I ran across this quote from Mel Siff today at the Yahoo Supertraining group. There is a tremendous amount of wisdom packed into this short paragraph. The author has gone straight to the heart of one of the things which ail us the most in the current "conventional" approach to fitness.
"The principle of gradual overload must be reformulated to mean
progressive neuromuscular overload, where variation is one means of
facilitating overloading. The bodybuilding emphasis on hypertrophy
obscures the vital principle that muscle growth and performance are
determined primarily by neuromuscular overload and not by steroid
ingestion. How else is it possible to explain the continual increase
in strength of weightlifters who remain for years the same mass? I am
convinced that major increases in performance and hypertrophy will
occur when we learn how to modulate predictably and safely the
inhibitory neuromuscular processes, both to increase overload and to
enhance the rate of recovery."
At first this passage may seem somewhat innocuous, but upon dissection it yields some interesting reflection. Firstly, what is the dominant training philosophy that you see when you walk into most gyms in this day in age in the West? Bodybuilding. And I am not pontificating, because that is the approach I subscribed to for many years. The doctrine of the bodybuilding philosophy has been so prevalent in the media over recent decades that it would be almost impossible to not imbibe the message. Isolation exercises, body-part splits, and other techniques for enhancing subjectively determined characteristics of physique are often the only thing many gym-goers have been subjected to. This is not necessarily a horrible thing, if your goal is to be a bodybuilder, but most of us have no such aspirations. If your goal is to be more healthy, have more energy, have less pain and be more comfortable with your physical appearance, all at the same time, then you need to break out of the bodybuilding mentality.
And what is the problem with the conventional doctrine? Well, one of the first problems which I come back to constantly is that it is all about doing more. The sole means of progression seems to be more work. Sure, you may change up exercises every 4-6 weeks. But all you are doing is going from one simplistic, two-dimensional exercise to another, juicing it until it can't make you grow anymore, then moving on. The missing ingredient is quality. If we want true athletic progress, we should not concentrate solely on increasing the quantity of work, but also on progressively and incrementally increasing the quality of work! Mel Siff hits on it when he talks about "progressive neuromuscular overload, where variation is one means of facilitating overloading." It is not just about load, volume, frequency, time under tension, etc. It is also about varying and augmenting the neuromuscular complexity of the training.
I think Coach Scott Sonnon of Circular Strength Training has succeeded in distilling this idea down into a practical and usable tool in the concept of Incremental Sophistication. Following this line of thought, the athlete is never limited solely to the basic exercise. For example, we may start with a push-up. Doing regular push-ups until we have built sufficient physical capacity for our sport or our goals. Then, we would take that push-up and make it into a more sophisticated movement pattern like a screwing-arm push up (reference Forward Pressure from RMAX International). Even though a regular push-up may not continue to challenge our systems and cause a training effect, by increasing the sophistication of the neurological demands of the exercise we can continue to reap progress. The screwing-arm push-up can then further transform into doing it on a closed fist or doing it explosively into a clap, etc. So you see, we are not just doing more, we are also doing "better" quality movement in that we are making the demands more complex in terms of neuromuscular coordination and we are also taking the movements closer to our sport or activity specific demands.
By stimulating our system to not only grow bigger muscles, but to improve the overall function and efficiency of the neuromuscular system, we open the door to creating more with less. We can gain more strength with less size. We can be more effective with less wasted effort. We can do more useful work versus simply doing more work, and that is the definition of efficiency. Fitness is not just about the size and shape of our muscles and how much bodyfat we have. It isn't even about how much force or power we can generate. It is about being able to perfectly execute the task in front of us with the least amount of effort possible. If you are able to do that, you are "fit" for your sport / activity. And if you are to be fit for something, you are going to need to add increasing sophistication to your training, because life and sport are not static, not two dimensional and not predictable.
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