The concept of Strength

Today I completely fucked up my training schedule owing to some academic pressure but anyways...as promised in my last post, today I shall reveal certain aspects of STRENGTH which you fellas will never find in any gym manual or coach's notebook. Do not worry guys...I aint gonna bore you with the usual stuff you have heard a zillion times from your gym buddies. So lets first look at the holy grail of STRENGTH training which you might not have realized.

                                STRENGTH IS MOSTLY NEURAL IN NATURE !!!

Yes your nervous system (not your muscles) is the key here. Now what the hell on earth does that imply ?? ... before coming to that, I want all you guys to know that all the great champions of the past like Arnold, Dorian Yates, Franco Colombu, John Grimek....all of them started out as "power-lifters" and not as bodybuilders. Being strong should always be considered a big deal in the iron game and any guy with male hormones running in his blood should address that first (size shall follow later). Now that your blood is boiling a bit, lets see what happens when you are churning out rep after rep..sweating it out...and thinking you are having an awesome workout :

Every muscle group has certain amount of "muscle fibers" called type 1 and type 2 that are responsible for force production. Type 1 are the muscle fibers that are not so strong...have less growth potential... but they resist fatigue for a long time (good for lighter weights and 12-15+ reps in a set). Type 2 on the other hand are the stronger,powerful and explosive ones...but they fatigue pretty soon...but these are also the fibers with the maximum growth potential. Now that you are aware of the muscle make up, lets see how they are recruited sequentially in a working set. suppose you pick up a weight that you can bench press for say 10 reps and not anymore. When you start doing your reps, the nervous system "orders" your muscle to recruit the type 1 fibers first...this process probably continues till say 6th or the 7th rep..and then do the type 2 fibers come into play after you have exhausted majority of type 1. But then you just are able to churn out 2-3 more reps before your nervous system craps out and you attain the infamous "failure" !! ..how many type 2 fibers did you recruit in those 2-3 reps?...I bet not a lot. The reason is because your nervous system isn't trained to handle such heavy loads and its actually your nervous system that fails momentarily even before your muscles fatigue !! ..

To summarize it naively, for pure STRENGTH, your target should be to fatigue as many type 2 muscle fibers as possible. Everyone of us is born with a given number of type 1 and type 2 fibers in any muscle group and this doesn't change in the lifetime (sorry dudes....we all have to live with it..)..When we start working out a muscle, the nervous system decides HOW MANY muscle fibers and WHICH TYPE are to be recruited and WHEN. But before we even fully realize our full potential of type 2 fibers during any set, our nervous system suddenly gives a "shutdown" order to the muscle fibers and we achieve failure and terminate the set and get satisfied with mediocre STRENGTH increases. Your muscle fibers is like an army (consisting of small time soldiers and also some great warriors)and the NERVOUS SYSTEM is like the supreme commander. During battle, even before the great warriors enter the war, the commander feels scared and calls of the battle.

Well now that you realize the "apparent" limitations, its obvious to take steps in order to overcome this. My next post shall deal with specific training techniques that train the nervous system and certainly your STRENGTH shall blast through the roof !!!...............

So, stay tuned...