dman please understand I do not say athletes can not recruite more fibers, I just say training “sport specific” is a frawd. To quote Ken Mannie(head strength coach Michigan State University), "the fact that an individual is skilled(or unskilled)in one activity does not indicate his skill level in another activity.To be specific- at least in the case of a motor/athletic skill-requires that the athlete use EXACTNESS, not similarity, in all the involved variables (i.e.,limb position, equipment, auditory and visual cues, environmental conditions, ever changing feedback,ect.)… he (not I)gives these references; Magill,R.(1993) Motor Learning:Concepts and Application(4th edition),Madison, WI,Wm.C.Brown.
Sage,G.H.(1984)Motor Learning and Control-A Neuropsychological Approach,Madison,WI,Wm.C.Brown.
Schmidt,R.A.(1991) Motor Learning Performance:From Principles to Practice,Champaign,IL,Human Kinetics.
Rose,D.J.(1997)A Multilevel Approach to the Study of Motor Control and Learning, Needham Heights, MA,Allyn&Bacon.
no I have not checked them all yet but my gist is that Schmidt showed that skill does not transfer, and Sage showed that the skill has to be EXACT. but I will read them all when I have time.
but lets not forget that Appalation State University did a study, subjects were tested in their strength, vertical, 30m sprint, 10 yard shutle run, and standing broad jump. they compared explosive vs. slow movement wt. training, you know what they found? “NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GROUPS IN IMPROVEMENT IN STRENGTH, SPEED, AND POWER PARAMETERS” the “explosive” lifting did NOT transfer! peace. hetyey225
again as i offered on another thread it up w/ supertraining group, there are guys there that know lots more than me. How is it though that, Trials of the 70s or so (i don’t remember the date, i can source it if i must) that elite OLers beat triple jumpers and high jumpers, and everyone else for that matter at the verticle jump. Also, how did they have the fastest 10m dash, faster than 100m sprinters. Explain heytey, perhaps it is that the Olympic lifts do have transfernce to sport.
Be careful not to overtrain with this, as you will not have soreness as an indicator and may overtrain your CNS.
We have all seen studies showing opposite conclusions, do any of you actually believe a study when it is seen? I mean really, they don’t prove a fucking thing, they just show something to have happened. If different studies on the same thing reach different conclusions, why consider any of them? Remember oat bran (stops heart attacks/dose nothing) steady state exercise (longer and easier is better/higher intensity is better) and just about every other goddamn thing around? I can get two different strength coaches, each of whom have reached the highest level of “success” in their sports and who are the complete opposite of each other (take Luie Simmons and Dan Right <could have his name wrong, he is the HIT coach of the Redskins and taught about 12 other proffesional strength coaches over the years>. The bottom line is this “How do you know the studies you follow are right?”. Use logic to make your training decisions. This is applied in real life through trial an error. Most of us make the same goddamn mistakes over and over.
spanky sory but because a lift went up doen not mean your muscle are stronger (usualy it does but it does not have to). about the muscle recruiteing more fibers M.Bernardi did a study in 1996 (motor unit recruitment stratedy changes with skill acquisition) the wanted to analyze motor-unit-recruitment paterns, he used electrodes to measure the motor recruitment on the subjects, at the end of the six week study (where curls were performed over 360 times per subject) the subjects were useing 20% FEWER muscle fibers to curl then they were the first day of the study even though they were able to handle MORE wt.
Here is my opinion on the subject:
As dman said, to increase your strength you:
a) Increase your muscle mass. As you dont want to icrease their bodymass i won’t write about that.
b) Increase your inter-muscularcoordination. This is, as dman said, the ability to coordinate your muscle groups to contract optimally to a SPECIFIC movement. Meaning that to run faster you need to run fast. You won’t get faster by only lifting weights or only doing somekind of sprintloading. Don’t get me wrong, i don’t mean that you should only train your specific sport but what you do in the gym won’t have a direct caryover to your sport.
c) You increase your intra-muscularcoordination. This is how efficiently the nervoussystem can activate One muscle (=to get as high power from one muscle as possible). It is regulated by, the quantity of activated motorunits, the frequensy of “nerv-signals” to the motorunits, the synergy of activation of the motorunits, and input from the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC). these are the “qualitys” that you should train in the gym. The SSC is trained trough ballistic exercises like plyometrics, cleans and stuff like that. The other qualitys are trained with heavy weights (1-5 reps), trying to accelerate as the weights as much as possibly, and keeping long rest periods between sets. No need in trying to use as sports specific exercises as possible, just select exercises that train the muscles you use in your sport.
