AmpedTraining Blog
2009 March 2 | Comments Off
By Matt
You grow outside the gym, not in it. That’s the mantra so often repeated, used to justify everything from training a muscle group only once a week to taking off whole months from exercise. There’s certainly a lot of truth in that statement. One thing that’s come into vogue these days is the concept of the unloading week (sometimes called deloading; it’s the same concept) where you do what the title says: remove the training stress from your body to “unload” it.
This is a valuable tool. Yet, as obvious as “take it easy” is, I don’t think a lot of people get it. So I want to talk about that.
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2009 February 26 | 1 Comment »
By Matt
I don’t usually listen to people online that quote squat numbers. If someone has a video, or is a competing powerlifter or Olympic weightlifter, that’s one thing. It isn’t a matter of lying, either. I think most people just don’t realize what actually constitutes a real squat.
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2009 February 17 | Comments Off
By Matt
I made this post on another forum, and it’s one of those things I tend to write off-the-cuff that tends to summarize things fairly well, so I thought I’d share. The context was a discussion about ‘overtraining’ and stress/fatigue in general.
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2009 February 9 | Comments Off
By Matt
Everybody likes to bench press, especially in the commercial gyms. It’s the one lift that everybody knows and everyone will ask about if you mention you lift weights. “How much ya bench?” Guys seem to gravitate to the bench, and crappy form, like it’s some expected tradition.
What about the girls though? Besides pullups, I can’t think of a lift that women seem to have a harder time with. It can lead to some frustration and eventually just giving up.
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2009 January 30 | 2 Comments »
By Matt
Lots of people have muscle groups or body parts they’d like to look better. This fair enough, in concept, but I’m not sure that average folks really understand some of the implications. Make no mistake, this applies to both males and females that aspire to have better bodies.
The rationale goes that if you want a part to look good, you have to work that part. It’s logical enough if you don’t know any better, I guess. Guys are all about the chest and biceps. Women like the butt and legs. Both seem equally obsessed with abs.
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2009 January 2 | Comments Off
By Matt
Something I’ve noticed over the last year or two is a trend towards including ‘plyometric’ exercises in workouts and other ‘information products’ geared towards women.
For those of you that don’t know, a plyometric exercise is a movement that’s rapidly loaded and then instantly reversed. Any jumping, bounding, or hopping movement falls into this category to some degree.
The idea is that some of the connective-tissue elements of the muscle complex can store energy from being rapidly loaded, and this energy can be reversed to provide a more powerful movement. The appropriate analogy here is a rubber band – when you land from a jump, the connective tissues around your muscle act in the exact same way. There’s a quick, powerful stretch which stores the energy.
This is labeled the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC), and it’s one of the most widely-studied phenomena in sports science. A lot of sports have a need for the ability to absorb and rebound force, and plyometrics have been repeatedly demonstrated to be very effective at training this ability.
The key thing to remember is that typical strength training doesn’t train the SSC; what plyometrics train, and how they train it, is a completely different thing from strength training. I’m reiterating this so you don’t get it in your head that it’s just a different kind of muscle exercise. Plyometric training is a dominantly neuromuscular effect – there’s little to no actual effect on the muscle fibers. More on plyometrics
2008 May 21 | Comments Off
By Matt
For a long time, I’d never really considered the hormonal aspects of training as being very important. It seems like a lot of wanking over what is, at best, a transient hormonal spike in response to a stimulus (in this case, exercise).
We’re talking brief here, like 45-60 minutes of increased testosterone which is, at best, a slight elevation off baseline. Steroid cycles have to magnify this level many times over to see drastic results.
However, there has been some correlation between testosterone and cortisol levels with the condition of the athlete. The first group I’m aware of that really investigated it were Lon Kilgore and Glenn Pendlay, who determined that the ratio of testosterone to cortisol was an accurate predictor of the state of the athlete — a marker of overtraining and overreaching, in other words.
Pendlay, G. and L. Kilgore (2001). Hormonal fluctuation: A new method for the programming of training. Weightlifting USA 19(2): 15.
Other (apparently unpublished) thesis research from Glenn Pendlay and Michael Hartmann has more or less confirmed that the test:cortisol ratio is depressed during hard training, but when unloading occurs it will sharply increase above baseline after adequate rest has occurred.
It seems like there’s definitely a correlation between testosterone levels and the athlete’s condition, even if it’s not responsible.
Is there anything more to it? There just might be.
