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May 30, 2005
Is This Like Mind-Training on Steroids? If You Want to Get Stronger, Beef Up Your Mind-Muscle Connection.
A legend of the iron game, weightlifting champion Yuri Vlasov, quipped that judging a man's strength by his size was akin to judging a book by its thickness. It is not the beef but a superior ‘mind-muscle link’ that enables one hundred and sixty-five pounders to squat six or seven big ones. The following crash course in neuroscience of strength shall clarify that point.
A skeletal muscle consists of thousands of muscle fibers that generate force when they contract.
A group of fibers is hooked up to the brain through a nerve cell called a motor neuron. This group is referred to as a motor unit, or an MU.
A muscle fiber either contracts, or it does not; there is no intermediate 'half contracted' state. This is the all-or-none law. The nervous system varies the force output of an individual motor unit by its firing frequency. Like the cylinders of an internal combustion engine, muscle MUs do not fire constantly, but at intervals. Firing the fibers with a greater frequency increases the muscle's force and power output, just like increasing a car engine's number of revolutions per minute.
Firing synchronization with other motor units is another way your nervous system can vary the muscle's force output. Normally motor units take turns firing to produce a smooth, controlled movement. A good analogy is running. You push off with one leg at a time. The force production is half of what you are capable of, the movement is smooth, and while one leg is working, the other one gets a chance to rest.
Long-term heavy training synchronizes the MU activation. As a result, you become what Russians call 'an elephant in a glassware store' (forget them bulls and china, Comrade). Your movement becomes more forceful, jerky, and cannot be sustained for a long period of time, like broad jumping. Fine motor control goes south. Your wife does not let you close to the dishes, which is just as well.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 5:55 AM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2005
To gain strength, quit bodybuilding!
Question: Lifting weights makes me sore and tired and my demanding sport practices are suffering. I am committed to excelling at my sport and I am contemplating quitting bodybuilding. Give me a reason not to.
Quit bodybuilding; start strength training. Traditional blitzing and blasting does not meet your needs. As I have explained in Power to the People!, a comrade who has to balance the iron with a sport should drastically cut back on his or her sets, reps, and exercises, increase the weight, and never train ‘on the nerve’ or close to failure. This type of training will make you very strong. And you will not be exhausted; just the other way around, it has been documented to have a tonic effect on your nervous system.
This is not a new idea. Charles MacMahon wrote in his 1925 The Royal Road to Health and Strength, ”Instead of spending more time as I went along I spent less, because the more concentrated the exercise, the fewer times you have to repeat it.
“Once I was in the performer’s tent of a big circus, chatting with a very famous trapeze performer. Just before it was time for him to do his act, he walked over to a nearby ring, hooked his first and second fingers to his right hand around it, and chinned himself twice with his right arm. Then he did the same with his left arm. He did this to “warm up” for his performance, and he told me that it was all the exercise he took outside his performance; except when he had to practice for a new stunt. Everybody knows that it takes more strength to chin once with one arm that it does to chin twenty-five times with two arms. The funny thing is that it causes far less fatigue. The performer knew that, and that is why he was so economical of his time and energy.”
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 5:45 AM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2005
The Way of the Truly Strong: Dump Your 'Workouts' and Start 'Practicing' the Skill of Strength
As my leatherneck father-in-law - who can take on any punk a third his age - likes to tell his son when the junior is heading to the health club, "Tell them sissies hello."
Mental toughness aside, one of the reasons Liederman, Nordquest, and their contemporaries succeeded in the game of strength is the simple fact that they treated their iron time as a practice rather than a workout. Understanding this subtle semantic difference made the physical culturists of the golden era supermen.
Recall the importance of neural adaptations in strength development. You can sum up these adaptations as honing your skill in contracting your muscles harder. Quoting Prof. Thomas Fahey, “Skill is perhaps the most important element in strength.” In Russian sports science there is even a term skill-strength and your date with iron is referred to as ‘a lesson’ or ‘a practice’.
Once you appreciate that strength training – as opposed to bodybuilding – is a form of skill practice, designing an effective customized strength program becomes just a matter of following the fundamental principles of motor learning. There are three.
First, practice must be specific. Do not rep out with a light weight when you are training for a heavy single.
The second rule is an extension of the first one. Practice fresh and stop before your skill starts deteriorating. That means ending your practice before you start dragging your tail – and saying no to training to failure.
Third, practice as frequently as possible while observing the first two rules.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 5:45 AM | Comments (0)
May 9, 2005
How a Bodybuilder Can Sculpt A Superb, Functional Physique - By Powerlifting!
A functional and realistic physique for a drug free bodybuilder, say a hard 210 pounds at 5'10", can be easily and naturally achieved with powerlifting style training without the headaches of complicated routines. ‘Powerlifting style training’ does not mean an exclusive diet of squats, benches, and deadlifts but the use of high set/low rep loading.
So your slow twitch fibers do not grow to their potential. So your mitochondria do not get enough stimulation. So your sarcoplasm, the filler goo in the muscle, does not get bloated. Who cares? Powerlifters do not – and sport more meat than you will ever have.
Power bodybuilding will reward you in three ways. First, you will start filling out your shirts very fast, often within days, provided you eat as heavy as you lift.
Second, you will get as strong as you look. Respect yourself; just say no to purely cosmetic training! The greatest karate master of all time, Mas Oyama, jibed at overgrown dysfunctional meat that “it didn’t do the cow any more good than it will you.”
Third, you will greatly simplify your life by reducing the number of variables you are juggling. Powerlifters successfully build great mass and strength while hardly ever changing their exercises. They just manipulate the poundages, the sets, and the reps. And the fewer moving parts a machine has, the more likely it is to reach its destination without breaking down.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today
Posted by james at 5:40 AM | Comments (1)
May 2, 2005
Bench Press Training, the Russian National Powerlifting Team Style
Eight out of the eleven gold medals at the IPF Men's Worlds went home beyond what used to be the Iron Curtain. Wouldn't you like to know how guys like Alexey Sivokon train?
Russian powerlifting mastermind Boris Sheyko developed a superb program for the bench press. The man used to train the Kazakhstan team and today is the Chief Coach, Men’s Powerlifting Team Russia. Comrade Sheyko’s credentials include Sivokon, Mor, and Podtinniy. ‘Nuff said.
Heavily influenced by R. Plukfelder and I. Abajiev, Sheyko believes in some serious volume. While Western PLers have gradually cut back to one weekly BP workout the Russian team coach insists on four to eight bench press sessions a week! The arms and shoulder girdle can recover a lot quicker than the legs and back, he says, so why not?! Sheyko likes to quote the expression popular among Russian weightlifters in the fifties and sixties: “To press a lot one must press a lot”.
No, it is not a program just for bench specialists like Irina Lugovaya who owes it her European championship title.
The matrix is designed for five BP workouts a week and is aimed at an advanced powerlifter, a KMS or an MS in Russian classification.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 5:45 AM | Comments (2447)