Shock
Training
By
Brian D. Johnston
Do
you really want to 'shock' your muscles?
You've heard it several times before: 'shock the muscles in
order to spur further growth and to keep them from
adapting.' There is an element of truth and validity to this
statement, if applied in its proper context which will be
discussed shortly. However, do note that the term 'shock' is a
misnomer. Although sounding 'hardcore', and contributing to a
catchy article title, shock refers to a clinical syndrome in
which the peripheral blood flow is inadequate to return
sufficient blood to the heart for normal function,
particularly transport of oxygen to all organs and tissues
(Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, 18th edition).
The result of shock could be due to a number of conditions,
including hemorrhage, drug interaction, infection, and trauma
(keep this one in mind). Symptoms of shock include marked
paleness of the skin, dilation of the pupils, a rapid but weak
pulse rate, shallow and increased breathing rate, and
decreased blood pressure. Other possible symptoms include
urinary retention and incontinence of feces, restlessness, and
extreme thirst.
If you suffer from any of these symptoms following a strength
training session, any of which are abnormal, seek medical
attention immediately. Also, give careful consideration to
restructuring your program; exercise is meant to improve
health, not jeopardize it. Moreover, if you could regularly
and, in fact, shock your system from strength training, you
would not be able to sustain doing so very often before
incurring death.
Since
trauma is a contributing determinant of shock, it may be
argued that strength training is a form of shock, causing
systemic trauma via muscular damage.
This
type of trauma is more aptly classified as a homeostatic
disturbance or disruption than that of shock. It is not akin
to an automobile accident or having a finger cut off in a
machining mishap. The induced trauma from physical exertion is
a stressor mild enough that most people can experience it
repeatedly without severe, physiological complications, but is
harsh enough to induce a soft tissue change of increased
strength and lean muscle mass. However, in order for the
negativity of exercise stress to become a positive, to cause a
change, sufficient time between training sessions must subsist
to allow the transpiration of supercompensatory adaptation.
Adapting to strength training
Adaptation is the adjustment to a change in internal or
external conditions or circumstances. In other words, our
bodies and minds become 'used to' particular stimuli wherein
the stimuli are no longer considered new or unusual, but part
of everyday existence. If a stimulus invades our bodies or
minds too frequently, not allowing for growth or change,
adaptation results in stagnation or regression, also known as
cellular resistance.
There are two types of adaptation. The first type is
developmental (homotrophic; homo meaning the same, trophic
concerned with nourishment), being a progressive reaction
resulting in an enlargement and multiplication of preexisting
cells without qualitative change. This type of adaptation
requires an increase in activity, such as a muscle having to
perform more (overload) metabolic work than usual. In the case
of strength training, the term 'more' generally refers to an
increase in weight lifted. Although an increase in duration
can benefit anaerobic training by increasing the load time
of the set doing so can only continue so long before
reaching diminishing returns, causing overuse atrophy of the
muscles. Hence, it is regular weight increases that are of
primary importance in overloading muscles to stimulate further
strength increases.
The second type of adaptation is redevelopmental (heterotrophic;
hetero indicating different), being a forced readjustment
to an entirely different kind of activity. Although this
refers to a definite qualitative biocellular change, the term
can gratuitously apply to change as a consequence of imposed
demands to exercise. Specifically, too much activity, too
frequently, results in overuse atrophy of fast twitch fibers,
those responsible for the greatest magnitude of muscle mass
and strength. They diminish in size to preserve contractile
energy and to accommodate an environment characterized by
endurance. Consequently, regardless of how hard you train it
is vital not to perform more exercise than is necessary to
stimulate the growth mechanism response.
Subsidiary classes of adaptation include the result of growth
processes and the acquisition of neuromuscular skills. In the
first instance, it is vital for the body to adapt to stress
during recovery, allowing for physiological and architectural
change in muscle tissue, i.e., increase functional ability as
a result of muscular hypertrophy. In the second instance, it
is necessary that the application of stress regularly change
so the muscles do not become accustomed to the method of
homeostatic disturbance. However, change must not be so
frequent that you cannot consistently compare different
measurements of training data in order to determine the
efficacy of a strength training program.
The above derivative aspects deal with the specificity of
adaptation. On a broader scale, the modality of adaptation
alters throughout a training career, subsuming three distinct
stages: 1) beginner (neuromuscular), 2) intermediate (hypertrophic),
and 3) advanced (neuromuscular).