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2008 May 20 | Comments Off
By Matt
The Effect of Ephedra and Caffeine on Maximal Strength and Power in Resistance-Trained Athletes
Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research:Volume 22(2)March 2008pp 464-470
Caffeine and ephedrine-related alkaloids recently have been removed from International Olympic Committee banned substances lists, whereas ephedrine itself is now permissible at urinary concentrations less than 10 μg·mL-1. The changes to the list may contribute to an increased use of caffeine and ephedra as ergogenic aids by athletes. Consequently, we sought to investigate the effects of ingesting caffeine (C) or a combination of ephedra and caffeine (C + E) on muscular strength and anaerobic power using a double-blind, crossover design. Forty-five minutes after ingesting a glucose placebo (P: 300 mg), C (300 mg) or C + E (300 mg + 60 mg), 9 resistance-trained male participants were tested for maximal strength by bench press [BP; 1 repetition maximum (1RM)] and latissimus dorsi pull down (LP; 1RM). Subjects also performed repeated repetitions at 80% of 1RM on both BP and LP until exhaustion. After this test, subjects underwent a 30-second Wingate test to determine peak anaerobic cycling power, mean power, and fatigue index. Although subjects reported increased alertness and enhanced mood after supplementation with caffeine and ephedra, there were no significant differences between any of the treatments in muscle strength, muscle endurance, or peak anaerobic power. Our results do not support the contention that supplementation with ephedra or caffeine will enhance either muscle strength or anaerobic exercise performance.
This was an interesting piece of information.
I’m not sure how many of you have ever played around with pre-workout stimulants, but if you’ve ever been a fan of ephedra/ephedrine products, you’ll know how they have a very strong effect on alertness and energy….which is a good thing if you’re in need of some extra training intensity.
Also, ephedra alkaloids (ie, the herbal form of the Ma Huang plant from which we get ephedra, not to be confused with ephedrine HCL which is a purified form) have recently been removed from the IOC banned list, which is an interesting move in itself.
Well, this seems to indicate that, while ephedra (E) and caffeine (C) taken in concert will do nice things for overall alertness and mental awareness, they don’t do anything for strength and anaerobic power.
Interesting, but not necessarily damning. For one, the boost of mental alertness in itself is reason enough to consider something of this nature. I can only speak for myself on this matter, but sometimes the motivation alone is the make or break in the workout – not to mention whether or not I even make it to the gym.
For those of you concerned about ephedra/ephedrine’s negative effects, all I can say is don’t be silly. E-based products of any type have been implicated in far less than 200 incidents of death, and all of those incidents have occurred in individuals that either 1) had a pre-existing cardiovascular issue and/or 2) ignored the warning labels and popped them like candy. The normal dose of 25mg will give you a buzz; 50-75mg without a tolerance is pushing it. But we’ve all heard the stories of people taking upwards of 100-200mg/day, and that’s just asking for it any way you look at it. Compare the number of deaths that occur each year from aspirin and you’ll see why, statistically, this is just not a worry if you aren’t a total moron.
There’s some drawbacks, though. This study used three groups (placebo, caffeine only, and ephedra + caffeine), but had only nine subjects. Yes, nine. Not nearly enough to matter statistically in total, let alone have any significance per group. So that means that this is more or less worthless in any realistic sense; but as a researcher in this area, you have to work with what you can get, I suppose.
Still interesting overall, though, and it does at least correlate to what I’ve personally seen to happen in the gym. Stimulants will get me very wired up and “in the zone” as it were, but I don’t think they’ve ever actually made me stronger. If anything, they just have the effect of getting rid of the “squat jitters”, those butterflies you get when you’re about to hit a really heavy weight.
Hey, again – getting over that and being able to push it is the big reason I’ve used stimulants. I’m not particularly interested in any real strength gains, just the ability to push it out.
2008 March 16 | Comments Off
By Matt
What does the word “functional” mean to you?
If you’ve had any sampling of the modern fitness industry, “functional” will probably mean doing exercises that have a high carryover to the motions and actions found in most team sports.
It could just as easily mean standing on a wobble board doing one-handed dumbbell presses, in order to improve “core stability”.
Have you ever stopped to think what “functional” really means, though?
The word itself should give you a hint. A more appropriate definition of functionality would be “the way the body’s systems work in order to create motor output”, to paraphrase the late Mel Siff.
In other words, functional training is a formal way of saying “training to improve how the body works in order to perform in specific ways”.
When somebody says that something is “functional”, the response should be “functional for what?”. Functional training is not just a discrete thing you can point to. It’s not a style of training, as much as people like to quantify training in this way.
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