as of now i am working on reinforcing correct body postion and muscular coordination to get the most out of m body so to speak. i perform extremly slow eccentrics in the extreme joint postion. during these excercises the the CNS sends extremly rapid sucession of impulses ie. rapid muslce contractions. imagine performing a golf swing but taking 5 min to get from club on floor to club over head because the movement is so extremly slow the muscle must contract extremly rapidly to maintain the slow movements speed. i have often trained altitude drops, and “plyometrics” upwards of 6 times a week for example i would do 50 reps of a modified depth jump for 3 days straight along with other plyometrics and then full body alititude drops the next 3 days.
Just be sensitive to overuse injuries. High tension exercises such as plyos are going to put a lot of stress on the connective tissue because the tendon matrix gets less blood flow and nutrients.
Make sure that if you perform such frequent sessions that you overload at a slow rate and take some good layoffs as soon as you experience residual soreness or tightness.
No matter how well you condition yourself, certain aspects of the CNS might not recover from very frequent, intense sessions. Everyone is limited to certain biochemical and hormonal reactions that take time to catalyze. These events happen in cycles that take time.
The key is to listen to your body. The more intense your workouts, the more important knowing your body becomes. Hope this helps!
hormonal release is directly tied to motor unit recruitment. if you train at your maximum at all times ie max velocity, load or effort you wont become sore. seems counterintuitive but if a get sore i take it as a sign that i did something wrong, that i didnt train hard enough. ofcourse you have to eat properly and sleep properly.
James, I don’t understand your statement. How will you not get sore if you train at max effort?
greater level of hormone release. if you are training at maximum (and most people do not even when they are attempting a max lift) and you become sore your either not getting enough sleep or arent eating right. again this was told to me, i put it in action and found it to be true.
thats kool.
could you please tell me, more? am interested on what can be done.
the 50 reps, if done straight, done really qualify as high CNS work. I take it was more like 5 sets of 10, or 10 sets of 5 or what? What hight are we looking at? how much recovery between each rep, set? What else was done?
i would be more interested in hearing how fast you can do say a 40 or 50 or so, then repeat it say 4 or so times in a session, then doing it again the next day, or something similiar! That would give me a better insight into what you are saying and how much You consider you are hitting your CNS v’s what Charlie has been recomending.
What you are saying fly’s straight in the face of what Charlie teachs. So unless you can show me otherwise, that high speed can be done each n every day, i wont be listening.
I have done personally high speed stuff everyday, (high for me) but it was over 300-400m and i was training for 800m. But it was not day after day after day, was like a wk or two tops.
I totally agree with boldwarrior, the CNS needs recovery, I dont believe for a second that 1 could last a full week of hard core CNS workouts without doing himself some serious damage, as charlie has said , it is better to undertrain than to over train.
the idea behind perform repeated plyometric or altitude drop type of training is that your trying to get the body to produce a rapid and powerful contraction over and over. this is facilitated by the strech reflex which cause a subsequent greater recruitment of the motor pool and the altitude drop which because of the falling velocity requires the bodies muscles to create a tension many times greater than the weight. for example if you do an altitude drop you muscles must generate potentially thousands of lbs during peak impulse. now for the most part i dont disagree with charlie. if you train the way he trains his athletes you cannot do the things i talk about, it must be engrained into the system. now obviously charlies stuff works all i am doing is presenting a different way of training. am i gunna claim that its better than charlies way of training? hell no. but training should be an evolution, the second we become complacent we stop our progress. i am not challenging what applied in the past im trying to build off of it. velocity is everything, velocity of contraction and velocity of movement, which are two different things. now i do believe that the system can be stressed to the point of maladaptaion but i believe it is a different aspect than that of “CNS fatigue”.
James, what are you trying to accomplish with this kind of training? I kind of understand your rationale; being able to absorb force; being able to prolong stress over and over. But what’s your specific end-goal or event you want to improve in, by doing this kind of work? Sprinting, jumping, football…?
James, without trying to sound rude,
are you a personal trainer, or something similiar?
i have talked to a few personal trainers who seem to talk as you do.
I think its a little simplistic to use soreness (or DOMS) as an indication of ‘not training hard enough’.
Hormonal release (i.e. T) is not directly related to max strength work, in fact lower Max Rep % work has been shown to encourage greater T release in many studies and as for GH - well that is another study…
Bold warrior … have a look at this too …
http://www.charliefrancis.com/community/showthread.php?t=12873
what is football? explosive violent contrations over and over again atleast from a physical persepective. what is sprinting? explosive and violent contractions over and over over the course of the event. these are our goals as athletes to be profecient in our given sport. in essence im talking about type 2B fiber endurance, among other things. i train the body in an oxygen debt forcing it to use aerobic systems for the majority of energy supply and in condtions where the body has no choice but to recruit the more powerful muscle fibers. in essence my body is turning into a recovery machine. what people dont realize or atelast what they do wrong is associate energy system with fiber type. when in fact any energy system can supply energy for any fiber type and in fact all energy systems are activated at any given time. as you are sitting here reading this all 3 of your energy systms are in use its just to what degree they are in use. so in my training my body cycles through its energy systems, while the greater used one is working the depleted one is recovering. and the oxidative system is never really touched to a great degree and soo is constantly helping to produce the atp i need. now ofcourse i cant go forever but what this does is give me an advantage. for example when a team is running wind sprints my system would be recovering even during the action so though i couldnt go at a given speed contiually i can be more ready for the additional sprint. fiber recruitment is controlled by the CNS not the bodis energy system. effectivly i am playing with the CNS to elicit the physical response i desire.
