Strength Concept as a Neural Expression

[no23]

Ok lets get to it … the effects of the CNS, PNS strength as a neural expression …

[pakewi]

Or: how to incorporate the neurological efficiency concept to training.

…or should I already start a new thread with this title?

[no23]

Good description …

If you like - though perhaps we should try and cover that under this thread? … for now

[WRCortese5]

Good idea no23. Look forward to seeing how this thread pans out.

[pakewi]

@james_colbert

what is a sprint but a series of balistic powerful contractions. now ofcourse it is more complex than that when you talk of other issues such as form ect. even if you do what charlie calls tempo work the forces expereineced are far greater than what most people expereience in the weightrroom. nso our goal is not only powerful muscle contractions but the ablity to produce these contraction more tha once. yet anything other than maximal will have a negative effect on peak out put or in this case peak speed. what is logical, place the body under situations where it has no choice to turn on maximally. train like this long enough and you will find things like cns fatigue as most of the ppl on this site understand them fade away. im attacking dogma that is why there is so much ressitance to say that you can train maximally over and over to say that you can train the entire body everyday. when most of us started training we believe the more we train the faster the results. the more we max bench the faster our max goes up. we were told that we were wrong but in reality we were right only we did not have the knowledge to understand that the body ability to adapt is based on its ablity to recover. so in essence if you could train 100 times a day and recover from the load you would make gains 100 times faster than a person who trained only once a day. i wont delve to deep into the neurological realities of this assertion as you seem caught up on the biological. my assertion here is simple muscle fatigues greatly one when its not used effeciently. this produces low grade inflamation. inflamation is a disruption to homeostasis. and two our bodies naturally contract the muscles when they become fatigued or injured, it is a protective mechanism but is neurological so it can be reporgramed. when muscle constricts it is less able to absorb force and thefore less able to display force. muscle is more likly to become injured because at the most basic level all injury comes from the inablity of the body to absorb force. you stuck in the dogma most plp think all there is is variations on set and reps when it comes to strength training. there are so many more mehtods. and the right ones will break down the neurological barriers which prevent a person from performing maximally more often. is there a limit… ofcourse. but in reality it is set far further than a max squat once a week or a max sprint once every 10 days. keep tissue elongated via neurological pathways, use your muscle in the most effecient manner so that low grade inflamation does not develop, and put the body under situations where it has no choice but to maximally recruit its motor pool and you will find the results interesting.

To promote discussion over this extremely interesting topic I took the liberty to underline and highlight the points in Mr.Colbert’s elsewhere post which generated this thread originally.

Particularly intriguing ,to me at least, appear the following points:

1. Neurological vs. Biological distinction and implications.

2. Efficiency and Fatigue definitions and mutual relationship.

3.Low grade inflammation concept considerations in the light of the never enough discussed and indagated General vs.Specific categories.

Over to you.

[jamirok]

Mr.Colbert, can you explain another time your conclusions? (expecially for low grade inflammation).

Some your ideas remember me the “central governor system” of Noakes.

Low grade inflammation can be (or is) = the muscles (metabolic?) responce to excessive/general CNS fatigue?

[james_colbert]

very excited about this topic was about to do a long write up on my views and realized that i need to go to class so ill get to this in the pm.
ps no need to call me mr colbert lol.

[jamirok]

Ok Mr Colbert…ops…James

[james_colbert]

when I read this thread and the first few posts a bunch of ideas popped into my head. lol should have written them down. but I will do my best to address the topic.

viewing strength training as neurological training is very important to the progress of sports science. of course the biological factors are important to consider but we must always remember that the body follows the mind not the other way around. first let me establish this, our goal is to elicit contraction from fast twitch muscle fibers as those are the most powerful and important to explosive events. fast twitch fibers as Charlie and many others have mentioned before, have a high threshold of excitation basically this means a high frequency of rate coding is required to activate these fibers. so if we can send a signal to the muscle at a high frequency we will activate these fibers. in most activities there is a gradation in force from slow twitch to fast twitch muscles i.e. the exact opposite of what we want as explosive athletes.

ideally at the start of a movement (also known as starting strength) we want the maximal number of motor units to activate at once, in the strict def. of starting strength rate coding can not be considered but in the practical sense we would want rate coding to be maximal (some text state that there is actually a optimal not maximal level of rate coding but that’s besides the point). so lets say the body has 100 motor units in a given muscle and it can activate at anywhere from 1 -100hz we would want all motor units going and in the first second of activation 100 impulses sent to the muscle. under normal training conditions i.e. lifting maximal weights there is a gradation of force as the body quickly discovers that more motor units and a greater frequency of impulses is needed to complete the movement. since we want maximal excitation upon the initiation of movement this is a valuable but inefficient training method.
under certain conditions the body reveres recruitment order and initiates movement with a high frequency of output, these conditions include absorbing force from a fall, catching a falling load, eliciting the stretch reflex, and others.

