AmpedTraining Blog
2010 January 23 | 5 Comments »
By Matt
It’s in vogue these days to hate on bodybuilding and the training methods bodybuilders use. The trend these days is to play up the role of strength-based training and ‘functional’ (sic) training methods, getting away from the older bodybuilding culture that’s dominated the popular conception of weight-lifting since at least the 1960s.
It used to be all about the pump, about feeling and shaping and all of that. These days, it’s more about ensuring proper movement, developing well-rounded fitness, and putting strength-based methods at the center of that balanced program. Specialized goals are then added to that framework, in the same sense that your house can look different from your neighbors even if they have the same blueprints.
I can’t say there’s a real problem with this, because that’s the gist of my philosophy, and in general I think that’s how things should be done. However, this takes us to a dangerous place, a thought process that can be counterproductive; in other words, you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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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
