Thoughts on Hypertrophy

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Josh

Some recent readings and viewings, and conversations with my good friend Charlie Reid, have brought up a bunch of thoughts on training methods for me, that I’d like to share here.

I’m starting to think that any use of hypertrophy rep ranges in weightlifting should be either athletic (position-related – i.e., for athletes who need more mass for their position – e.g., American football linemen, etc.) OR for bodybuilding purposes (again, mass-building).

Hypertrophy weight-training as a “general rule” seems to be justified only by the bodybuilding craze, and doesn’t really seem to contribute anything of value to the average person or non-mass-needing athletes (other than “physique” or “mass”).

Strength does not require specific hypertrophy work. For instance, take a look at the old programs of Paul Anderson and other pre-1960′s strongmen. They didn’t do hypertrophy rep/weight ranges. They did high weights/low reps or low weights for technique (still relatively low reps). Granted, Anderson was an enormous man, from his heavy milk, eggs, and honey diet. He was certainly “obese” by most standards (BMI or bodyfat percentage).

A good modern-day example is Ross Enamait, whose training (as far as I’m familiar with it) emphasizes static/isometric strength and the development of maximal strength and power.

Volume was what created any hypertrophy old-time strongmen had. By old-time strongmen, I don’t mean the “physical culturists,” like Eugene Sandow, who obviously did pursue hypertrophy-based repetition ranges. Just like with athletes pre 1970′s. If an athlete was “ripped,” it was because they did considerably higher volume. But most athletes pre 1970′s (or even 1980′s) weren’t ripped, and didn’t have huge physiques.

That said, the comparison of modern-day exercise to that done even by bodybuilders in the 1890′s is unfair. Mostly because the “bodybuilders” in those days also performed extensive physical and acrobatic stunts, like back- and front-flips, weighted back-bridges, etc.

“Physical Culture” was just becoming a “discipline” unto itself at that point, and embraced the development of all of the “purely-physical” qualities of the trainee – balance, acrobatic ability/coordination, strength, power, etc. But this was mostly done through practice of skills with a supplementation of weight training – a trend that is starting to return in certain circles (see Joel Jamieson’s training at 8weeksout.com), but is still relatively rare.

But back to hypertrophy. Does it actually transfer to improvement in performance? Not really.

Look at Barry Bonds pre-1993…he was still an MVP with the Pirates, and a relatively skinny dude could be a phenomenal baseball player. I don’t think the drugs were what helped him (at least, not 100%…check out this article – http://www.cosellout.com/2007/08/24/the-myths-of-756-bary-bonds-predictable-power-progression/).

Anabolic Wheaties anyone?

Another good example is George St. Pierre (“GSP”) – the UFC fighter, who said in an interview that he only lifts weights for looks (body-sculpting)…to quote:

“I don’t believe in strength and conditioning. I never do strength and conditioning. I do not believe that running on a treadmill or doing I don’t know what, so called machine. I don’t believe that’s going to help you have better cardio for a fight. I think everything in fighting is about efficiency…The only reason it is good to lift weights, to do bench press, and stuff like that, I believe, is because it is going to make me more marketable, and to keep myself looking more symmetric, with a better image.”

GSP also says in the article linked above that “I remember I had a Muay Thai instructor from France, that I even brought on the reality show The Ultimate Fighter. The guy smoked, I don’t know how many packs of cigarettes a day. He’s always drinking alcohol. He’s a real character, and he’s completely out of shape, but when he spars with us in Muay Thai, he kicks everyone’s ass. The reason is because he is more efficient than we are.”

Not a wuss.

“Sports scientists” will say (accurately) that maximal force production is directly related to the cross-sectional area of the muscle. That is, the more dense and thick the muscle, the more force it will be able to generate. However, as I mentioned above, hypertrophy also results from a high volume of work. This is why Olympic weightlifters, who usually stay far away from the hypertrophy rep-ranges, have incredibly large thighs. They do many sets of 1-3 repetitions. The training volume on their legs is incredibly high.

For O-lifters, they do this because that is their sport. That is, you can’t get good at the Clean & Jerk or the Snatch without learning how to squat and squat really well – which requires repetitive practice (i.e., volume).