[james_colbert]

@pakewi

To promote discussion over this extremely interesting topic I took the liberty to underline and highlight the points in Mr.Colbert’s elsewhere post which generated this thread originally.

Particularly intriguing ,to me at least, appear the following points:

1. Neurological vs. Biological distinction and implications.

2. Efficiency and Fatigue definitions and mutual relationship.

3.Low grade inflammation concept considerations in the light of the never enough discussed and indagated General vs.Specific categories.

Over to you.

1. the neurology always controls the biology but the biolgy inputs into the neurology and i think that is one reason for “CNS fatigue” i believe this type of fatigue is a protective mechanism, and feedback from the biology greatly influences the state of the neurology. take care of the biological response to training and break down the neurological barriers and i believe it is possible to train without a maladptive response only adaptive resposne.

ahh crap got to run bbl.

[jamirok]

@james_colbert

1. the neurology always controls the biology but the biolgy inputs into the neurology and i think that is one reason for “CNS fatigue” i believe this type of fatigue is a protective mechanism, and feedback from the biology greatly influences the state of the neurology. take care of the biological response to training and break down the neurological barriers and i believe it is possible to train without a maladptive response only adaptive resposne.

ahh crap got to run bbl.

I agree and I think pakewi too.
Explain low grade inflammation please!

Ps: pakewi I’ve seen your new avatar…

[pakewi]

@james_colbert

ideally at the start of a movement (also known as starting strength) we want the maximal number of motor units to activate at once, in the strict def. of starting strength rate coding can not be considered but in the practical sense we would want rate coding to be maximal (some text state that there is actually a optimal not maximal level of rate coding but that’s besides the point). so lets say the body has 100 motor units in a given muscle and it can activate at anywhere from 1 -100hz we would want all motor units going and in the first second of activation 100 impulses sent to the muscle. under normal training conditions i.e. lifting maximal weights there is a gradation of force as the body quickly discovers that more motor units and a greater frequency of impulses is needed to complete the movement. since we want maximal excitation upon the initiation of movement this is a valuable but inefficient training method.
under certain conditions the body reveres recruitment order and initiates movement with a high frequency of output, these conditions include absorbing force from a fall, catching a falling load, eliciting the stretch reflex, and others.

Agreed.And rather good explanation too. This is to me the single reason why MedBall and Plyo work is so valuable to Swimming (and maybe to many in water movements),where paradoxically friction forces outscore elastic ones…
Would you expand on the rasons behind the critical importance of initiating movement with high frequency and its impact on Efficiency,please?

The Efficiency concept and definition I think are key here,and way too long forgotten…

[pakewi]

@james_colbert

of course the biological factors are important to consider but we must always remember that the body follows the mind not the other way around.

I think there are exceptions to the “mind/brain first rule”,but let’s take it as it si here for the purposes of this discussion,and keep the topic for another quite interesting thread in the distant future…

[james_colbert]

@pakewi

To promote discussion over this extremely interesting topic I took the liberty to underline and highlight the points in Mr.Colbert’s elsewhere post which generated this thread originally.

Particularly intriguing ,to me at least, appear the following points:

1. Neurological vs. Biological distinction and implications.

2. Efficiency and Fatigue definitions and mutual relationship.

3.Low grade inflammation concept considerations in the light of the never enough discussed and indagated General vs.Specific categories.

Over to you.

ok sorry guys its been a crazy day but I’ve been dying to get back to this thread.

