We always laugh at the guy or gal who come to the gym and set up shop on the treadmill or elliptical, hit their favorite program, and proceed to sweat it out for the next hour. Or Six. And still look like they did on day one. If the rule saying calories in < Calories out = weight loss held any merit, these folks would be skinny bitches/bastards in no time, right? So what gives?
Here’s another riddle for you. Why is it that runners get overuse injuries so frequently? Is it that they aren’t fit, or that they have muscle imbalances? I’m going to probably piss a lot of people off here, but it’s not a muscle imbalance issue in 90% of runners. Go ahead, fire away, I can take it, but hear me out.
Let’s say you have your generic runner, who decides that in order to increase their run fitness, they need to run more miles and build their volume and stack run on top of run on top of run, until they wind up peeling the bottom of their feet off from the friction. Sound familiar? Sure does.
So then they get injured and they’re told to take time off. Have you ever told a runner to take time off?? It’s like telling a 4 year old that Santa is really their dad and that Bambi’s mom was really the other white meat. It’s a look of shock, horror, and stubbornness all rolled into one chin tucked mouth half-opened disgust and sheer contempt that you would consider something so stupid.
So as soon as they don’t have any more pain, they go back to it, running the same way, in their same shoes, with the same range of motion in each of their same joints, at the same speed, with the Exact. Same. Pattern. It’s common to say that marathon runners have only one gear, and they tend to burn the living hell out of that one gear. Think about it like driving across the country in first gear the entire way. Sure, you could do it, but you would probably still have an engine that wasn’t a molten rock of lead at the end of the road, and you’d hit the end of the road a hell of a lot sooner if you shifted gears once in a while, drove on some dirt roads, you get the picture.
A lot of people would look at this as an obvious. Take 50,000 steps with the impact of double your body weight in the exact same manner, and you’re bound to cause some issues.
What about your weight training routine? Would this apply here?
Let me ask you this. Do you have a “favorite way” of setting up specific exercises? Use specific machines? Do your squats, deadlifts, chest press, pullups, even bicep curls, side raises, donkey punchers and whateverthehell you call this on a daily basis??
My guess is that you’ve probably changed everything about the way you do an exercise, like the weight, rep range, set scheme, tempo, rest period, etc, but continue to do the same exercise in the exact same way. Even if you do a training cycle of any amount of time, you come back to the same old standby, and give it another kick to see if you’ve made some progress. Sometimes it means you got a little stronger, sometimes you might have lost some strength, but whatevs, you’re back in the groove. And grooves are by nature more comfortable than change.
Another good question would be when was the last time you saw consistent progress in all your lifts, and continued to see advancements for an extended period of time? Ever wonder why the big guys are always seeing results, and why they get there faster and better than everyone else? They’re the ones who change things up the most, and tend to adapt more consistently to the stresses imposed on their bodies due to the variation.
The three stages everyone goes through with movement pattern acquisition are stress (new movement is introduced, body tries to figure out what the hell to do), adaptation (body gets stronger, better at sending nerve impulses, more efficient), and exhaustion (body fatigues, develops compensation patterns, overuse injuries pop up, decreased performance). The key is to try to determine ways to prevent exhaustion while extending the adaptation phase. Duh, right? It’s trickier than you think.
We can see how important variety is by looking no further than the newbies in the gym, especially those in the age range between 15-19. They seem like they can just look at a weight stack and grow (some exceptions apply), and we can see this in older clients as well, when they start doubling and even tripling the amount of weight they can lift in the first few weeks of training. The novel movements and stresses on their bodies cause an increase in nervous signalling without any appreciable increase in muscle cross sectional area. We also see that the muscle can generate a stronger maximal contraction through EMG analysis after performing a strength training routine. Concurrently, when someone puts a joint into isolation, like when they are casted, the maximal muscle contraction is reduced, even in as little as 8 hours, which means doing those isometric calf presses against the cast when I screwed up my ankle playing basketball in high school were completely useless. Epic fail on my part.
Additionally, we can see that a muscles strength is pretty much pattern-specific and doesn’t carry over well to other activities that use the same muscles. Take the runner for example. Let’s have someone who doesn’t run very much at all, but lifts weights like crazy and has very strong legs go out one day and bust out 5 miles and see what part of their body is sore. My guess would be their quads, because they aren’t used to the pattern. Go go one step further, there’s a substantial body of evidence that regardless of the experience of the lifter, visualizing completing the lift versus not visualizing it will more often result in success, which goes to show the role of the nervous system and the psychological aspects to task performance as being just as important as the physical.
The downside is that the neural regeneration is one of the limiting factors to performance, a fact that becomes obvious when performing max weight lifts for repeated sets. The nerve will also get bored with the same old same old after a little while, reducing the amount of effort it puts into contraction and decreasing the benefits at the end of the line. Let’s face it, muscles are pretty dumb. They’ll contract as hard as they’re told to for as long as they’re told to, either by the nerve or by electrical stimulation, so keeping the nerve “interested” in the workout becomes the number one challenge.
Ever listen to the same 4 songs on the radio for a few hours and want to slit your wrists in a hope to make it stop? Yeah, your neural system feels the same way. I can’t listen to “Rolling in the Deep” anymore after a ride home from Calgary where it was on multiple radio stations 37 times in the span of 3 hours.
How do you keep the nerve interested, you ask? Simple, switch it up all the time.
Let’s take for example a dumbell row. Everyone will tell you there’s only one way to row, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts it looks something like this.
95 pounds like a boss, baby.
So let’s say you do the movement in the same way for a few weeks. The nerve will get bored and start watching Jersey Shore to take it’s mind off the fact that you keep making it want to do the same thing over and over again. By changing your grip, your stance, and your angle of pull you can effectively make this one exercise into multiple exercises, stimulating different fibres and different firing patterns that prevent your nervous system from getting used to the pattern.
The average trainee will adapt to a specific movement pattern and stop seeing any benefit from it within 6 workouts. More advanced lifters will adapt within as little as 2-3 workouts, and elites will be within a single workout, meaning consisten variation to the theme is required to make sure the individual is staying ahead of the game, so to speak, and to also prevent pattern burnout and overuse. If runners would vary their terrain, speed, technique, footwear, direction, and training volume more frequently versus just piling mileage on top of mileage, they would have a much lower incidence of overuse injuries, tendinitis and tendinosis, and would then make a few professions have to skip payments on fancy things.
Oh, I almost forgot, if you’re interested in being wicked smart and getting more knowledge than you could swing a badger at, pick up a copy of Muscle Imbalances Revealed: Upper Body today to take advantage of a launch sale to save $70 off the regular price, PLUS get into a coaching call with all the creators. That would be myself, Rick Kaselj, Tony Gentilcore, and Jeff Cubos. Will there be references to smart stuff, Star Wars, and the odd deadlift? More than likely. There will not be any mention of Tracy Anderson or Jillian Michaels being elected president.
Pick up your copy of Muscle Imbalances Revealed HERE before midnight to take advantage of the sale and become my best friend for life.
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