But to say that just because O-lifters have big thighs and are incredibly strong squatters means that a person with big thighs is naturally more athletic at their sport (if it isn’t O-lifting) is ridiculous. Strength doesn’t impart skill…and often times, bulk doesn’t help at all, since it’s gained in a manner not-specific to the sport demands.

Just like with GSP, extra mass is more cosmetic (especially in baseball) than “performance-enhancing.”

Even in a sport like sprinting, the benefits of specific hypertrophy work seem far-fetched to me. Charlie Francis comments in one of his forum posts that the sprinters he saw who were strong in the gym were strong because they were good sprinters first, not vice versa.

Similarly, in his “Mastering the NFL Combine” DVD
, Joe DeFranco outlines a preparation program that has no hypertrophy work at all. I know DeFranco has guys do hypertrophy work at times, but not having them do it in the Combine program points precisely to what I’m talking about – it isn’t necessary for performance (unless the athlete really needs it).

Charlie Francis was Ben Johnson’s sprint coach, which raises an interesting side-point to this post. Johnson was disqualified from the 88 Olympics for steroid use. Francis’ book “Speed Trap” talks about this a bit, and Francis was an outspoken opponent of the IOC’s steroid-testing regime.

Now I’m not saying that Carl Lewis (Ben’s biggest opponent) never did steroids. Nor am I advocating for their use (or disuse). Those are topics for another post. What’s interesting here is that Carl Lewis saw weightlifting as secondary to sprint training – something Francis’ comment alludes to, though his sprinters did lift heavy and often. There are plenty of forums on this, but check out Brian Mac’s page and Fred Hatfield’s if this topic interests you.

Heavy weightlifting does increase musculo-tendinous strength, power production, etc. An argument exists for heavy weight lifting with athletes (which was mostly the type of lifting Johnson did, btw), but limited to what volume is tolerable to the athlete within the demands of their sport-specific training.

The main idea I’m playing with here is that “strength” has been defined specifically as related to hypertrophy-based weight training, which in my opinion isn’t very important or necessary for superior health or athletic performance. The corollary of that concept is that many people believe that strength itself leads to better performance. This is especially true in the trainer/strength-coach world, of course…being a little biased toward strength.

I know it may seem very “basic” to many coaches out there, but in the personal training world it is more and more important to emphasize the proper use of weight training and especially of hypertrophy-based training methods.

And that’s the reason for this post – to attempt to start a discussion, and maybe help to change this trend that’s been going on for the past twenty years or so regarding the nature of superior physical development.

Hypertrophy is all well and good, but it should be an adjunct (at most) to the training of physical skill, which involves – coordination and balance (proprioception, nociception and vestibular sense), strength (maximal), speed and power, and – perhaps above all – movement quality represented through skill-development.

In the end, there is no “right” or “wrong” to this. There are different goals, and different means of achieving those goals. As John Wood of the Oldtime Strongman Site writes:

Lets forget everything about training for a minute and focus on you… your goals… your available equipment… your motivation levels… your training time… your willingness to “stick with it, — all that kind of thing.

What you “should” do depends on these factors, not how someone tells you you must train, and from that, the type of workout that is necessary should become quite clear. Once a week, every day, to failure, not to failure, basic, complex, weights, bodyweight, kettlebells, sandbags – whichever you choose, there’s going to be the correct way to do it for the results you want, and the not-correct way to do it, which will be a waste of time. ..

…But again, just like the training examples of the oldtime strongmen I mentioned above, of all you could do, it must fall in line with a few basic physiological principles otherwise nothing will happen – no improvement, no muscle growth – nothing.

Some styles of training are quite clearly “better” – but the real question is “better how?” Some take more time, some less, some use equipment, some don’t. Again, it comes down to you, and your goals.

Update:
I tracked down a paper by Newman, et al. (2006) called “Strength, But Not Muscle Mass, Is Associated With Mortality in the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study Cohort.”

Nice name, huh?