2. when I say efficiency for the most part im talking about movement. as many of you know there are generally considered two types of movement actions and too two different types of motor control. they are ballistic movements and cocontraction movements and feedforward control and feedback control respectively. in athletics and in general ballistic actions are desirable for motor efficiency simply because opposing muscle groups aren’t “fighting” each other. you probably have heard this example before, if your quads are the prime mover and are producing 100 N of force and the opposing group, the hamstrings is producing 20 N of force then your 100 N isn’t fully expressed and the movement is considered inefficient. one thing you may not have heard of is this, efficient movement occurs when the antagonist relaxes at the same intensity and velocity as the agonist contracts. so you can see how important movement efficiency is to running fast times, or in the case of field sports running fast over and over, tackling over and over, jumping over and over. although I don’t believe in CNS limitations (in the traditional sense) I do believe in biological limitations so continued ballistic movement i.e. sprinting is greatly influenced by the both the production and conservation of contractile substrates.

3. ok the low grade inflamation thing… if any of you are familiar with the ARP and what it does you will know that it seeks out sources of inflamation. inflamation being the response of the body to stress or damage. traditional training produces an inflammatory response, you get sore, you can no longer perform etc. jays way of training, maximally, does not. im not going to profess that I understand it completely but I know it to be true because I have trained in the manner he describes and noticed the noticeable difference. also most people don’t know that Adam didn’t have the ARP when he trained with jay. Dennis and jay didn’t meet till Dennis saw the Monday night football piece on Adam and the realized that the two were achieving the same thing just by different means.

[james_colbert]

@pakewi

I think there are exceptions to the “mind/brain first rule”,but let’s take it as it si here for the purposes of this discussion,and keep the topic for another quite interesting thread in the distant future…

I agree that’s why I have a theory that feedback mechanism from the bodies tissue are one of the reasons for CNS fatigue. get rid of these signals and the CNS is free to operate unhindered by fatigue.

[pakewi]

@james_colbert

I agree that’s why I have a theory that feedback mechanism from the bodies tissue are one of the reasons for CNS fatigue. get rid of these signals and the CNS is free to operate unhindered by fatigue.

Very finely expressed…!
That was MY theory…Oh my! Jamirok,let’s call Rupert…oops: THE ARMY…this guy here is STEALING our stuff…

Hope you don’t mind some genuine kidding,Mr.Colbert. But we are really on the very same lines on this,and I guess after some harsh times,finally some frank relaxed discussion over extremely interesting and stimulating topics won’t be a bad thing after all…

[no23]

Which in another sense underlines the suggestion that there is no such thing as neural fatigue as such rather neural protection.

[james_colbert]

this topic is going to make me do some much needed research into the inflammatory response. this is what I believe jay has figured out. 1. there is not CNS fatigue only inhibition or rather a protective mechanism to keep us from ripping ourselves apart. 2. information flows two ways so the above said inhibition may be produced because of the state of the physicality and the inflammatory response. 3. get rid of the negative feedback from the body to the brain and break down inhibitor barriers and fatigue as we know it is a thing of the past. he said it best on his site.

“training elicits only the response of the specific trait being trained; nothing else is affected. It completely eliminates the normal symptoms of overtraining, and can become, depending on the level of the athlete, specific to the very skill being performed without interruption of the base performance of that skill.”

what this means is that training the body only leads to adaptive change not anything else (fatigue, soreness, etc.) not so far fetched to think of a person maxing out in the bench 50 times in a single workout session. or a person benching their max every 30 min 8 hours a day for a year!

[Davan]

Where do external stresses like work/school/relationships fit into this? I am sure most people here know SOMETIMES the bigger “CNS drain” aren’t from those depth jumps or sprints or squats or whatever, but studying your ass off for a big exam that has huge implications for your future (hopefully you are feeling the pressure ;)), etc.

[james_colbert]

@Davan

Where do external stresses like work/school/relationships fit into this? I am sure most people here know SOMETIMES the bigger “CNS drain” aren’t from those depth jumps or sprints or squats or whatever, but studying your ass off for a big exam that has huge implications for your future (hopefully you are feeling the pressure ;)), etc.

simply u worry too much. your right there are outside stresses. but you are doing a lot to exagerate them. the same thing with competiton if your so worried about performing you wont be focusing on what is most important. now with the stress that does come with life a lot of that can be managed with a good diet and sleep. people over look this all to often. i kno from our converstaion your situation and let me tell you its gunna come down to how well you can manage your time and how well you can roll with the punches.