Does anyone know if there is anyway of measuring your % of fast twitch fibres compared with your slow?
How about a biopsy? It feels good, I promise…
I’ve tried one of those! ha ha!!
Dont Lie To That Man… Trust Me Dont Dont Get One… They Are Very Painful… Goodluck…
Biopsies aren’t always a good predictor as the distribution of FT and ST firbre is such that a small difference in biopsy sites might yield wildly varying results
Could you elaborate Charlie? I mean I know we’re all familiar with the differences in red/transitional/white fiber through the body according to its role in movement but I’ve heard the same thing from Poliquin saying that the insertion of the lat may be more slow twitch than the origin, etc., etc.
P.S. By the way, Charlie I know I’ve seen Poliquin mention your contribution in response to critical threshold but on other occasions I’ve read him take credit and say he named it “Critical Threshold Drop-Off Index”. What’s the truth?
I just remember a clinic I did some work with had access to an MRI for research (mostly into disease states) and they saw a patchy distribution throughout the quads. As for the other question, I guess there’s theory and then terminology.
any simple methods?
You can’t find exact proportions, but comparing your standing long jump and
vertical jump measures to charts can be useful. I’ve heard somewhere that you can take 80% of your max in an exercise and lift it to failure. If this number is
lower than 5 you have a high distribution of glycolitic fibers.
More generalizations…
That 80% max test is fairly inaccurate. You have to account for all factors including training age, what lift you are performing (compound movements involving many muscle groups will throw off accuracy; i.e. bicep curl test compared with leg press), biological age, etc.
I suppose you could use EMS a see the relative pulse rate you can reach before tetany- 18 to 20 is very good. But what are you going to do with the info? there are so many other factors to consider.
How much does the ratio of FT to ST fibres really matter? IE if an athlete was to have a 50/50 split would they be able to run under 10 seconds in the 100m? How? Or if there were more ST compared to FT could an athlete still become a top level sprinter? Sorry, I’m a novice in this field fellas.
Problem is to know what the ratio really is- and even if you could, how does that influence things when you have other factors involved like mounting points for the muscles.
Sometimes all this analysis-paralysis of fast twitch fibres is a waste of time.
(I say that respectfully)
The only statistic that actaully matters is that of the athletes 100m time.
The Strength:Weight ratio, leg length, % fast twitch fibres, even body fat, ALL influence the athletes time - but the question is - When all these are mixed together - what is their time? and possibly more importantly even if you knew all these - Do you know what you’d do with them?
Good point. I always tell the athletes I work with that we don’t bother testing things we can’t do anything about!!