My best friend benches 440 cleanly but ecc loads at 500 lbs sometimes. He’s fine and hasn’t had any injuries!
Yes as stabilizers. Remember when the Pectorials are lengthing the Lats are shortening and then in the concentric phase the Pectorials are shortening and the Lats are lengthening; therefore, by stretching the antagonists they will provide less resistance for the pectorials to contract.
Its a fancy way of saying you get the most bang for your buck. It produces relaxtion in the antagonists.
Did you ever try and do situps while having a minor back spasm? :rolleyes:
Couple of questions. Would you restrict this to bench, and, if not, why not?
When in the training period would you do this, cosidering the potential impact on speed work?
From: http://www.exploringspasticity.com/explore/muscle.html
What is Normal Muscle Control?
Normal Muscle Control
Despite its seeming simplicity, normal muscle control is actually very complex, involving several interacting regions of the brain and spinal cord. Voluntary movement of a muscle begins when electrical signals are generated in the outer layer of the brain. These electrical signals pass through the midbrain to the spinal cord along so-called upper motor neurons. Within the spinal cord, they connect to lower motor neurons, which convey the signals out of the spinal cord to the surface of the muscle involved. Electrical stimulation of the muscle causes contraction. The force of contraction pulling on the skeleton causes movement of the limb. Damage to the upper motor neurons or their connection to lower motor neurons is the cause of most spasticity.
Muscles are present in opposing groups, such as the biceps and triceps of the upper arm. Contraction of the biceps bends the elbow, while contraction of the triceps straightens it. When a muscle is being intentionally stimulated to contract, it is called an agonist. Opposing muscles are called antagonists. For instance, when you flex your biceps, it is the agonist, while the triceps is the antagonist. Note that any given muscle will be an agonist in one situation, but an antagonist in another. Also note that when an agonist contracts, the antagonist naturally gets stretched. The response to this stretching is what goes wrong in spasticity.
This natural stretching of antagonist muscles is necessary for movement, but too much stretching can damage the muscle. Two related signaling pathways help prevent too much, and too little, stretch of the antagonist. [1] First, while an agonist is contracting, the spinal cord sends inhibitory signals to the antagonist to prevent it from contracting while it is being stretched out. Second, the antagonist sends sensory signals back to the spinal cord to indicate how much it is being stretched. When the antagonist is stretched too far or too fast, these sensory signals override the inhibitory signals and set off protective contractions in the antagonist to prevent muscle damage. This protective contraction is seen in the stretch reflex that makes your knee jerk when the doctor hits a tendon with a rubber mallet. These two antagonist-regulating pathways help to ensure that the intended movement can occur, but cannot damage surrounding muscles.
Spasticity occurs when these two antagonist-regulating pathways are improperly controlled, usually due to upper motor neuron damage. First, the pathway that normally inhibits antagonist contraction becomes less active than normal, leading to unwanted co-contraction of antagonists during movement of an agonist. This prevents smooth movement and full range of motion in the agonist. Second, the stretch reflex becomes hyperactive, so that the antagonist is likely to contract even when stretched only slightly. As a result of loss of inhibition and hyperactive stretch reflexes, movement becomes difficult to control, and muscles may remain stiff and contracted for long periods of time.
Referring to the bold print up above I believe that the body sets these protective mechanisms at a point well before injury. I believe you can extend this point closer to the point of injury and therefore have bigger lifts but you do take on a greater chance of injury. You want to overstretch and injure yourself so this is a very tricky game of when is to little to produce the desired effect and when is to much that it causes injury?
Again referring to Hatfield in his book “Power” about the feedback-loop and ballistics he states,"When the tension is too great-based on your ‘motor memory’ of previous attempts at lifting that weight-a message is sent ot the muscle to shut down. So, a ‘feedback loop’ exists, a system of neuronal wiring designed to protect you from hurting yourself by lifting too much. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, built this protective mechanism a bit too sensitive, however.
Shutdown occurs to soon for most people. There’s a buffer zone that’s overly conservative. Remember teh stories, many of which are documented, of the mother, in a moment of panic, lifting a crashed car off her pinned child?
… the Golgi tendon organ’s inhibitory message was prevented from ever completing its loop back to the muscle…Can this involuntary strength potential be tapped on a voluntary basis?
