Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Angles, range of motion, and training modalities in regards to growth

Angles and even ROM DO matter in regards to what you are trying to work.

I will give an example of this -

When John and I were in Aussie, we did about a billion sets of leg extensions one morning. Well, we did tons and tons of reps from the bottom only coming 1/4 of the way up. The next few days our rectus femoris was sore as fuck. Not the VMO or anything else. Just the rectus femoris.

So if you have a weak bodypart, understanding how the joints are moving through a movement, and what it's actually targeting is really important. A 1 inch change in the way you do side laterals can shift the load from traps, to side delts, to front delts. So if your medial delts are weak, and you are doing side laterals to remedy that but aren't moving the humerus mechanically correct, then they won't take the brunt of the work.

Training a bodypart twice a week -

Pretty sure John trains really hard, and sometimes he trains a bodypart four times a week. I've trained bodyparts everyday for short stretches when I wanted to bring them up.

Guys trained bodyparts twice a week for decades. In fact, one of the best ways to help a bodypart recover is to train it a day or two after a hard training session. Pakulski and I had a convo about this in Toronto. Are you sore because of the microtears, or because of the inflammation produced by them? Because if you train a very sore bodypart the next day, the soreness subsides substantially.

Recovery -  

People get localized recovery, at the muscular level, mixed up with systematic recovery all the time. Systematic recovery has more to do with a reloading of BCAA, ATP, glycogen, and the balance between serotonin and dopamine. Localized recovery is about recovering at the muscular level. They are two very different processes.

This is why you have to balance training across a scale of volume, intensity, and frequency. You can have two of them high at one time, but the third needs to be lower. So if you want to train heavy, with a lot of volume, you will need to train less often.

If you want to train with a lot of volume, and want to train very often, then intensity (percentage of 1 rep max) has to be lowered (i.e. you can't train heavy).

Of course you can break these rules in regards to the sliding scale of volume, intensity, and frequency however you're going to end up overtraining from it.

Everything you do in training should be done for a very specific reason. Lots of guys leave untapped growth because they never address different types of muscle fibers through different training modalities. Not only that, but different muscle groups are made up of different fibers, yet lots of people apply the same training methodologies to all muscle groups, then wonder why some lag behind significantly.

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