Fadi
...
Muscle Fibre Contraction
It’s Saturday night and you and some of your mates and their girlfriends are going out for some de-stressing time. No sooner you’ve gotten to your destination; you’re met with a group of arrogant rowdy males intent on screwing your night out.
They pick on the biggest bloke… you! With a blink of an eye, one man of the opposition is down and out cold for the count, with a single swift and powerful fist blow to the nose.
Now for the fun bit of analising what has just taken place inside of your killer arm muscles? When you decided that enough was enough, your muscles contracted fully before smashing your opponent’s face. So why did I use the adjective “fully” when describing the verb “to contract”? Because there is no such thing as a partially contracted muscle fibre. To reiterate: when your muscle contracts, it contracts completely or not at all. That was fact #1.
Let’s move to another element of muscle contraction by using the night out scenario yet again.
Muscle fibre recruitment
It seems that although your powerful punch has made a mess of the rude man’s face, it was not enough to intimidate the other gang members into retreat. What to do? Some here might say, well how about punching harder, with more force that would send a clearer message to the angry mob that you really mean business. However, another and a much better and safer option would be to get your mates involved in this dirty and ugly fight. So now we’re talking of group involvement rather than getting your hands dirty all by yourself.
Again, let us go back inside our muscular system and see how we’re going to translate what I’ve just written about the group involvement into muscular physiology. Well, when a muscle fatigues or gets exhausted, more muscle fibres are recruited as they are needed, to complete the job at hand. So to sum up the last point, we say if and when a muscle fibre cannot handle the intensity of the load by itself, the central nervous system insures that more muscle fibres come to its aid as is needed to complete the job at hand. That was fact #2.
Did you know that muscle fibres are not able to vary the intensity of their contraction relative to the load against which they are subjected to? That was fact #3.
Let me first explain what the implication of the above statement really means in simple plain English. What this statement is stating is that a muscular contraction cannot get stronger simply because you’ve added more weight to the bar. I’ll give you an example that would clearly illustrate this point.
When I was weightlifting, I used to perform an assistance exercise called clean pulls, it’s where you lift the bar off the weightlifting platform in an explosive manner. Now let’s say my routine for that workout had called for 5x3 at 180kg. Naturally, I would start with a lighter weight before reaching my max weight for that exercise. It went something like this:
100kg x3
140kg x3
160kg x3
180kg 5x3
Now to look at what was happening inside the muscle fibres again as far as muscle fibre recruitment is concerned. At 100kg, a small percentage of my muscles were recruited by my CNS to lift the weight. Mind you, although a small percentage was recruited, what was recruited was contracting at 100% efficiency/fully (a la fact #1). Now as I progressed up in weight, from 140kg and all the way up to 180kg, more and more muscle fibres became recruited in order for me to blast that weight up explosively. So it was not a case of a stronger contraction of muscle fibres, but rather more of them becoming recruited as needed to help me manage the 180kg (a la fact #2).
Bodybuilding and the best rep range debate.
Check out the internet forums, and you’re sure to find the debate is still raging on as to which rep range is best for muscular hypertrophy. They usually go something like this:
1-5 reps = strength & power, little hypertrophy
6-8 reps = strength & hypertrophy
9-12 reps = hypertrophy & some strength
13-20+ reps = local endurance, some hypertrophy, little strength
Some will tell you that low reps with heavier weights are the way to go since muscle growth is dependent on muscle tension under load. Others would say it’s not the force that counts, but the sheer volume with less emphasis on heavy weights. Confused yet?! My advice: don’t get bogged down with it. I’ll attempt to make it clearer why that is... soon enough.
May the FORCE be with you, mmm… wait, let’s change that to EFFORT!
If you’re one who follows what I write, then you’d know that I neither belong to the high intensity school of bodybuilding, nor do I belong to the high volume school of thought. Ah, you must belong to the school of TUT, that is Time Under tension, which as they say, should determine your rep range. No, no, and no. I belong rather to the school that places effort above all other criteria when it comes to muscular hypertrophy. So if your wish is to build muscles, then choose whatever rep range you believe works best for you, (I won’t argue with you), and then apply full effort to stimulate your muscles into some serious growth. Even if full out effort is applied for only one (usually the last set) out of 3, 4, or whatever, then you will reap the reward that is optimum muscle stimulus (not growth, since that occurs outside the gym as you all know).
