Amped Training

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Why Your Muscles Get Sore: Exercise and Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

This is one I've been meaning to write for a long time now, and it's way overdue.

Everybody and his mother gets hung up on the need to be sore, stiff, and exhausted in order to have an effective workout. 

Well, I take a look at those assumptions, then compare it to what's going on according to controlled research. 

I know, I know: Shut up and lift, labcoat!

Or if you're a girl: I don't care what your research says, I know what works for me!

Yeah. 

Well, if you actually want to know what's going on, have a read. If not, meh. 

Why Your Muscles Get Sore

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Is It Critique or Hatin'?

In the aftermath of the last post I made, regarding Alwyn Cosgrove's plagiarism of Lyle McDonald's Ultimate Diet 2.0, there's been two prevailing opinons.

One side feels that it's despicable. The other side feels that it's just undeserved hatin', and people trolling for the sake of trolling. 

Alwyn has since made a semi-public apology for not crediting Lyle,  but in the process this has placed a nail in the coffin: he was given no permission to use Lyle's work, and in light of other events the excuse of conveniently forgetting the credit paragraph with the rest of the work is extremely flimsy. 

But to those of you that feel it's undeserved hatin', I'm curious for the rationale.

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Warp Speed Plagiarism

 I just read this over at Lyle McDonald's blog.

Apparently Warp Speed Fat Loss, a new-ish product by Alwyn Cosgrove and Mike Roussell, liberally borrows from Lyle's 2003 book The Ultimate Diet 2.0. By "liberally borrows from", I mean "copied nearly word for word".

Read the full story on Lyle's blog: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/blog/2008/07/09/plagiarism-part-2/

I'm not gonna comment any further, cause Lyle sums up most of it, but wow. That's all I can say.

And yet, I'm sure there will be plenty of people writing this off or "giving them the benefit of the doubt" even now. Why? Because they're big names? 

How far does it have to go before you (meaning we) have enough of blatant, outright theft? This is the equivalent of a 4th grader stealing another kid's book report, and it has about the same quality. 

Yet we gladly support these people, give them money, and hold them in high regard. That speaks volumes, to me.

If you want to spread the word, Digg away: http://digg.com/health/Alwyn_Cosgrove_Plagiarizes_Lyle_McDonald_s_Ultimate_Diet_2_0

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Upcoming Workouts - 6 July 2008 

In the last post I outlined my experiences with training on a daily (or at least semi-daily) basis. All in all it's a good thing and very productive if you have the time, but it doesn't come without consequences. 

With that in mind, I've drawn up my schedule for the next week or so. Each part will only be trained three times a week, instead of 5-6. There will be less total volume, less handling of the really heavy stuff, and more emphasis on joint mobility/stability and movement preparation in general.  

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 My Experience with LIfting Often

If you read my pieces on high-volume training (part 1 and part 2 ), you'll know that I've been toying around with a high-volume training block. Not so much doing a lot of work in each session, but doing a lot of workout sessions.

The schedule looked like this, more or less:

Monday - 2-board Press and Box Squat, 6 sets of 3 at ~70%

Tuesday - Incline Bench and Front Squat, 6-8 sets of 3 at ~75%

Wednesday - 2-board Press and Deadlift, 6 sets of 2 at ~80% 

Thursday - Speed Bench and Speed Box Squats, 10-12 sets of 2-3 at ~55%

Friday - Max Effort Bench and Squat exercises, 4-7 singles heavy as hell

Saturday - 2-board Press and Front Squat, 6 sets of 2 at ~70%

That's the on-paper plan, anyway. In practice, I ended up missing about three of these sessions. The first week it wasn't a problem, but by Thursday of the second week, I was feeling beat up pretty good.  

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A Closer Look at Cortisol

I wrote this the other day after seeing yet another esteemed strength coaching expert repeat an all-too-common myth: the idea that cortisol, a key stress hormone in our bodies, is harmful to the athlete. This is based on the idea that cortisol increases during a workout, and cortisol is catabolic, therefore this is Bad Juju. 

As you'll read, there's more to it than this simplified explanation.