Hetyey, that study doesn’t provide any real concrete information. It really makes no sense that a person would recruit LESS motor units as they got stronger unless a) the weight is the same weight they used before becoming stronger, and b) the weight is moved at the same speed before they became strnoger. Think about this - did the study take into account tempo at all? Was the lift explosive or slow? Was the weight a submaximal or near-maximal weight? How many reps? All of these things must be taken into consideration, and from what you posted I can’t tell any of this information from this study. What I’m talking about here is a person’s ability to fire MORE motor units at once in order to either a) lift a maximal weight or b) accelerate a sub-maximal weight to a greater velocity. The ability to recruit more motor units at once leads to greater force output, and athletes can gain this ability through lifting. This is one reason why WSB lifters incorporate a speed day… It teaches their muscles to fire more motor units at the same time, thus providing more force. Also, I never said that a lift can’t increase due to better “skill” in that particular lift. This can definitely happen. Pavel Tsatsouline talks about this all the time when he recommends “greasing the groove”. What YOU said before was that this was the ONLY reason why someone got better at a particular lift, which is just plain wrong. I’m just pointing out that it’s ridiculous to say that skill alone will result in someone becoming stronger in a lift; and it’s ridiculous to say that if someone does get stronger at a particular lift that they don’t get stronger at something else. Granted there has to be some logical carryover - getting better at benching more than likely will not translate to a better vertical jump. BUT, being able to clean or squat more weight CAN result in a better vertical jump. Why?
Check out the impirical evidence with Olympic lifters. These guys have CRAZY vertical jumps. Shane Hammond can dunk as basketball on a regulation hoop and can do back flips at a body weight of 380 lbs. Now I think there’s some confusion here, because Colin stated a study that showed that those who could run quickly in a straight line can’t run quickly in circles… Well, there’s not much carrover there because running in circles is more about skill, not power. It’s really not a good comparison. Becoming stronger in a lifting movement that has carryover to a sport-related activity WILL result in becoming better at that sport related activity, because that lifting movement teaches your body how to generate power. If this wasn’t the case then athletes wouldn’t bother lifting weights! Like dman suggested, get yourself a copy of Science and Practice of Strength Training by Zatsiorky, this goes into this sort of thing in GREAT detail.
Colin, I think you bring up a good point… while studies are cool and all, if what you do doesn’t produce results then it doesn’t mean shit. There can be a hundred different studies showing one thing, and a hundred different studies contradicting what the first hundred showed. Why? Different conditions in testing, flaws in studies, etc. Studies can be used to make a point about ANYTHING… especially when you leave out the details. Studies CAN be useful, just keep in mind that studies can and DO have different parameters that affect their outcomes.
you have yet to explain why OLers are so good at running and jumping. “the subjects were useing 20% FEWER muscle fibers to curl then they were the first day of the study even though they were able to handle MORE wt.” Well if they used the same weight that they did in the beggining, then the original weight is a lower %1RM and accordingly recruits less fibers, particularly fast twitch.
interesting pissing match here. Does any of this fly in the face of the all or none principle? To answer the original question, citing personal firsthand experience, exaggerating the negaitive is too boring, and did cause an increase in DOMS. I also get more severe DOMS at the introduction of a new exercise. I would offer for simplicity sake, keep your training to basic multi-joint exercises, lower rep, low volume training and practice your sport as you normally would.
As a fellow athlete, and as mentioned before, do the complete lift. Just really try to explode on the lift. And depending on your sport to partials focusing on the last 3rd of the lift. This imittates more real world situations you would encounter in athletics. For example, when throwing discus you never go into a full squat, so you don’t need to do full squats all the time. Mix it up.
about OLers, these same guys if untrained would still beat these same sprinter if they were also untrained in the first 10meters, IT’S GENETICS!! athletes are born NOT made.about the study they DID increase the wt thru the study, I will honestly say I do not know if tempo was the same or not, and the coment that they would not do it if it did not work is insane!! I brought this up on another thread but if these techniques are so great than why has the 100m gone up 2 INCHES a year since 1968? for thirty+ years they have been doing the same thing with next to no results! I say if you do get stronger in an exercise just thru learning it you did NOT realy get stronger. you seem to think that as your body becomes more proficient it will recruite more fibers but if you just think about it what is proficiency? useing as few as possible, which is what your body wants to do to protect itself, motor unit learning is too specific to believe it will transfer, if your muscle fibers get stronger that will transfer but that happens less w/low rep training than moderate rep training, yea if you have growth from your low rep training than that will transfer but as I said it happens less w/low rep than moderate rep training. if you get stronger it will carry over, if you “learn” an exercise it will not. peace
I’ll make you guys a deal, I’ll check out supertraining if you guys check out the strengthcoach site, deal?
