Part II: The Paradox: Why ‘Heavy Weights’ do not make your muscles grow.
Because your brain (and everyone else's, including mine) is conditioned by ‘fitness’ images seen on T.V. and magazines (showing weights in the hands of lean and muscular people) you may mistakenly believe strength training with weights automatically makes your muscles bigger. Thus, the purpose of this article is to utterly convince you that lifting ‘heavier weights’ do not build larger muscles.” To understand this, I want you to visualize how rock climbers must activate extreme strength within their muscles in order to climb vertically up a wall. You may have observed that these people – male or female are not big, yet super strong! So... how is it possible that you can get stronger without getting bigger by lifting heavier weight compared to lifting lighter weight?
Recall the neural recruitment principle from Part1: If you…1) Think you are going to lift ‘heavier” weight – or 2) You literally are lifting ‘heavy’ weight – then your nervous system activates more cells within a single muscle in order that a greater percentage of muscle ‘fires up’ to move or hold the weight. So here is why this happens...
You must consider what happens between your brain and your muscle. Your body's brain-to-nervous-system-to-muscle activation signal is a bioelectric wave – just like a wave on the ocean – and can be big or small. Big waves have a larger peak, and result from what? You may have guessed it…literally heavier weights as opposed to lighter ones, or…merely thinking you are about to lift a ‘heavy’ weight!
This means that if you initially believe the weight is heavy or it literally is heavy, then you will recruit a greater percentage of muscle simply because a larger electric wave sent down your nervous system activates more of the muscle to ‘fire up’. A single muscle never fires up completely 100% because muscles are soft tissue that will rip and tear if you totally activated them! All soft tissue – muscles, tendons, and ligaments - (and even hard structure like bones) can’t hold too much tension or lift too much weight ripping and tearing! Even a steel structure has its limits, as all Minneapolitans know.
Scientific measurements have shown that the nervous system maximizes its ‘peak electric’ wave/signal two or three reps before failure. Peak signals induced from 'more weight' are simply like a higher ocean wave, in the form of a bioelectric signal sent down the nerves of your body on the way to the muscle... just like through an electric wire... and this signal ‘loses its peak’ around 2 or 3 reps BEFORE muscle fatigue and all out failure occurs.
By training the nervous system to recruit more of the muscle fibers this will in turn make the muscle create MORE TENSION! And as long as you stop short of failure/fatigue - the result is a stronger muscle that will not get much bigger! Creating more tension means the muscle contracts with more force! Creating more tension is simply not the same as ‘working the muscle to exhaustion’. The tone of a muscle will increase – which means the resting level of neuromuscular activity increases (like a engine at high idle) and does NOT mean the superficial/visual appearance of the muscle.
Unfortunately, this knowledge is poorly disseminated and not coherently organized into the education curriculum in colleges or training programs for health and fitness professionals. Further down the line in time when it is most important to translate this knowledge into practical application – when health professionals must train, rehabilitate, or teach people – intellectual entropy in the brains of teachers garble the lessons even more, thus it is no wonder that patients, clients, and news reporters complain about mixed messages regarding health care, nutrition, and physical training. This is not braggadocio, arrogance, or criticism on my part; it is fact.
Certainly, great teachers possess different teaching styles compared one another and therefore a unique chemistry develops between teachers/writers and students/readers but it is just as certain that all competent teachers must understand teach the same fundamental knowledge. In other words, there are immutable fundamentals - such as the primary colors Red, Blue, and Yellow, the seven notes of the major scale of music (familiarly known as Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti,…), as well as the macronutrients Carbohydrates, Protein, and Fat. I digress.
If you desire - or if your trainer idiotically yells at you to finish an exercise to exhaustion then your muscles will keep working…at least for a while! This just means the electrical signals of nervous system degraded past their peak into smaller waves and you are forcing the muscle to work at lower levels of output while you may gnash and grind in pain. It’s like a jockey whipping the horse down the stretch of the Kentucky Derby. By the time your muscles are fatigued your nervous system is past its peak, and thus, you are training yourself to get possibly weaker, not stronger, if you repeatedly force this to happen.
Training to exhaustion or failure often kills motivation in the long run, or causes many young people to dislike exercise. (Recall the Presidential Fitness Award in 7th grade designed to make most people fail?)
If you want to get stronger then stop before training to or through fatigue/failure. Moreover, injuries drop dramatically because most injuries occur under muscular and mentally fatigued conditions, yet ironically many trainers and coaches push people to the point of failure (with either lighter or heavier weight), and worse yet, 'help' the client with forced reps to exhaust the muscle even more! This is done to please the trainer/coach as well as the client that effort is ‘good’. Rah-rah, c'mon...one more.