Anyway, the researchers found that muscle strength (especially of the quadriceps and hand-grip muscles (hand intrinsics and forearms) and not size to be correlated with decreased incidence of mortality (death). That is, people whose legs and grip were weak tended to die sooner.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the reasons behind this correlation. I’ll outline them in another post later.

It reminded me of another paper, Expression and Development of Maximal Muscle Power, Robert Newtons PhD thesis.

It’s a fantastic piece of work, and if I remember correctly says that the aspect of muscular strength that fades with age is actually power – and that the development of power is greatest from ballistic movements in which the weight is actually thrown/propelled by the individual.

Some recent lessons

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Josh

I haven’t done a “cookie-cutter” weightlifting program in years. Probably not since I bought Ross Enamait’s excellent book “Never Gymless.” I think that was in 2006.

Since then, I’ve created my own training programs. I’ve vacillated wildly between types of training – weightlifting, bodyweight, o-lifts, Crossfit and Crossfit-style workouts, rings/gymnastics, etc.

Too much stuff!

I feel like I’ve learned some things since then, and figured I’d share some of those lessons.

1. Cookie-cutter programs aren’t all bad. Hell, I and most of my friends learned everything we knew about the gym from magazines, and from trying out programs in those magazines. I still like to try people’s programs, to see how they affect my body. While I might fiddle with them a little, I try to adhere as closely as possible to the program as-is, to see what happens.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll pitch it again, because I think the guy has a ton of integrity. DeFranco’s “Built Like a Badass” program is fantastic. It’s based on the “core lifts” (bench press, deadlift, squat, overhead press), is based around the individual’s current single-rep maximum, and progresses up nicely. I don’t know how it would work with a pure “beginner,” but it’s working great for me. Try it out if you’re looking for something new.

2. Related to the above, I feel more and more like strength is built in the gym, but skill is built on the field of practice. Modern “functional training” has athletes doing a lot of stuff that is not related to strength training in the gym.

3. Strength is best built using the “classic lifts”/”fundamental movement patterns,” and adhering to the guidelines of good form.

4. This is where “functional training” or “corrective exercise” come in. When an individual has a limitation that doesn’t allow them to perform the “classic lifts” or fundamental movement patterns in a way that is biomechanically sound for them, you have to start incorporating the lessons from functional/corrective training methodologies.

5. If the individual’s form is breaking down because the weight is too heavy for them, you have to evaluate the risk/reward equation for them. Is it worth it to possibly get injured in the gym, in order to lift more weight that day? Maybe. Maybe not.

6. There is no “perfect” anything. There’s no “perfect” form. There’s really good form for a particular individual at a particular time. There’s no “perfect” program. There’s a really good program for an individual at that time.

7. Athletes need specificity. The general person needs general movement.

Let me be more clear. When you have specific tasks or demands that you have to accomplish, you have to be very specific with the type, frequency, and intensity of the movements you engage in. When you don’t have anything so specific, you have free reign to do whatever you want to.

That being said, while the athlete’s “skill” training (aside from the “skill” of strength) will be specific to their sport, position, or event, the general gym-goer will benefit from playing more to develop skill.

8. Rhythm is critical to success. As the saying goes, “timing is everything.” I’d make it more specific – “rhythm is everything.” Find the rhythms in your life and synchronize them to your best advantage. Use rhythm in your training, both in terms of programming, and in terms of practice itself – engage in rhythmical movement more frequently.

Ok, that’s all folks…more later. Appreciate any thoughts on the above…

The skill of strength…

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Josh

The first person I ever saw use the phrase “strength is a skill,” was Pavel Tsatsouline. His method of “greasing the groove” – repeating a movement pattern (like a pullup, for instance) very frequently throughout the day, but with very low duration/repetitions – summarizes this idea, and has helped a lot of people achieve levels of strength they thought were impossible.

It struck me today, after my workout, that this is really true, but in a different way than I had understood before.

It seems like the type of strength you practice is a skill. I mean, like a skill, strength is highly specific.

I’ve long been an admirer of Digby and Sale’s SAID Principle – Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. But I guess I never really felt it in my own training till today.