I’ll let you in on my training philosophy without burdening you with my full program for now. I feel the deal when I restrict my rest periods between sets to between 30-60 seconds max, depending on the exercise at hand. Why such short rest period? It’s to do with muscle fibre recruitment, insuring that the muscle fibres that I’ve just smashed don’t get a chance to recover fully. A trained athlete such as I can regain about 75% of his power output after 30 seconds of an all-out effort, and about 85% recovery after 60 seconds. Energy Pathways: Anaerobic and aerobic Energy Pathways
So why is that so important I hear you ask? Well it’s important that I commence my subsequent sets prior to when full recovery has taken place in order to place emphasis on stressing the glycolytic energy system (speaking from an Energy Pathways point of view), and to insure recruitment of the larger and more powerful fast twitch muscle fibres according to the critically analised/revised Size Principle (law) by Dr Ralph N. Carpinelli. The Size Principle as Carpinelli puts it is as follows: “The size principle states that when the central nervous system recruits motor units for a specific activity, it begins with the smallest, more easily excited, least powerful motor units and progresses to the larger, more difficult to excite, more powerful motor units to maintain or increase force.” Carpinelli views it like this: “Although the size principle is described reasonably accurately, it is often followed by a misunderstanding of the underlying neurophysiological concept and its practical application.”
...so in a nutshell, what he’s saying is that the original size principle study (by Dr Henneman 1957) has been misunderstood by authors on the subject to mean that heavier is better (or the force/weight was the controlling factor) which Dr. Carpinelli rejects, as he points out that it’s the effort and not the resistance that is the controlling factor, saying that the prerequisite for maximum muscle fibre recruitment is determined by the level of effort. THE SIZE PRINCIPLE AND A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OFTHE UNSUBSTANTIATED HEAVIER-IS-BETTER RECOMMENDATION FOR RESISTANCE TRAINING http://www.scsepf.org/doc/291208/Paper1.pdf.
Let me explain/demonstrate it using Dr. Carpinelli’s way.
Effort vs. Force
Allow me to demonstrate to you how muscular effort rather than force, (weight on the bar) is the controlling factor in causing maximum muscle fibre recruitment. Yes, that’s the slow twitch (Type I) muscle fibres and fast-twitch Type IIa and Type IIb fibres all joining in the party.
Please take a look at the photo of Larry Scott performing the exercise he made famous. Now let us just pretend for a moment that Larry is curling 40kg. Let us further pretend that he’s actually applying the isometric principle (where the weight is static) and that (as in the photo), he’s holding the bar at its most difficult position for the working biceps; at an elbow angle of 90 degrees. We’ve assumed that the weight on the bar is 40kg, and we know that for Larry to hold that weight stationary, his muscles would have to be applying an effort of exactly 40kg to maintain that static position, or else the bar would begin to travel up or down. Now as time elapses, Larry would have to apply more and more effort to that bar in order for him to keep it from dropping. So now we know that although the force (weight) has remained constant at 40kg, the effort applied by Larry’s biceps has changed/has increased over time (relative to the weight feeling heavier and heavier), or else that bar would have dropped. Are you with me? So after a given time (say 60 seconds or so), the muscular effort would decrease (as the recruited muscle fibres get fatigued) to such an extent that would not allow Larry to maintain 40kg of effort to match the weight of that bar, resulting in the termination of the set. You can bet that at the peak of muscular effort (that is at or near maximum effort), all the muscle fibres were joining the party… of muscle fibre recruitment/or involvement a la fact #2 (remember those thugs)!
Just in case, (just in case) you’re having some problem wrapping your head around this, believing that the weight (and not the effort) was the controlling factor in achieving maximum muscle fibre recruitment, I say this: let’s say you could go on holding that 40kg for 60 seconds, but you decided to stop at 30, would you have achieved maximum muscle fibre involvement? The answer is no, you would not have. Okay then, why? I mean the weight (which you believed was the controlling factor) has not changed, it was still 40kg, so why didn’t it manage to cause for you full muscle fibre involvement? The answer is simply because you, (starting with your brain, where effort is initiated by the way) have decided to call it quits. You’ve called it quits at 30 seconds by deciding to stop applying more and more effort to that dead 40kg weight.
