You are not Painting
January 30th 2007 11:35
Not related to weight training.
Weight training is not analogous to painting. When you paint a wall etc,you brush a stroke,step back, and see what it looks like. If you decide you did not get enough paint on the object to suit you, you reach for the paint again and give it another brush. If it takes three or four strokes,so be it.
This is the way in which many people approach weight training. They are not the most forlorn of trainers. Those are the trainers who obliviously soldier through the sets specified on the workout card they carry with them and like automata move on to the cardio area as the card prescribes. I assume that these clueless folks are rookies and have not had enough experience to begin to take control of their workouts.
More experienced trainers tend to have a certain number of sets for each exercise which they will finish in accordance their overall plan no matter what. In most cases I suspect that they are doing one or even two too many sets for what is optimum on any given movement. Why? Because there is no set that can approach the first for productive muscle building.
Your muscles are programmed to adapt to various kinds of stimuli. Their reaction to sub-maximal sets is to prepare for repetition by focusing on slow twitch tissue designed to be activated by long repetitive movements. Its counterpart-fast twitch tissue- is designed for rapid recruitment when there is demand for explosive short term activation.
Weight training can and does involve both,but real changes in strength and size focus on the fast-twitch. Our friends from an earlier post-sprinters- when they have muscle biopsies, show a larger than normal percentage of fast twitch tissue in their muscles. They are also characterized by the large size of their bodies when compared to long distance runners. Thus bigger in running is a direct result of short and all out. In sculpting the body bigger thus thereby better sculpted is a direct result of sets at maximum effort.
Repeated sets of the same movement with the same moderately heavy weight send the body the message that you are stressing repetitiveness and that means slow twitch stimulation. In painting another stroke works fine;in weights it works against the kind of explosive and all out sets that sculpt the body.
Superior training thus involves doing every set with the maximum effort and no set is more important than the first. Everything you've got should be brought to bear on it. If you haven't done it to the max you cannot compensate by adding further inadequate sets. Always concentrate on your work,especially the first set. Your servant, as always.
Not weight training
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