Read it at the web link - Cortisol and You

Or read on below:

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High Volume: What's the Story? Part 2

In the last segment , I went over the concept of high-volume/high-frequency training.

To summarize briefly, high volume weight training as used by bodybuilders isn't very productive; but a high volume of work used by strength athletes can be of benefit.

 Why doesn't it work so well for bodybuilders? Bro-ish bodybuilders use high volume because they're after a pump. In their mind, the pump is more important than anything else; more important than progression, weight on the bar, or tension-time.

Since those concepts are the responsible factor behind muscle hypertrophy (aka, bigger muscles), these are what you should work on. Something like 5 sets of 5, or 3-4 sets of 10, or something along those lines will go a lot farther towards getting a muscle bigger than doing 10 variations of the same exercise for 5 sets of 12 each.

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High Volume: What's the Story?

 When we discuss weight training, one of the key things we talk about is the volume of work done. Volume can mean different things to different people.

To Mike Mentzer and the HIT gang, volume was the number of sets done. Most bodybuilders still think in these terms; the number of sets per body part.

To athletes and strength coaches, volume takes on a different meaning. In this circle, volume is generally measured as the number of barbell lifts done (NL), or as the tonnage of a workout (sets * reps * weight used). 

Volume is also manipulated by the frequency of workouts. If you lift once a week, you'll have less volume than someone lifting three times a week, all things equal (note that this isn't always the case; you can take the workload of a single workout and spread it across multiple sessions).  

There's a pretty wide gap between these two groups, not to mention in between them. The bodybuilders will argue over doing just a few sets (HIT) or doing a whole lot of sets to "blast the part" (the high-volume workouts you read in the muscle mags). As a rule, if you're after physique goals, and aren't using steroids to help things along, you're better off keeping the volume in check. This doesn't mean one set,  nor does it mean one workout every 21 days (this has actually been suggested, so I'm not making it up). It means keep things in check.

What about strength athletes? Here it gets a little fuzzier. Bodybuilding requires a specific set of conditions, and creates a specific kind of stress in the muscle tissues. Strength gains can overlap with this on occasion, but by and large pure strength training is a different animal. This is what I want to talk about.  

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Testosterone Spikes: Predictor of Performance? 

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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So Bands Don't Work, Huh? 

The Effects of Combining Elastic and Free Weight Resistance on Strength and Power in Athletes

This study was undertaken to determine whether combined elastic and free weight resistance (CR) provides different strength and power adaptations than free weight resistance (FWR) training alone. Forty-four young (age 20 ± 1 years), resistance-trained (4 ± 2 years' experience) subjects were recruited from men's basketball and wrestling teams and women's basketball and hockey teams at Cornell University. Subjects were stratified according to team, then randomly assigned to the control (C; n = 21) or experimental group (E; n = 23). Before and after 7 weeks of resistance training, subjects were tested for lean body mass, 1 repetition maximum back squat and bench press, and peak and average power. Both C and E groups performed identical workouts except that E used CR (i.e., elastic resistance) for the back squat and bench press, whereas the C group used FWR alone. CR was performed using an elastic bungee cord attached to a standard barbell loaded with plates. Elastic tension was accounted for in an attempt to equalize the total work done by each group. Statistical analyses revealed significant (P < 0.05) between-group differences after training. Compared with C, improvement for E was nearly three times greater for back squat (16.47 ± 5.67 vs. 6.84 ± 4.42 kg increase), two times greater for bench press (6.68 ± 3.41 vs. 3.34 ± 2.67 kg increase), and nearly three times greater for average power (68.55 ± 84.35 vs. 23.66 ± 40.56 watt increase). Training with CR may be better than FWR alone for developing lower and upper body strength, and lower body power in resistance-trained individuals. Long-term effects are unclear, but CR training makes a meaningful contribution in the short term to performance adaptations of experienced athletes.

Well, this goes a long way towards clearing up that misconception, I'd hope.

Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell fame has been credited with bringing elastic bands to popularity in the training of strength athletes, but there's been a lot of resistance (haha) to the idea in some circles.

The big reason, of course, was a lack of clinical research on the subject. In all fairness, this is actually a valid criticism -- otherwise, we'd be taking the bro-route of going by how it feels, yo.