However, pushing a muscle to exhaustion is necessary when 1) Training the muscle for increasing their lactic acid thresholds AND, 2) Training the total body to handle higher levels of cardiovascular output. Hence, using relatively less weight and working in a higher rep ranges will result in larger muscles. (Muscles must pack more glycogen and build up more mitochondrial enzymes to maintain the higher rep zones/endurance demand).
Think about it this way…’reps/exhaustion’ training strategies must employ lighter weights… otherwise you could not do lots of reps! Got it? Less weight indisputably sends a weaker bioelectric wave through your nerves, and therefore less muscle is contracted to do work. (Visualize two dim light bulbs vainly trying to light a larger room!) Conversely, by utilizing more weight/less reps and stopping short of failure, you will become stronger by training the nervous system like a rock climber does. Comparatively, bodybuilders lift ‘lighter’ weights than rock climbers! The body builder would activate something like four out of ten light bulbs until the bulbs burn out whereas the rock climber activates six of ten light bulbs and pushes ‘more wattage’ into ‘brighter burning’ bulbs… and then turns off switch before the bulbs burn up!
At any rate, athletes like rock climbers and power lifters are interested in maximizing the strength/tension the muscle creates for only one lift or just a few difficult maneuvers in a short burst… not exhaust it with 12-15 reps! Imagine a power lifter or rock climber attempting to repeat a single lift or difficult maneuver more than 10 times in a row! Such repetition is fine for increasing endurance or building a muscle’s size but is counterproductive for creating pure strength.
Nevertheless, any beginner can do either type of training (reps/exhaustion training with lighter weights or neural recruitment training with heavier weights) and grow stronger because either way will initially overload the nervous system! Take anybody who is in a weakened state, give 'em a weight to lift, and they will get stronger. Duh, overloading the nervous system, mind you, is simply using any additional weight or technique - that one is unaccustomed to – which activates the nervous system to a higher level of the current day’s un-adapted intensity output. Give any amount of weight to a beginner who has handled zero extra weight and overloading the nervous system begins.
The fact remains - more weight means the muscle encounters more resistance - and therefore, must activate a larger percentage of muscle fibers to create more tension, period.
Even yoga poses (when held to shaking) exhaust the muscles and overtax the nervous system. Yeah... you will get stronger and not shake with practice, but you will quickly plateau without added load (weight) and then through time spent with the same work load it is difficult to get any stronger when just body weight alone is utilized for creating resistance. If you actually grew 20 to 30 pounds heavier overnight, then you would automatically recruit more muscle to counteract against the increased pressure by gravity that pulls your body to the ground!
Thus, positional strength is what yoga develops... which is smart to develop – yet is limited in comparison to using traditional weights because of yoga’s near impossibility to progressively add load! In other words, if you do not or cannot add weight, then the stimulus to recruit more muscle quickly reaches a limit. Of course you can create ways to increase resistance… but these are usually external artifices and devices used to ‘add to your body weight’ – and therefore are the equivalent stimuli provided by traditional free weights and the lot.
Through media, people are fooled by words and imagery, wrong education, and pep-talk - this means you are conditioned to think that lifting 'heavy weights' produce large muscles like you see on body builders. Au Contraire!... the truth is that lifting heavier weights do not necessarily make your muscles grow.
Please remember, I am persuading you to combine a scientifically measured phenomenon with a personal/intuitive experience you have likely felt in the past. Thus, when you consciously combine the power of the ‘intuitive carpenter’ with the artistically applied knowledge of the scientist during training sessions, you may build your confidence and body awareness to greater levels like never before.
Still… many people must overcome past conditioning and deeply held emotionally based misconception. The only way to accomplish this is by doing it. Such road blocks are not created by others in this world, but are found within our self, are they not?
Thus, many people will need a skilled guide to overcome the reluctance to lift relatively ‘heavy weight’. This reluctance stems from wrong education and psychosomatic fear! Fear in your psyche is made physically real and cripples the body (soma).
By becoming conscious of this phenomenon (neural recruitment) through practice, you will experience a deeper understanding of your body. Moreover, this experience is only an icebreaker that helps you coherently integrate resistance training, nutrition, yoga, and more into a organized whole. What this means in terms of whole body training and training your core will be revealed in The Finale of Core Confusion, next newsletter!