This talks about the mind muscle connection, and how you can get stronger contractions in muscle groups you think about or try to emphasise during a movement.
This chart shows internal focus (like thinking about individual muscles doing the move: bicep squeezing to pull arm) vs external focus ( thinking about the move: to squat just stand up really fast).
So what?!
Well if I did a few lifts for a few sets and really focused on increasing weight while keeping reps about the same, I’d get stronger.
But after awhile my “strengths” might overpower my “weaknesses.” Like if did military press and deadlift, maybe my front delts and lower back get more work than my rear delts and hamstrings. After awhile I might start to look funny, or get bad posture, or maybe my progress would just kinda plateau.
At that point I could switch away from a low volume, progressive overload plan and go to a higher volume, more sets, not going to failure so much plan. I could do 4 sets, well shy of failure keeping max focus/tension on rear delts of hamstrings. To “practice” using the whack muscle, accumulating “good” contractions and stopping before my traps or low back started kicking in and I start cheating.
Ideally after doing that for awhile I could return to more Regular Lifting, but with better rear delts and hamstrings this time. Hopefully I would be able to push a little further, and get bigger and stronger this time. After awhile I could see what’s undertrained and run through the process again.
Grabbed this from the Carter/Muscle thread. Interesting so far. Yates says rest 1 minute between sets. Is that un-ethical? (haha). Also he mentions slowing the eccentric of lifts for more gains. Controversial!
Everyone of my eccentrics is 3 sec minimum. That’s a normal rep. Everyone would benefit from slowing their eccentrics. Think how much more TUT That is over a year.
Especially for type 2A bouncey cheat reppers like me. The bands make things move real nice. I’m getting old now so I’m going to try to use more accommodating resistance to try to get less abused.
Incline dumbbells were great last night. I want to figure out how to get something hooked up for overhead presses.
More great stuff from the Carter/Muscle thread. How to handle a training cycle if you’re not a powerlifter.
"The first week is a break in week, not much different than already talked about. figuring out movement selection, focusing on technique, etc. With 2-3 sets of each movement being performed.
That might go on for 10-12 days or so. Then the next week there’s a drop in volume and each set is taken to a failure point that either leaves 0 reps in the tank (true failure) or to form failure, i.e. squats, rack deads, etc. Anything that has a high degree of neural output due to the need for internal bracing/stability.
There’s 2-3 weeks of that, straight sets to failure. Then you’d switch to 50% sets, or drop sets, or double r/p sets for a few weeks all depending. All focusing on breaking rep PR’s. Then you run that until full adaption has occurred. At that point you take a break and decide on what you want to focus on for the next training cycle."
-Paul Carter
Plan it out, feel it out the first week, and then get increasingly more about it for awhile. Then chill out, reorganize and start over.
I was checking out the latest Bryant/Jackson deadlift video but it was pretty boring so I looked up this guy.
I’ve seen him do some stuff with John Meadows and somebody posted a video of him teaching a dude to work his rhomboids. I thought about it while I did face pulls against a band, anchored overhead. The band allowed for a nice pull a part and squeeze at the end. I can’t find that rhomboid video anywhere now. But here’s dude talking hips.
