacy is King
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.
2. Training Framework
2.1 Anatomy of Strength
For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to lump the physiological aspects of strength into neurological and muscular attributes. Every physiological adaptation has a “performance ceiling.” That is, there is some maximum potential we’ll never actually reach, but that influences our performance nonetheless. The rate of adaptation for each aspect is proportional to its proximity to that limit, while the “cost” of maintaining an adaptation is inversely proportional to its proximity. In other words, the closer we get to our limits, the harder and slower it is to get even closer, and the costlier it is just to stay where we are.2.1.1 Neurological Aspects
The neurological aspects of strength include coordination and recruitment. By coordination, I mean our ability to convert force into productive movement. Gross motor movements require a collaborative effort from different muscles and joints to move our bodies and external objects in the desired direction. We improve coordination through observing, visualizing, performing, and coaching cues. The time and effort to learn a new movement pattern varies, but, once learned, the movement pattern does not change much over time. Learning productive movement is immensely valuable to a novice, but if we view a perfectly coordinated movement as a nearly vertical line, further advancements in coordination cannot yield an improvement in the display of strength. Maintaining good coordination is important for effective training but it quickly ceases to be a specific adaptive focus.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.
2.1.2 Muscular Aspects
Finally, muscles are the engines for contractile force. The maximum contractile potential of a muscle is ultimately limited by its cross-sectional area (CSA). The CSA is where the contractile elements of the muscle interact, and more CSA means more interactions and more potential force. Relative to the other aspects of strength, muscular CSA has, by far, the highest “ceiling.” Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue, and each motor unit can be considered somewhat in isolation. The high-threshold motor units tend to be the least resistant to fatigue, but the hardest to recruit. And low-threshold units are very fatigue-resistant. The magnitude of fatigue each motor unit experiences is related to the number of times it contracts. Manipulating intensity influences this process asymmetrically. Generally, low-intensity movements (e.g. walking) will not engage high-threshold motor units, even with many repetitions, and few total repetitions, even at a high intensity, will not fatigue motor units enough to elicit hypertrophy. But “moderate” intensity movements performed for many repetitions has the potential to recruit and fatigue the greatest number of motor units sufficiently to elicit hypertrophy.2.1.3 Strength as a Display of Cumulative Adaptations
Simplistically, we can think of strength as being determined by the above components. CSA determines maximum possible force, recruitment determines what proportion of that force is expressed, and coordination determines how productively the lifter translates force to movement. A low to mid-range RM effort demands high motor unit recruitment but, at best, only fatigues the least fatigue-resistant motor units. The high motor unit recruitment heavily stresses the neurological aspects of strength without stimulating hypertrophy in most of the involved motor units. It also inhibits performance of additional repetitions due to the neurological fatigue. It causes subsequent reps to be “sloppy.” This may confuse the firing pattern of the movement, reducing coordination. Moderate intensity reps can be performed with better, more consistent form, while allowing sufficient cumulative repetitions to fatigue the most motor units.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.
2.2 The Novice Effect
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.
2.3 The Targeted Specialist
Approaching an adaptive limit basically means that tolerances narrow, and thresholds get higher: The range between too much stress (overtrained) and not enough (no improvement) narrows. The body becomes more resistant to stress, requiring more to stimulate further adaptation: The threshold to elevate muscle protein synthesis (MPS) increases, and that elevation diminishes both in peak and duration. De-training happens more quickly, and recovery takes longer. Confusingly, the need for both specificity and variety increase. And the cost for maintaining these physiological adaptations increases.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.
3. Train, Sustain, Develop, Display
Training complexity addresses the fact that the components of strength respond differently to the same stress and are subject to different limits. Post-novice lifters benefit from understanding which components of strength they can benefit the most from, and when the display of strength actually supports or detracts from training. More advanced lifters have to balance competing demands to continue making progress. If your goal is to display your strength, remember that said display requires an effective collaboration of the components of strength. Regular RM PRs are seductive, but they’re usually not very productive. As a lifter, your training should apply stress appropriately to yield the greatest returns on investment, and that may require a little bit of complexity, planning, and a better understanding of the components of strength.