Beginner Trainees
During the initial few months of strength training, as with
any non-practiced physical activity, adaptation is largely
neurological. Uncoordinated bodies unaccustomed to lifting
weights do not efficiently lift loaded barbells, do not
isolate the intended targeted area, using more musculature and
energy than necessary. It is not unusual, for example, for
beginners to feel more tension in their forearms than in their
shoulders while performing lateral raises, or experience sore
abdominals after performing triceps pushdowns. Eventually
coordination and motor skills improve, shifting a greater
burden on the targeted muscles.
Intermediate Trainees
Subsequently, once the nervous system adequately adapts to
skillfully lift weights, it is then obligatory for muscles to
hypertrophy in order to confront future overloads. Although
several hypotheses exist as to why and how muscles adapt via
hypertrophy, it appears a key factor is overcompensation of
protein synthesis or an increase in myofibrillar proteins.
Greg Bradley-Popovich explained this process in the book
Rational Strength Training: Principles & Casebook
(available at www.i-a-r-t.com) as follows:
"During the process of protein synthesis in any cell,
energy is consumed in the form of adenosine triphosphate
(ATP), the body's energy currency. Muscle contraction, like
protein synthesis and the vast majority of other physiological
processes, also consumes ATP. The moments of ATP shortage
during protein synthesis (as a result of ATP being used for
intense muscular contractions) are hypothesized to be of
paramount importance. Supposedly, an unknown signal would
report to the muscle cell nuclei ordering them to send more
protein-building instructions back out into the cell. It is
proposed that when a trained muscle attempts to "catch
up" on its protein synthesis during rest, it
inadvertently overshoots resulting in a supercompensation, or
net increase, in the amount of muscle protein. The concept of
this competition for energy, called the ATP Deficit Theory, is
somewhat analogous to the glycogen supercompensation
characteristic of trained muscles."
Evidently, to promote muscle hypertrophy, the activity must be
demanding enough to produce this effect.
Low
intensity endurance training will not sufficiently deplete ATP
stores available for protein synthesis. ATP can actually
regenerate itself that quickly. Conversely, if the tension
time of a set is too brief apparently under 45 seconds
(although this is debatable) while implementing very heavy
weights ATP is taken up quickly, but not in proportion to
muscle fatigue; again resulting in lack of ATP store depletion
allocated for protein synthesis. This may explain why power
and Olympic lifters increase strength (via skill
acquisition/adaptive coordination) without the characteristic
hypertrophy of bodybuilders. Hence, in order to maximize
muscle growth, it is best that sets last at least 45 seconds,
but not so long (over 2 minutes) as to promote a high
endurance capacity and potential overuse atrophy.
Advanced Trainees
After 18-24 months of proper training (a rarity, indeed),
realizing optimum hypertrophic adaptation becomes quite
probable. However, this is only true relative to the
individual. It would be true of a thirty-year old trainee,
whose testosterone levels are slowly declining, but not
applicable to a 15-year old teenage boy. However, with all
factors being ideal, two years is more than sufficient to
realize optimum hypertrophy in the young adult.
Thereafter, hypertrophy slowly relinquishes its role as a
fundamental factor in progressive strength gains, with
neurological and psychological factors taking over. Trainees
become so used to lifting that improvement continues by
implementing better methods of leverage while increasing the
participatory rate of surrounding muscle groups to help lift
progressively heavier weights also known as adaptive
coordination. Trainees also acquire the mental focus and
discipline to better use emotions (e.g., anger) to
volitionally 'will' weight up the psychological factor.
It then becomes a trainee's greatest challenge to eke out a
few final pounds of muscle mass, to realize full genetic
potential. For a novice, the mere inclusion of resistance
training is new and unusual. Consequently, nearly any program
- regardless of how poorly designed - elicits a positive
effect. (This does not suggest that those with six months or
less training experience should refrain from the
hyper-training suggestions in this article, but is unnecessary
and should remain in reserve for when progress slows
considerably.)