my end goal is to be a physically better more effecient human, lol but i do run track and play football
no and for the most part i hate personal trainers. what you think is that i am telling people that they can train all they want as hard as they want all day everyday which is what a personal trainer might tell you or atleast that you can traid hard everyday. NO NO NO. I have said before there is a point at whcih training becomes maladaptive. stressors overcome the bodies ability to recover and through training you can, lets say extend your bodies ability to prduce output. people think that training is just to perform ie you train you get better and you perform. Screw that. you have to train just so you can train atleast in the way that im talking about. your setting you body up so that it can max bench everyday, so that it can do plyometrics everyday. even then the trianing must be balanced and well watched over to insure stimuli does not become maladaptive.
funny i said nothing about testosterone, and nothing about max strength work. i love how people put words in my mouth. i did however say that hormonal release is directly tied to motor unit recruitment. so the impulse sent to recruit a motor unit also inervates by way of interneuron the nerves which trigger the realease of hormones.
James, I have read before that volume per unit of time has a greater effect on the release of hormonal messengers. Ca2+ spikes per unit of time have a greater effect on the release of hormonal and other messengers than max weight or max intensity for a given movement.
Due to rate coding, it is possible to recruit motor units of any type once fatigue starts setting in. Your body will recruit what it can until lactic acid takes all the binding sites for calcium. At that point no, or little contraction will be possible.
There is a very distinct relationship between the nervous system and the endocrine system, but that should be common sense as evidence by epinephrine release. Fight or flight is just one example of this relationship.
If someones goal is to maximize hormonal response from a stressor, volume and intensity should both be addressed.
What is your source that increased levels of serum hormones defeat soreness?
Soreness is related to increased serum creatine kinase activity and has been shown in studies to not be related to inflamation within the muscle tissue.
If your theory is correct, then assuming sleep and diet are great, DOMS would be caused by low hormonal levels?
I am not trying to come down on you, but the picture of soreness and intensity is bigger than the one we are presenting here.
the hormonal relationship is this, the body will recover faster via metabolism. the cause of DOMS is still suspect there are alot of therioes only one of which you presented. so in that point i have to go on experience to back up the claim. i have trained the “charlie way” and i have trained my way not to say one gets better results then the other (i dont want to open a can of worms) but simply i dont expereince DOMS training the way i do. also if you do a little research you will find that in elite atheltes lactic acid level are actually higher after intese muscular activity than in untraiend atheltes. what people dont realize is lactic acid can form lactate which is a source of energy for further muscular contraction. lactic acid can beomce your friend.
I agree with you James. Many relationships with lactic acid haven’t been fully explored and it obviously plays a role in overall metabolism some how.
True, lactate can be used as a fuel source for muscle contractions via the mitochondria and the Lactate Shuttle Theory, but the prefered users of the lactate are smooth muscle tissue, cardiac tissue, and slow twitch muscle fibers. This leaves FT fibers at a disadvantage because they do not have the oxidative properties required to convert the LA into glycogen.
The LA will still take Ca2+ receptors and hamper explosive contractions by FT fibers (AKA slow mo running…lol). Slow twitch fibers will still be able to contract within their own respective ability to shuttle LA into the mitochondria.
Metabolism however, is the sum of the energy activities of the body, both anabolic and catabolic. Therefore, all metabolism is not created equal and having a high metabolism isn’t neccessarily a great thing or a bad thing, just another piece of the puzzle.
how can you then explain the higher levels of lactic acid in trained individuals as apposed to untrained or novce ones. And yet they do not expereience to the same degree the inablity to contract their muscles under duress ie a elite 400m runner versus a novice 400m runner.
Its the H+ ions that cause one to fatuge and slow, due to correct training, you can accumulate more H+ ions and not be as fatagued. This is due to the body learning to deal with the added H+ ions. If say in training you get used to max H+ ions and basically collapse at the end due to the shear pain, then in a race, running at sub max effort will produce sub max H+ ions, your body will be so addapted to Max H+ ions floating around that sub Max H+ ions will leave the body feeling ok. It simply learns to deal with it.
Its like being able to bench say 500lbs once. YOu couldnt do it every day. But doing 400lbs every day for 1rep would be easy.
ANyway, dealing with that much H+ ions, lactic acid ect would be more inclined for 400-1500m work.