Tag: resistance

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As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Another interesting strength-training study just popped up, this one published in PLoS One. The claim in the press release is quite eye-catching: “Building muscle doesn’t require lifting heavy weights.” This is a leap of logic that isn’t quite supported by the paper itself, whose claims centre on “stimulating muscle protein synthesis ” and “inducing acute muscle anabolism” rather than actually demonstrating big muscles. Still, it’s a very surprising study, from a well-respected group (Stuart Phillips at McMaster University).

The study compared three different weights routines:

(1) lift at 90% of one-rep max until failure;

(2) lift at 30% of one-rep max until you’ve lifted as much as you did in the first routine;

(3) lift at 30% of one-rep max until failure.

Deeply entrenched dogma tells us that the best way to build big muscles is to lift heavy weights — option (1) in the workout routine. But the researchers injected tracers and took muscle biopsies four and 24 hours after each workout to find out what was happening on a cellular level. They found that the first and third routines were the same on most measures of protein synthesis, and the third routine was even better on some measures. Those new proteins being synthesized are what accumulate, over time, to produce bigger muscles. So as long as you’re lifting until can’t lift anymore, you’ll do as well or better with light weights as you would with heavy weights.

This is some serious heresy being proposed, and it’s important to note that they didn’t actually observe bigger muscles, just cellular markers. The researchers themselves note that “a training study in which these distinctly different exercise loads are utilized is clearly warranted to confirm our speculation.”

Whatever the training study eventually shows, it’s hard to imagine that this will affect how serious muscle-builders train. However, the researchers believe it could have important implications for “people with compromised skeletal muscle mass, such as the elderly, patients with cancer, or those who are recovering from trauma, surgery or even stroke,” since it minimizes the risk of orthopedic and soft-tissue injury. I’d generalize that even further — there are many, many people who are intimidated by the prospect of trying to lift heavy weights, but might be willing to lift a lighter weight 20 or 30 times until they can’t lift it anymore. Of course, that’s the crux: the method only works if you reach failure, so it’s still going to hurt. You’re just less likely to cause a scene at the gym by dropping the weight on your foot.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

If you’re trying to step up your basketball (or tennis or soccer or whatever) game, which weights routine is better:

(1) three sets of three back squats at 90% of one-rep max; or

(2) seven sets of six jump squats at less than 30% of one-rep max?

The conventional wisdom is that ballistic power training carries more bang for your performance buck, since it simulates the movements you’ll be making at realistic speeds. Other than in sports like weightlifting and football, it seldom matters what your absolute maximum strength is, especially if you can’t summon it instantly.

Certainly, if you’re Roger Federer, you’ve got a custom-tailored, periodized training plan that incorporates both pure strength and ballistic work. But what if you’re an average, non-professional athlete? A study by New Zealand researchers in the current issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise pits these two workout regimens against each other in a group of 24 “relatively weak” volunteers, measuring functional outcomes like maximal power output, jump height, movement velocity and sprint performance. The result: after 10 weeks, the two groups were pretty much identical (and significantly better than untrained controls in all measures).

In both cases, the adaptations were primarily neuromuscular — signals from the brain to the muscles were transmitted and executed more effectively. (The precise neuromuscular changes were different in the two groups: the ballistic group was able to produce force more quickly, while the strength group increased the magnitude of their contractions, but the performance results were the same.) These neuromuscular adaptations are precisely the point of ballistic training — to some extent, that’s all you get from it. The surprising result in this study was that, for “weak” people who haven’t already done a lot of weightlifting, ordinary strength training produces comparable neuromuscular benefits. But if you keep at it, strength training will eventually also produce significant structural changes — i.e. bigger muscles — that provide further performance benefits.

So the moral of the story, according to the researchers, is that recreational athletes who’d like to improve their performance should choose strength training. It’ll give them all the benefits of neuromuscular training, with the possibility of additional muscle growth if they keep at it.

From my point of view, there’s another moral we can draw from it, which is that, if you haven’t been lifting any weights, pretty much anything you do is going to trigger those neuromuscular gains and improve your performance — so don’t get hung up on the details, just do it.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

As of September 2017, new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Check out my bestselling new book on the science of endurance, ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, published in February 2018 with a foreword by Malcolm Gladwell.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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A new Jockology column is now posted on the Globe and Mail website, taking a closer look at some of the research into personal trainers (a topic I blogged about a few months ago):

The question

Will I get a better workout if I hire a personal trainer?

The answer

In a famous study at Ball State University in Indiana, researchers put two groups of 10 men through identical 12-week strength-training programs. The groups were evenly matched when they started, and they did the same combination of exercises, the same number of times, with the same amount of rest.

At the end of the experiment, one group had gained 32 per cent more upper-body strength and 47 per cent more lower-body strength than the other. No performance-enhancing pills were involved – the only difference was that the more successful group had a personal trainer watching over their workouts.[READ ON…]

One of the key punchlines: people with personal trainers choose to lift heavier weights, and thus make more progress. Left to their own devices, many people choose weights that are less than 40-50% of their one-rep max, and thus pretty much ineffective for stimulating strength gains.