The Best Bodybuilding Method of All Times… really?!
At 20, I used to think I was Mr. Invincible (just like most other 20 year olds), But as time passes by and one gets older (and hopefully wiser), one realises that there’s more to building muscles than simply pushing the heavies around. Now approaching 47, I have my heart and joints to consider when designing a bodybuilding program. If you happen to favour one method of training above all other methods; be it high volume, HIT, training to failure, and all other methods in between, please consider the fact that each method has its advocates and World Champions. Having said that, you’d always get the ignorant and the arrogant not only claiming that their method is the best, but they find it necessary to put other methods down in the process. Imagine this “guru” walking up to freaky Lee Priest or the Austrian oak (in his hey days) and insulting them for using high volume training, accusing them of being sissies and telling them how much inferior their method is compared to his! Or we can have it the other way around, where one feels the need to abuse Dorian Yates and the late Mike Mentzer and their followers for advocating their method of HIT. I hope we can rise above such short sightedness ladies and gentlemen, and show only respect and admiration to all Champions and their followers irrespective of method/s used.
Let’s finish off with yet another study that may challenge the way you have thought about things weight related. Low-Load High Volume Resistance Exercise Stimulates Muscle Protein Synthesis More Than High-Load Low Volume Resistance Exercise in Young Men. Don’t forget to check out the comment section, I found it very interesting indeed. PLoS ONE: Low-Load High Volume Resistance Exercise Stimulates Muscle Protein Synthesis More Than High-Load Low Volume Resistance Exercise in Young Men
Take home message: choose the rep range/s that you’re convinced is best for you; choose the method/s that you feel comfortable with, but whichever rep range or method you choose (though I’d personally vary both), consistency of effort is the way and will always be the way to bring out the beast that is hiding inside of you. Do not be intimidated by anyone’s method, and certainly don’t feel that you need to lift very heavy weights (possibly risking an injury) just so you can please some and feel that you “belong”. Be your own athlete and know what works best for you and what you respond to the best.
I wish you all the very best with your health and training. It’s over to you now...
Fadi.
It’s Saturday night and you and some of your mates and their girlfriends are going out for some de-stressing time. No sooner you’ve gotten to your destination; you’re met with a group of arrogant rowdy males intent on screwing your night out.
They pick on the biggest bloke… you! With a blink of an eye, one man of the opposition is down and out cold for the count, with a single swift and powerful fist blow to the nose.
Now for the fun bit of analising what has just taken place inside of your killer arm muscles? When you decided that enough was enough, your muscles contracted fully before smashing your opponent’s face. So why did I use the adjective “fully” when describing the verb “to contract”? Because there is no such thing as a partially contracted muscle fibre. To reiterate: when your muscle contracts, it contracts completely or not at all. That was fact #1.
Let’s move to another element of muscle contraction by using the night out scenario yet again.
Muscle fibre recruitment
It seems that although your powerful punch has made a mess of the rude man’s face, it was not enough to intimidate the other gang members into retreat. What to do? Some here might say, well how about punching harder, with more force that would send a clearer message to the angry mob that you really mean business. However, another and a much better and safer option would be to get your mates involved in this dirty and ugly fight. So now we’re talking of group involvement rather than getting your hands dirty all by yourself.
Again, let us go back inside our muscular system and see how we’re going to translate what I’ve just written about the group involvement into muscular physiology. Well, when a muscle fatigues or gets exhausted, more muscle fibres are recruited as they are needed, to complete the job at hand. So to sum up the last point, we say if and when a muscle fibre cannot handle the intensity of the load by itself, the central nervous system insures that more muscle fibres come to its aid as is needed to complete the job at hand. That was fact #2.
Did you know that muscle fibres are not able to vary the intensity of their contraction relative to the load against which they are subjected to? That was fact #3.
Let me first explain what the implication of the above statement really means in simple plain English. What this statement is stating is that a muscular contraction cannot get stronger simply because you’ve added more weight to the bar. I’ll give you an example that would clearly illustrate this point.