I started a weightlifting program about a month ago. Specifically, DeFranco’s “Built Like a Badass” program (more on that later). It had been a while since I’d done any regular, scheduled weightlifting. My workouts for the past six months or so have been bodyweight stuff.

Today I was doing some heavy one-arm rows, and realized how different I felt versus the first week of the program. It wasn’t just strength-gain/adaptation. I felt accustomed to the whole thing – the movement pattern, the intensity, the stance, etc. It was something I haven’t felt for a few years…since the last time I did one-arm rows on a regular basis.

I realized that that type of strength was a skill I had stopped practicing.

And I know that when I go back to bodyweight movements, there will be a (re-)learning curve there as well.

Seems like Pavel, Digby, Sales, and everyone else who said it was right…strength is a highly specific skill.

The Difference Between Strength and Skill

Posted on October 29, 2009 by Josh

While guys like Pavel will claim that “strength is a skill” – it’s true only to a point, and I think that the point is largely misunderstood or misinterpreted nowadays.

Doing strength-building movements – especially and particularly the classic lifts: deadlift, squat, overhead press, clean, chins (weighted), dips (weighted), bench, maybe row – require some “skill,” but I wouldn’t classify them as “motor skills” in the typical sense.

Those are “strength skills.” They are practiced in a certain way (with ever increasing load/intensity) in order to disrupt homeostasis and create adaptations in the body.

That is, simply repeating the movements involved in strength exercises will not get you stronger. Practice the movement all you want, but if you don’t add weight (progressively over time), you won’t get any stronger. You might, however, get more skilled.

The first example that comes to mind that allows for a nice comparison of these two types of “skill” development is the sport of Olympic weightlifting.

In the Soviet Union, and I think in many Eastern Bloc countries with state-funded Olympic training programs, children would be chosen to begin training for their sport at a very young age…perhaps around 5 years old.

For the first three to five years of the child’s training career, they would never touch a real barbell, let alone a weighted barbell. Instead, they’d practice with a towel, or a wooden dowel.

They’d practice the motor skill of the Olympic lifts – which is a very very specific motor skill (hence those lifts being a sport unto themselves).

Around the age of 10, the child might be allowed to begin practicing with a lightweight barbell, and from there, ever so gradually, progressively add weight – always making sure that they maintained the highest level of motor skill in the execution of the movement.

While a lot of this has to do with children simply being ill-suited for progressive weight training, because they’re still growing at a rapid rate, much of it also has to do with getting a person at a young enough age that they can accumulate 10,000 hours of practice at the skill before they achieve full developmental maturity.

This hearkens back to my old blog posts on skill and skill development. Skill is problem solving. It’s the ability to creatively solve problems given the resources available. “Talent” is what we call “inborn skill.” And, it seems, that it doesn’t really exist.

While some people may be more uniquely suited for expertise at certain skills (say, because of limb/torso ratios, etc.), the expression of that “talent” is all that really matters.

So, it’s impossible for us to know how real, frequent, or infrequent “inborn” talent is or is not – that is, until every child is given equal access to every musical instrument, athletic sport, computer program, or whatever other skill you want to measure, from the age of 2 on. Not only that, but they need also be given the freedom, time, money, and emotional support to continue. Got that? Great, now tell me how “talented” someone is.

But this post isn’t about talent. It’s about STRENGTH and SKILL.

The truth is, we all need both.

It’s just that I see so little focus on the real training of EITHER these days.

Most folks in the gym go in and pump some iron to look good. They don’t try to lift heavy poundages. They don’t do the classic lifts at all.

They also do bizarre skill-based workouts…things you might do for fun if you were a little kid, but that are treated with unsettling seriousness in an “adult” gym. Things like balancing on a stability ball on your knees while you move the medicine balls you’re holding in each hand in strange patterns, or while catching and throwing a medicine ball. Not a lot of laughter…a lot of grimacing.

But what’s the point of that? I mean what’s the point both of the seriousness with which it’s undertaken, and of the “exercise” itself. It doesn’t build strength. There’s no progressing it. There’s no overload to it. The body is in too unstable a position to overload. And it only builds the strangest type of “skill” possible…one divorced from anything you might encounter in life at all.

