Interesting. And notable that both are heavily (heh) promoting methods that include much more than emphasis on completing a few reps heavy for a few sets. The first emphasizes the importance of some focus on the eccentric phase, isometrics as part of a plan, and the neural adaptations.
Question about that hypertrophy bomb - if the first portion with the long eccentric phases is done to accurately only one or two reps in reserve how the heck does anyone do the rest of the set?
Strength is very specific. If you want to get competitively good at bench pressing, you need to bench press. For this purpose, loads of 85%+ using IIx are what drive improvements. Using more sets and reps at lower weight to eventually get there involves a lot of “ineffective” effort, and most gym lifters don’t work hard enough to use all (or most) of the IIx capacity without pushing the loads, which means fewer reps.
However, for most people, non-specific strength is fine. If you want to carry a load up the stairs at any age, or play with your grandchildren easily, the distinction won’t matter much at all. The research shows maintaining youthful VO2 max levels and muscle mass are what get you there.
You need very specific strength to compete at very specific exercises. But as you point out, that’s not what most people want. They want to be able to lift their grandkids, to and carry a heavy box, and to balance their own body on uneven footing, and to carry a full pot of water, and to drag the fallen branch to the mulch pile, and to shovel the snow, and to move those sacks of concrete the contractor left in the way, and…
Lots of different tasks that need different specific strengths. So i think for most people, a variety of strength exercises that hit different muscle groups acting together in different ways is what’s most valuable.
More than fine even. It is the goal. As well stated:
My personal decades long stated goal has been to both be able to be looked to to safely hold up a corner of the chair holding up a hefty in law during the Hora dance at any of my kids weddings, and to be able to dance all that night. Bonus if I can still do the Russian squat kick dance. None of my kids are yet obliging with a wedding so I’m going to have to keep exercising! The kick dance is sure to be the first to go.
Within limits on the muscle mass maybe. I just got back from a four day rim to rim Grand Canyon trip. Another member of the group was man likely near my age, former Marine, clearly big time lifter: not fat but bulky. He struggled at points. Not just that of course he is not built for the endurance aspect of the activity. Getting his bulk scrambled up and over a boulder to get to Ribbon Falls took him a few and climbing up to the top was a no go.
I know guys who can deadlift 700 pounds but genuinely struggle to climb a flight of stairs. For most people, general strength is better. For athletes, the skills they need are sport specific, and few people are high-level athletes.
Not a doctor and I’ll need to read through what the more learned individuals wrote. In general, the answer seemed to be a bit of a mystery but I did find some reference to:
Cell fluid.
Cell splitting.
That is to say, a muscle can become larger through two mechanisms, either it grows with added fluid - inflating like a balloon - or it can split into two cells, with each growing a little bit.
Assuming that this is true, we can imagine how these two mechanisms might achieve greater strength but have different usage characteristics.
A lever becomes more powerful, the further you put the end from the fulcrum. And likewise, if I need to pull a jointed limb up, my leverage for doing so is better the higher up I am from the ground. The simple geometrical shift gives a power advantage. But, that is all that I’ve changed. My machinery for doing the lifting hasn’t necessarily become more strong nor more durable. It just has improved mechanical advantage.
If I split a cell, then I have more cell wall. The initial cell, if it was pulling laterally and if we visualize it from the side, has a top wall and a bottom wall that it can contract, to try and perform the lift. The total load that it can sustain, without rupture, is limited by the amount of weight that those walls can lift. Now, again, if you split the cell - say, laying the two of them like pancakes on top of each other, and continuing to visualize from the side - then you now have the top and bottom walls of two cells, both able to contract and both able to support some weight. You’ve quadrupled the pulling power. The lower cell might have poorer mechanical advantage but the higher one has better. You’re roughly break even on the geometry, but gained in terms of machinery and total weight that can supported without rupture.
One might theorize a mechanism like the following:
Under extreme, sudden load, muscle cells are ruptured and torn. As they grow back, some number will restore themselves as multiple smaller cells, rather than fully rejoining and reverting to the status quo.
Under lower-intensity, less destructive load, the muscles will tend to stretch out and grow as they’re pumped up to give mechanical advantage. The stretching allows the cells to maintain size even after the pump subsides.
While both styles of training will have both types of impact, you will see more of one style of strength increase under one style of training than the other.
In general - if true - we’d expect to see a higher count of muscle cells with strength training and, when you stop training, less of a decline in strength and less loss of muscle mass. And, with hypertrophic training, more shrinkage after you stop training and subsequently more loss of strength, due to the loss of mechanical advantage.
This does seem to follow anecdotal evidence. E.g. farmer strength vs bodybuilder strength. One is said to last through to old age and still be available even when someone isn’t so physically large. The other is said to be more ephemeral. That’s probably at least 80% bullcock, if for no reason other than the whole “everything in your body gets replaced within 5 years” rule - you probably do need to use it or lose it, either way - but there could be some amount of truth to it, if you do some work to maintain.
An alternative theory is simply that your brain and central nervous system develop for the separate styles of movement. First time under an extreme load and you’ll decide that it’s impossible. As you get used to the extremeness, you start to be able to push through and do it on demand.
Actually, a new review is showing that muscle division is probably not a thing but, instead:
Specific components of the muscles, such as myofibrils and sarcoplasm with organelles inside muscle fibers and ECM around them, react differently to specific stimuli and trigger specific responses, which may involve the adaptation of the contractile machinery.