When I was weightlifting, I used to perform an assistance exercise called clean pulls, it’s where you lift the bar off the weightlifting platform in an explosive manner. Now let’s say my routine for that workout had called for 5x3 at 180kg. Naturally, I would start with a lighter weight before reaching my max weight for that exercise. It went something like this:
100kg x3
140kg x3
160kg x3
180kg 5x3
Now to look at what was happening inside the muscle fibres again as far as muscle fibre recruitment is concerned. At 100kg, a small percentage of my muscles were recruited by my CNS to lift the weight. Mind you, although a small percentage was recruited, what was recruited was contracting at 100% efficiency/fully (a la fact #1). Now as I progressed up in weight, from 140kg and all the way up to 180kg, more and more muscle fibres became recruited in order for me to blast that weight up explosively. So it was not a case of a stronger contraction of muscle fibres, but rather more of them becoming recruited as needed to help me manage the 180kg (a la fact #2).
Bodybuilding and the best rep range debate.
Check out the internet forums, and you’re sure to find the debate is still raging on as to which rep range is best for muscular hypertrophy. They usually go something like this:
1-5 reps = strength & power, little hypertrophy
6-8 reps = strength & hypertrophy
9-12 reps = hypertrophy & some strength
13-20+ reps = local endurance, some hypertrophy, little strength
Some will tell you that low reps with heavier weights are the way to go since muscle growth is dependent on muscle tension under load. Others would say it’s not the force that counts, but the sheer volume with less emphasis on heavy weights. Confused yet?! My advice: don’t get bogged down with it. I’ll attempt to make it clearer why that is... soon enough.
May the FORCE be with you, mmm… wait, let’s change that to EFFORT!
If you’re one who follows what I write, then you’d know that I neither belong to the high intensity school of bodybuilding, nor do I belong to the high volume school of thought. Ah, you must belong to the school of TUT, that is Time Under tension, which as they say, should determine your rep range. No, no, and no. I belong rather to the school that places effort above all other criteria when it comes to muscular hypertrophy. So if your wish is to build muscles, then choose whatever rep range you believe works best for you, (I won’t argue with you), and then apply full effort to stimulate your muscles into some serious growth. Even if full out effort is applied for only one (usually the last set) out of 3, 4, or whatever, then you will reap the reward that is optimum muscle stimulus (not growth, since that occurs outside the gym as you all know).
I’ll let you in on my training philosophy without burdening you with my full program for now. I feel the deal when I restrict my rest periods between sets to between 30-60 seconds max, depending on the exercise at hand. Why such short rest period? It’s to do with muscle fibre recruitment, insuring that the muscle fibres that I’ve just smashed don’t get a chance to recover fully. A trained athlete such as I can regain about 75% of his power output after 30 seconds of an all-out effort, and about 85% recovery after 60 seconds. Energy Pathways: Anaerobic and aerobic Energy Pathways
So why is that so important I hear you ask? Well it’s important that I commence my subsequent sets prior to when full recovery has taken place in order to place emphasis on stressing the glycolytic energy system (speaking from an Energy Pathways point of view), and to insure recruitment of the larger and more powerful fast twitch muscle fibres according to the critically analised/revised Size Principle (law) by Dr Ralph N. Carpinelli. The Size Principle as Carpinelli puts it is as follows: “The size principle states that when the central nervous system recruits motor units for a specific activity, it begins with the smallest, more easily excited, least powerful motor units and progresses to the larger, more difficult to excite, more powerful motor units to maintain or increase force.” Carpinelli views it like this: “Although the size principle is described reasonably accurately, it is often followed by a misunderstanding of the underlying neurophysiological concept and its practical application.”
...so in a nutshell, what he’s saying is that the original size principle study (by Dr Henneman 1957) has been misunderstood by authors on the subject to mean that heavier is better (or the force/weight was the controlling factor) which Dr. Carpinelli rejects, as he points out that it’s the effort and not the resistance that is the controlling factor, saying that the prerequisite for maximum muscle fibre recruitment is determined by the level of effort. THE SIZE PRINCIPLE AND A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OFTHE UNSUBSTANTIATED HEAVIER-IS-BETTER RECOMMENDATION FOR RESISTANCE TRAINING http://www.scsepf.org/doc/291208/Paper1.pdf.
Let me explain/demonstrate it using Dr. Carpinelli’s way.