Also, unknown changes are thought to occur within the central nervous system (specifically the hypothalmus) that somehow alters the sensitivity of negative feedback levels.
Yes I know Hatfield is referring to ballistics in this regard but I believe the same thought can be applied to more antagonist relaxtion and leading to an easier/faster agonist contraction of a muscle.
You want the inhibitory signals to continue doing what there doing (refer back to where is shows the number 1) and also by stretching antagonsits before doing bench you can allow the antagonist to bigger overall stretch while the Pectorials are contracting leading to heavier/faster lifts. Second by decreasing the time the antagonist muscle sends sensory signals back to the spinal cord to indicate how much it is being stretched. :eek:
Are you referring to the ecc lifting or the antagonist stretching. Sorry Charlie when I get an epiphany I block out everything else.
Referring to Ecc loading,
A. Mattes talks about endangering the myotatatic (stretch) reflex which protects the muscles. He sees this actions and the holding of a stretch position for more than 1.5 to 2 seconds causing the muscles being lengthened beyond their tonic/normal resting length to receive greater tension.
Remember you’ve gone beyond the stretch reflex because you’re now straining/stretching muscles to their normal elongation. Now it becomes a danger to the muscle fibers being forcefully elongated.
Now going back to you Steve standing with your heels off the tread of the step. You are lowering yourself so that your heels are now below the horizontal of the step. If you understand the above, then you’ve gone beyond your stretch reflex and the muscle, gastrocs/soleus which you are stretching are being strained under the weight of your entire gravitational body force.
If there are knots in the soleus or gastrocs, (fascia wrapped tightly around portions of those muscles which were injured through overuse or being overstretched…and contracted to protect themselves from further injury), you are overstretching/straining good muscle fiber that when overstretched can be damaged. The end result of this good feeling stretch is that there will come a day when you will say, stretching doesn’t work because you have a calf muscle which is almost totally bound up with fascia which like a tourniquet will not allow the muscle to move through its full range of motion (rom).
As John Jesse noted: Fascia has a strong tendendcy to contract due to age, chilling, poor posture, injury to the muscle it surrounds, and muscular imbalance. Contraction of fascia reduces the range of movement in body joints. You can begin to see why fascial release which is practiced by Rolfers and people of similar techniques works so well to assist someone get back to better balance and fuller range of motion by allowing those adhesions to be loosened from where they are holding unnecessarily to other fascia/muscles and bone.
Something I’ll mention but won’t go into fully since I don’t comprehend it enough to fully explain is the reality of “The Kinetic Chain.”
In movement there is a chain of nerve firings which take place at various moments in the movement of any body part. You probably have seen those machines which takes a person through the ROM of a joint so that when healing from surgery on that joint, there is no binding up of the surrounding muscles and tendons. In walking/running when the muscles within the chain of movement reach the correct position, the nerves fire to set in motion the next part of the chain. Simply by putting your muscles under an intense stretch, you can interfere with the normal firing of nerves in those muscles so that the normal, graceful body movement is impaired.
Supervenomsuperman,
I personally would start with 2 seconds. Anymore than 2 seconds and your just asking for trouble like a lot of bodybuilders who do negatives and try and bring the bar down as slow as possible until gravity beats them.
In case you missed it,
On the Monday Night Football pregame show being the NFL Today they showed some of St. Louis Ram Adam Archelleta’s workout. They talked about CNS stimulation and improving his bench press. Adam was doing ghg’s by putting his feet under a wt stack (like the wts on a lat pulldown machine) they also showed him using EMS while he was doing the ghg (maybe he didn’t have enough strength to do one without EMS). The showed him doing explosive bench on the modified smith machine (it was modified because instead of the bar there was a flat piece of metal the size of a rectangular coffe table). They showed him trying to do a fast arm movement back and forth while releasing a 5 lb wt like a sprinter who would do a full arm swing in a bentover row type position and he releases the wt swings his arm back and then forward trying to catch the wt. He did side to side plyo pushups.
Finally they showed him doing drop catches on the bench press where he was dropping the wt and then catching it just before the bottom (his hands were always on the barbell he just lowered really fast), what this does is it produces ecc loading and therefore a better reactive response and thus more force on the concentric contraction! The wt he was using was 225 lbs which led him to increase his bench to over 500 lbs! This last technique I believe is an invention of the WSBC.