But this would still be a specific adaptation to dealing with heavier, short term loads.
I wanted to get your thoughts on something else I first noticed in my 30’s when I started hiking in steep hills. When ever I work my legs I seem to become energized. Part of it is the lighter feeling on my feet but it goes beyond that mentally I feel like a kid. This usually happens fairy quickly I would say within a week or two of starting leg exercises. I installed a 10" step that I can do reps on recently. It took about two weeks to start getting some half way decent reps but once that kicked in I feel like a different person. I started a strict diet 2 months ago and lost 20# very quickly but the last 3 weeks have been stuck, even gaining 3# back and I am only eating about 1200 calories? I am starting to wonder if I am experiencing gains in muscle weight that are off setting my fat losses. I have added 3/4" to my biceps, and taken 8" off of my stomach ( above my waist). I have never felt this motivated about working out before. I think the step I installed plays a big part in this.
Roughly 12,400 athletes are expected to participate in this year’s National Senior Games, which are taking place in Des Moines, Iowa, at the end of July. Of those, 187 will be participating in the powerlifting competition – 99 men, aged 54 to 95, and 88 women, aged 50 to 82.
The oldest female competitor, 82-year-old Faith O’Reilly, says a friend took her to a powerlifting meet in her late 30s. “I was watching everybody and I thought, ‘Well, I can do that,’” she says.
Almost 77 here, I don’t take any medication except my inhaler. I drink at least 1 pot of coffee a day. ( 12 cups).My brothers who don’t smoke and only drink about 1 cup per day are diabetic, high blood pressure, hi cholesterol, some heart problems. I am the only one that smokes.
So a fun article that came in my news feed. To be fair I am not training for hypertrophy … but trying to prevent sarcopenia overlaps some. Fun to read because I like all of those wrong things, and swear by including them in the mix!
More seriously I think articles like this illustrate the silliness of these goals. Balance work (bosu ball disc whatever) is not in and of itself going to maximize hypertrophy. But it hits core and the long stabilization muscles well which can then help in other work. Dissing heavy carries and Turkish Get Ups? Great compound movements!
I saw some of the YouTube version. The less said about that, the better.
I’ll grant that I haven’t looked at the research, but the arguments against instability training, as I recall, are:
It downgrades your body’s willingness to exert max effort, because your safety system kicks in and says, “Don’t do that!” In that state, you just don’t get as much work done.
The basic argument for weightlifting - in the face of all of the injuries you could experience by being in a gym, stumbling over equipment, lifting weights that might be too heavy, etc. - is that it’s a more controlled environment than the outside world. You’re minimize risk, by creating a stable and controlled environment for dealing with heavy loads, to build up your body such that if something does happen to you in the real world - you fall, someone bumps into you, etc. - it has almost no impact, because you’re so robust. Instability training just puts that risk of injury, which we were attempting to avoid, back into the gym.
If we take the view that instability training’s one gain is that it prepares you to deal with instability - e.g. shakiness caused by old age - wouldn’t the shakiness of your own body, during exercise in a controlled environment, already cover that? Or more importantly, has research shown that instability training actually helps one to reduce their own shakiness, and that it does it better at that than a focus on pure hypertrophy?
If there’s research showing some advantages in some situations to some particular outcomes, then so be it. But, currently, I’d side with Israetel, for pretty much anyone for pretty much any purpose.
As to the kettlebell swing, I feel like he might be discounting the idea of much larger kettlebells, based on his mockery in the video. But certainly, I can’t agree with him about the value of the swing, unless you really lock yourself into a bodybuilding viewpoint.
In terms of bodybuilding - as I understand it - you’re generally trying to hit targeted muscles in a minimally fatiguing way, so you can carry on to hit as many other muscles as possible, and spend as much total time in the gym as possible. Taking that view, I suppose that I see his point. If you have a weight that’s actually appropriate for your strength level, it does sap a lot of energy.
But in terms of functional training, trying to get a well balanced and full workout out in a minimal time, building up monster strength, etc. the swing is great.
We had a monster of a guy at our gym that only did kettlebell training and who I doubt was using anything under 100lbs for any particular movement (we had some massive KBs). I don’t know that there’s any traditional movement - deadlift, squat, clean & jerk, etc. - that he’d put up better numbers than an expert but I’d certainly class him as the most well-rounded physique and the person that I’d least want to have get his hands on me in a squabble.
If you’re doing 200 lbs kettlebell swings for sets of 12, I ain’t going near you.
Actually, I think we may have had the 362 lbs kettlebell. I forget precisely where we were topping out at but I’m pretty sure it was past Rogue and into the one-of-a-kind realm.
I could pick up our second heaviest, just barely, with my stronger hand alone. The other was a no-go.
I am not sure if I brought this up here before or not but shortness of breath has been a limiting factor in my new program. I find walking or any kind of leg exercises I get out of breath fast but I can do extended periods of upper body work without the shortness of breath. The past 10 years I have spent almost no time walking and my legs got weak. I still have large fairly solid leg muscles but they fatigue very quickly and when they fatigue I also run out of breath. My theory is that large out of shape leg muscles can pump out a lot of co2 which triggers my breathing hard. A few weeks ago I went on a new program of just going up and down on a step one leg at a time until that leg fatigues. After 3 weeks I am noticing dramatic improvements in my breathing. Going to do this for a few more weeks and then start walking again.