If you’re going to be performing that trick on a stage, or a streetcorner, for your paycheck, it’s important to practice that.

But if not – what the hell are you doing?

The saddest thing of all is that the trainers aren’t even laughing. I mean, not the ones who are making the people do it.

Take a look at your programming, ye trainers and trainees. Return to the basics.

Train STRENGTH with heavy stuff, progressively made heavier, and predominantly with “traditional” (bilateral, barbell) movements.

Train SKILL outside, or wherever you exercise that skill, and try to make it as absolutely perfect as possible…

The Talent Code

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Josh

The Talent Code is a book by Daniel Coyle. It’s got some good stories in it. But I think it’s terribly misleading.

For one thing, Coyle tries to make a case for myelination of nerve circuits as being a key to talent. But that’s actually backwardly-causal. An increase in practice causes increased myelination of nerve circuits, not vice versa. Myelination of nervous cells is essentially similar to the formation of callouses on palms after repeated heavy labor. The repeated exposure to stress causes the cells to protect themselves by increasing their buffer. It’s adaptation…but not causation.

Coyle tries to attach early-childhood experience to increased myelination, which would lead to increased activity. But his arguments are incredibly weak, statistically speaking. He says that highly motivated people in history lost a parent at an early age, hence their heightened drive to survive. However, up until the advent of modern medicine, many people (I’d like to say “most”) lost a parent at an early age, either through war, illness, or the labor of childbirth itself. How meaningful is the statement?

Coyle also suggests that perhaps it’s the child’s place in the family. Younger children have to “keep up” with their elder siblings. Maybe. But how many successful only children have there been?

While he admits that his approach isn’t scientific, it leads me to wonder, then, exactly what his approach is, and how and why it got published.

It seems that these types of science books come out in waves. Some journalist catches onto a nice idea, gets approval for a book deal, and other publishers jump on the bandwagon. Coyle’s book is one of three that I have read in the past three years about talent – the other two being Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and “Talent is Overrated,” by Geoff Colvin.

Gladwell’s book presented some interesting stories about the amount of luck behind the life-history of the people we often think were “born great” think of as “successful.” Colvin’s book places the entire onus of greatness on practice.

All three books were released within a year of each other, and all three suffer from the same problem – none of them were written by anyone with expertise (or “talent”) in the field of motor learning, learning, or movement science.

What you get are some vague ideas about what talent might be. You’re told to practice more. And even then, you might not be in the right place at the right time, or get the right breaks to really “succeed.”

In the end, it’s completely meaningless. While you may be enlightened about the factors contributing to what you used to attribute to “talent” (maybe some genetic predispositions, deliberate practice over years, lucky breaks through life), you leave with no specific understanding of how to increase your own talent at the things you want to do.

I highly recommend all three of these books. I thought they were each great in their own way. But if you’re looking to improve your talent at something, go out and find a good teacher, and start practicing.

The Other Person Is Always Right

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Josh

I want to expose you to an idea that I’ve been trying to integrate into my life recently. I first encountered this idea a few years ago, when I was reading about NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP is typically associated with Tony Robbins, who popularized parts of it. Many sales training techniques will utilize the eye cues from NLP that can reveal the parts of a person’s brain they’re using during conversation (popularly, to see if the person is “lying,” though this isn’t the purpose in NLP). But I’m getting off on a tangent here…

One of the main concepts within NLP is that every person has a “map” of reality that they refer to when thinking about or doing things. An integral part of this concept of a “reality map” is understanding that every person has a positive outcome intended in every action. No one does things to achieve what they would then perceive to be as a negative outcome. They always want to create what they currently understand to be a positive outcome.

Finally, and most importantly, every person is right about what they think.

Take a second to consider these statements. Consider the worst person you can imagine. A criminal of some sort, perhaps. That person’s actions reflect their map of reality. And within that map, their actions have a positive outcome for themselves. They either gain esteem, personal wealth, or something else from their actions. Not only that, but they are completely right about that belief. While their actions may not be “right,” their thought about what their actions will get them, in relation to their map of reality, can never be wrong. They may change their map after suffering consequences other than what they believed would happen (or they may not).