However, for the advanced trainee, it is not as simple as
performing the same workouts and the same exercises
incessantly. Adding a repetition or a few pounds to the bar
inevitably increases strength if sufficient recovery exists
- but is only part of a synergistic totality necessary to
stimulate muscle hypertrophy beyond current levels. Repetition
of a mundane stimulus, regardless of the seemingly positive
outcome of strength increases from workout-to-workout, results
in over-adaptation of a stressor. What is occurring are
strength increases due to neuromuscular coordination and
volitional effort. As previously stated, the objective is
muscle adaptation to exercise stress to increase functional
ability not adaptation to the method of exercise stress -
to the element stimulating growth. To make further progress,
to fulfill one's ultimate genetic potential, workouts must
undertake unusual events events to which the body is not
accustomed.
Analogously, years ago when people suffered from certain
physical or mental diseases, doctors prescribed blood-letting
and shock therapy. Today these procedures seem barbaric, but
they did serve a purpose. Medical professionals hypothesized,
and correctly so, that diseases become part of the
individual's internal environment. The result: the patient is
unable to continue fighting the disease, remaining complacent
and coexists within a 'groove'. The inclusion of blood-letting
and shock therapy introduces a new stress, so intense and
foreign that the body establishes an all-out defense mechanism
against the invading intruder (being the loss of blood and
electrical shock) that, concurrently, combats the original
disease, or at least holds it in submission.
Strength training must be of a similar nature: very intense
and unusual to traumatize the muscles and homeostatic
tendencies into further growth/change, forcing them to adapt
to a higher level of functional ability. However, realize that
the more intense the stimulus, the lower the volume and
frequency must be in order to minimize inroading into recovery
ability both systemically (the body as a whole) and locally
(the trained muscle in question). Furthermore, increasing
sets, volume or frequency is not an ideal method of
traumatizing the muscles in an effort to improve muscular
hypertrophy. If it were ideal, ten sets would be better than
one, twenty sets better than ten, etc. ad infinitum. Obviously
this rationality produces diminishing returns and inevitable
overtraining.
Furthermore, past a certain level, it is more the extent or
magnitude than the intensity of tissue damage that stimulates
cortisol production, the hormone responsible for catabolizing
inflammation due to (exercise) stress; the hormone that,
likewise, catabolizes muscle protein. Consequently, performing
multitudinous sets in order to annihilate a muscle is both
unnecessary and very unproductive. Doing so proceeds past the
point of stimulation into over-stimulation, a factor that
negates precision of dose/response measurement while espousing
ambiguity.
What is more, some periodization proponents suggest that there
is an increase in growth hormone (gH) production after 45
minutes of training. However, they fail to indicate the
significance of a correspondingly higher cortisol release,
nullifying any potential benefits of a gH boost. Excess
cortisol actually inhibits the function of gH. Moreover, the
increase in gH from exercise is not analogous to that of
potent injections taken by some bodybuilders, the former being
too diminutive to notably accelerate or positively influence
muscle hypertrophy beyond norms at least it has never been
proven otherwise.
Advanced
training methods
What, then, constitutes intense and unusual? I can provide
several examples from my own experience, examples that
produced excellent results in a brief period of time, even
after several years of unproductive, high volume training.
(Note: although some of my clients and I have benefited from
the following methods, they will not suit everyone's recovery
ability and rate-of-fatigue [i.e., fiber type,
endocrinological responses].)
My first experience with the 'unusual' occurred after an
initial year of training. At age 16, progress came to a
standstill. unable to push my body weight past 150 pounds at a
height of 5' 10", I purchased Mike Mentzer's Heavy Duty™
arm course, an approach that promoted rest-pause training.
This method suggests performing 2-3 reps to muscular failure,
followed by singles or doubles to muscular failure with the
same (or slightly lesser weight) with 10 second rests between
the mini-sets, totaling 5-8 reps. Within 3 sessions of
training my biceps once per week for one rest-pause set of
concentration curls, my arms increased in size by 1/2 inch. I
then made the fatal error of believing 'more is better',
performing two rest-pause sets twice weekly in the hopes of
accelerating growth. Accordingly, the intensity was too
extreme to accommodate the volume and frequency, and I quickly
lost my 1/2 inch gain in a matter of a month. I made a second
error in logic, that HIT was inferior to 'traditional'
training (although it produced a most spectacular gain), and
returned to my previous program of higher volume, lower
intensity work.