Effort vs. Force
Allow me to demonstrate to you how muscular effort rather than force, (weight on the bar) is the controlling factor in causing maximum muscle fibre recruitment. Yes, that’s the slow twitch (Type I) muscle fibres and fast-twitch Type IIa and Type IIb fibres all joining in the party.
Please take a look at the photo of Larry Scott performing the exercise he made famous. Now let us just pretend for a moment that Larry is curling 40kg. Let us further pretend that he’s actually applying the isometric principle (where the weight is static) and that (as in the photo), he’s holding the bar at its most difficult position for the working biceps; at an elbow angle of 90 degrees. We’ve assumed that the weight on the bar is 40kg, and we know that for Larry to hold that weight stationary, his muscles would have to be applying an effort of exactly 40kg to maintain that static position, or else the bar would begin to travel up or down. Now as time elapses, Larry would have to apply more and more effort to that bar in order for him to keep it from dropping. So now we know that although the force (weight) has remained constant at 40kg, the effort applied by Larry’s biceps has changed/has increased over time (relative to the weight feeling heavier and heavier), or else that bar would have dropped. Are you with me? So after a given time (say 60 seconds or so), the muscular effort would decrease (as the recruited muscle fibres get fatigued) to such an extent that would not allow Larry to maintain 40kg of effort to match the weight of that bar, resulting in the termination of the set. You can bet that at the peak of muscular effort (that is at or near maximum effort), all the muscle fibres were joining the party… of muscle fibre recruitment/or involvement a la fact #2 (remember those thugs)!
Just in case, (just in case) you’re having some problem wrapping your head around this, believing that the weight (and not the effort) was the controlling factor in achieving maximum muscle fibre recruitment, I say this: let’s say you could go on holding that 40kg for 60 seconds, but you decided to stop at 30, would you have achieved maximum muscle fibre involvement? The answer is no, you would not have. Okay then, why? I mean the weight (which you believed was the controlling factor) has not changed, it was still 40kg, so why didn’t it manage to cause for you full muscle fibre involvement? The answer is simply because you, (starting with your brain, where effort is initiated by the way) have decided to call it quits. You’ve called it quits at 30 seconds by deciding to stop applying more and more effort to that dead 40kg weight.
The Best Bodybuilding Method of All Times… really?!
At 20, I used to think I was Mr. Invincible (just like most other 20 year olds), But as time passes by and one gets older (and hopefully wiser), one realises that there’s more to building muscles than simply pushing the heavies around. Now approaching 47, I have my heart and joints to consider when designing a bodybuilding program. If you happen to favour one method of training above all other methods; be it high volume, HIT, training to failure, and all other methods in between, please consider the fact that each method has its advocates and World Champions. Having said that, you’d always get the ignorant and the arrogant not only claiming that their method is the best, but they find it necessary to put other methods down in the process. Imagine this “guru” walking up to freaky Lee Priest or the Austrian oak (in his hey days) and insulting them for using high volume training, accusing them of being sissies and telling them how much inferior their method is compared to his! Or we can have it the other way around, where one feels the need to abuse Dorian Yates and the late Mike Mentzer and their followers for advocating their method of HIT. I hope we can rise above such short sightedness ladies and gentlemen, and show only respect and admiration to all Champions and their followers irrespective of method/s used.
Let’s finish off with yet another study that may challenge the way you have thought about things weight related. Low-Load High Volume Resistance Exercise Stimulates Muscle Protein Synthesis More Than High-Load Low Volume Resistance Exercise in Young Men. Don’t forget to check out the comment section, I found it very interesting indeed. PLoS ONE: Low-Load High Volume Resistance Exercise Stimulates Muscle Protein Synthesis More Than High-Load Low Volume Resistance Exercise in Young Men
Take home message: choose the rep range/s that you’re convinced is best for you; choose the method/s that you feel comfortable with, but whichever rep range or method you choose (though I’d personally vary both), consistency of effort is the way and will always be the way to bring out the beast that is hiding inside of you. Do not be intimidated by anyone’s method, and certainly don’t feel that you need to lift very heavy weights (possibly risking an injury) just so you can please some and feel that you “belong”. Be your own athlete and know what works best for you and what you respond to the best.
I wish you all the very best with your health and training. It’s over to you now...
Fadi.
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