Of course genetics play a big role in how well an athlete performs, there’s no doubt. In fact I’m willing to say that this is why some athletes can break world records and some can’t… most simply don’t have the genetic potential. Read, potential. The work still has to be put in and the athlete still needs to train. This includes weightlifting. All professional athletes put in a great deal of work to get to where they are, and this includes lifting weights… A guy with the genetic potential to be the greatest sprinter on earth can’t just sit on the couch and drink beer all day, he needs to train, and train properly. He could beomce a very good sprinter just by sprinting, but if he teaches his body to produce force more efficiently then wouldn’t he be even better still? Oh, and the OL’ers that dman was referring to did little if any sprinting or vertical jump training, yet still managed to outperform the other athletes. Now assuming that all of these athletes were the cream of the crop (pretty safe assumption considering these were Olympic athletes) it’s also safe to assume that they were all genetically superior, and yet the OL’ers outperformed. This leaves only one difference between them and the other athletes… the OL’ers did explosive lifting!
I think you're confusing the body's ability to learn a particular movement and the body's ability to learn how to generate force. The two are similar but not the same. The body may better learn the motor recruitment pattern for a bench press, AND the muscles used in the bench press may become better at producing force because more motor units can be fired. So, you are correct in that the body learning how to bench better will not help an athletic endeavor, BUT the body's ability to produce force with the muscles used in the bench press MAY. These are two different yet related things.
Ok, tell you what, read either Supertraining or Science and Practice (your pick) and I'll go to the strengthcoach site. Just post the URL or tell me how to get there. BTW, I've been to Cyberpump several times - just because I don't agree with something doesn't mean I won't read it.
i will check out the strengthcoach site, but everything you say flies in the face of all reason. I don’t know where to start. Athletes aren’t born or made, rather it is a combination of both. Sprinters train and run a hell of a lot more than Olers, yet the Olers have better starts, because there are biomechanic similarities between the lifts and jumping and the beggining phases of running. Furthermore, you must understand the law of diminishing returns, for breaking elite records. You constantly refuse to recognize that untrained individuals can recruit 50% (generally) of their muscles, elite power athletes generally get above 70%. going from 50%-70% IS getting stronger. Just join supertraining, they never really get tired of teaching, i do.
my esteem for strength coach is not very high, after perusing around. The biomechanics of their good morning are unsound (rolling your neck forward causes your back to round, messing with the arch). I was a bit angered by the running article. It attempted to isolate muscles, and then teach running. Charlie Francis (coach of Ben Johnson), said to be wary, if ever to attempt to alter ones natural running, as it can have serrious repurcusions down the road…
also it advocates HIT for powerlifters, geez.
If fewer fibers are handling more weight, aren’t those fibers, by definition, stronger than they were when they needed the additional recruitment of other fibers? If you loaded enough to require the original percentage of fibers are you not going to be lifting a significantly heavier weight? Isn’t that strength increase? Aren’t bodybuilding stages everywhere full of enormously hypertrophied (and perhaps even hyperplased) fibers, that aren’t as strong per lb as other strength athletes? If the only way to increase the strength of muscle is to make it grow, why aren’t the growth “specialists” also the record holders for lifting?
spanky, the funny thing is in the end I agree with you more than not. I do tend to think out loud on the keyboard so I can get alittle off topic. but in the end we agree that learning an exercise will not transfer while real strength gains will. we just dissagree on what explosive training does, I believe more of the progress in these movements is thru learning. dman, I know the demonstratins are not that great but come on its w/stick figures. in regards to power lifters they do incorperate volume (or practice;-) training, also there is nothing wrong with correcting poor form in running or anything else. how do I get to that supertraining thing, I tried thru yahoo but I AM a newbie to this computer shit so HELP. peace
go over to dave tate’s elitefts site, he has a link to it.