After a further two years of training, I perused some old
training records, analyzing my rest-pause experiment. I then
hypothesized that it was the new, unusual and intense stimulus
that produced the gain. I then conceived a new procedure for
my calves, which stagnated at sixteen inches for several
months on a program of up to 10 sets, twice a week. I
performed only one set of single dumbbell calf raises,
consisting of 8 repetitions to muscular failure, followed by
eight forced then 8 negative repetitions. The effort was,
indeed, intense and the delayed muscular soreness even worse.
Unable to walk for two days, I stayed home from high school
vowing never to do that again. However, after twenty days the
soreness subsided and I repeated the workout. Within four
sessions, averaging once every ten days, my calves grew 3/4
inches.
Six years thereafter, at age 24, I performed a much different
calf program consisting of one set of seated calf raises and
one set of standing calf raises, each for an arbitrary 100
continuous repetitions. Extremely torturous, I chose only to
complete two such workouts, but increased my calf girth
another _ inch in two weeks. Evidently, my calves consist of a
higher ratio of slow twitch, endurance fibers; otherwise, they
would have atrophied due to the volume (load time) of each
set.
About
the same time I substituted heavy squatting of 8-10
repetitions for twenty rep sets, performing only one such set,
after an initial warm-up, once a week. Within 5 sessions my
thigh circumference increased by three-quarter inches. The
higher repetitions, together with a different training
environment of a much longer load time, was a needed change
(disturbance) to my homeostasis and, likewise, the growth
appeared to reflect an abundance of slow twitch fibers in my
thighs.
All
of these training applications have several elements in
common. First, the strategy is unusual, although the exercises
implemented were familiar. Second, muscular adaptation was
fairly quick, realized within 3-5 workouts with any further
application failing to produce additional (or at least
noticeable) results.
Third, to obtain optimum results the
intensity variable must be ideal for the muscle group in
question. For example, it would be perilous to perform 100 rep
sets for a muscle predominantly fast twitch, and most likely
ineffective to integrate heavy rest-pause training for a
muscle predominantly slow twitch. Fourth, and from my
empirical data, implementing the same intensity variable in
future workouts does not increase muscle hypertrophy nearly as
well, or at all, in comparison to the initial application.
Declining results may be due to two factors: 1) neuromuscular
memory (adaptation to the method of stimulus), and 2) the
muscles are that much closer to their genetic apex, so it is
illogical to expect later progress to be as noteworthy.
There are some other factors to consider. Foremost,
appropriate application of the overall scheme of the above
sample intensity variables, as well as others, must take into
account that (exercise) stress affects the body as a whole,
thereby systemically making inroads into recovery resources.
Accordingly, limit any type of 'shock therapy' to one muscle
group, or one exercise affecting multiple muscle groups at a
time. Furthermore, instilling hyper intense training methods
correspondingly necessitates the maintenance of past training
poundages (or a modest overload) for remaining exercises and
body parts, thereby reducing inroads into recovery. This point
is vital since attempting to dramatically improve on all
exercises increases the risk of overtraining.
It is then imperative to discontinue hyper training after 4-5
training sessions, or when noticing diminishing returns, to
avoid further and unnecessary inroading. Allow 1-2 weeks
complete rest (no training) then choose a new exercise/muscle
group, repeating the process. In sum, it may take six or more
months to cover the entire body, depending on frequency of
training and the number of muscles/exercises chosen.
Do not make the mistake of altering your program every
session, implementing the so-called 'Confusion Principle.'
Altering workouts randomly, or changing a routine too
frequently does not provide consistent and regular data to
determine progress results. The only thing being confused is
your ability to apply logical and standardized analysis
methods, thereby making training a hit and miss approach.
Regarding frequency, it does not need to be re-regulated if
training the remaining, non-hyper trained body parts on a
maintenance/modest improvement basis. However, the
muscle/exercise receiving a hyper approach may need to be
down-regulated in frequency to once every second workout (half
as often than is typical) to accommodate the unusually high
demands and to better allow for localized recovery of the
affected soft tissues. For example, if you typically
incorporate the leg press once every seven days, then once
every fourteen days would be in order. Additional
consideration must also be given to the cross-over effect of
the hyper exercise in question. Since the leg press affects
hamstrings and glutes, it is vital to refrain from additional
exercises for these muscle groups, both on the hyper day and
especially on the non-hyper days.
By implementing the above hyper-training fundamentals, you may
be quite surprised as to the effects produced, even after
months or years of nonexistent results. However, do so
cautiously, rationally and, most importantly, sporadically.