Understanding and accepting this concept is the first step. Learning to accept that what another person tells you is true to them is the second (and I think, more difficult) step.

To highlight this again, let’s take another, less extreme example. A teenager is in the “rebellion” stage. They have formed a map of reality based on their prior experience, their current environment, and their perception of the future. Their actions reflect this map. They do not intend to experience negative consequences as the result of their actions. They want to express themselves and their understanding of the world, whatever it may be – to correct perceived wrongs done to them, perhaps. While they might get grounded for bad behavior, they never intended to get grounded from the outset. Again, not only that, but they were not wrong in what they believed. They were completely right, based on their map of reality, to behave the way they did.

My second exposure to this same concept happened this semester in my Motor Learning class. We learned a new definition of the word “skill,” which is skill as the ability to solve a motor problem. Skill, then, is a continuum, with several factors influencing each person’s level of skill at any moment.

The first article we read with this approach to the idea of skill was by Dr. Susan Higgins. In it, she points out that “the degree of skill we attain on most tasks is generally to the satisfaction of the individual within the constraints imposed by cognitive, morphological, or sociocultural factors. We thereby settle for a level that suits our momentary needs.”

She also says that “You cannot impose a strategy or movement on another person, but should instead regard their own solution and consider the expression of their own personality and problem-solving ability in that solution, and then find ways to enhance their chance of success at the task and increase their pool of resources for solving the problem.” Because – “Each strategy a person uses complements their strengths and weaknesses and reflects their current level of understanding and skill.”

Isn’t this directly in line with what NLP says? I think so.

But what is the lesson here? I don’t want you to think that this post only applies to physical training, or therapy, that’s why I included the NLP tie-in.

I guess my reason for this post is to make a suggestion, which is this:

The next time you’re speaking with, or dealing with another person (or even thinking about an interaction you’ve previously had with another person), consider the perspective presented here. Consider the fact that the other person is referencing their map of reality, and that it is absolutely true to them. Also consider that, whatever the outcome of the interaction, they were ultimately interested in attaining something positive for themselves, in some way.

When you see people doing things, realize that they are expressing their current level of ability in solving the problem presented to them (whether it’s a movement or other type of problem) in their world, based on their previous experience, and their level of consideration of the situation. What is their map? How can you help them to express themselves more clearly (whether it’s through actions or words)? What questions can you ask that will help you to understand them better?

Then, you can think about yourself and your own actions and reactions in this way. Examine yourself, and see how you’re trying to solve problems. What might facilitate your problem-solving capacity? How can you be more understanding and allowing toward yourself?

Finally, consider they way your map presents you to the world. How do you look to other people, based on the map of reality you reference? How can you communicate your map more clearly to others?

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Taking this approach has been a challenging (to say the least) but incredibly eye-opening experience for me. I hope that it will be for you too!

Do Sawyers Have Bigger Arms?

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Josh

The therapy/training world recognizes structure as being related to function. If a person’s structure is off (forward-head, sloped shoulders, etc…see my last post), then their function is what’s causing it (barring any real deformities due to genetics or injury). Changing their function will change their structure. The opposite is not necessarily true.

I wonder, then, if the Sawyers of the world have bigger arms on average than the rest of us. Or if the Smiths have stronger grips, or the Porters stronger than average back musculature.

Since these surnames were originally the occupation of the individual (John the Smith…aka John Smith, Tim the Saw-er…Tim Sawyer, or William the Porter…Bill Porter), and the names and professions were often handed down for several generations, was there any resultant morphological difference in the eventual offspring?

While it’s probably too far gone to tell, I’d hazard a guess that at one point (right before the industrial revolution) the answer may have been yes, or at least, skewed toward characteristics favorable for those professions.

But what about the structural part? If your last name is Porter, and you don’t share your great-, or great-great-, grandfather’s strength, might you still share the structural deficiencies he passed down over the generations, but that he was able to compensate for through constant use?

Again, probably too far gone to tell. But it begs the question – what strengths and weaknesses will you pass down to your offspring?