Our primary goal for
untrained clients is strength development. It helps with things like power,
speed, muscular endurance and anaerobic conditioning. Our prescription to get
there? Heavy weights for low reps.
We have encountered a
standard response from our fighters, and female clients: “Won’t lifting weights
make me big and bulky?” Time to attack this myth!
Firstly, it is pretty
hard to get big. Just go the gym and take a look at all the guys pumping iron,
then look at how many are jacked. The ratio isn’t that high. Just because you
are moving a weight around, it won’t necessarily make you look like Ronnie
Coleman (this is even more true for girls, because they typically have lower
testosterone levels).
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Time to go behind the
scenes... The size of a muscle is positively correlated with strength, BUT you
don’t need to make your muscles bigger to become strong. There are two types of
strength adaptations that take place: structural adaptations and neural
adaptations. Most people neglect the latter.
Individuals can
improve their strength without adding a single pound of muscle. Have you ever
heard of the story where a female moved a truck to save her baby? It is
suggested that everyone’s muscle has the POTENTIAL to exert high levels of
force, but our nervous system shuts the muscle off because it thinks it will
become damaged under heavy loads (Golgi Tendon Organs). Learning how to
activate our muscle is an overlooked adaptation to strength training (achieved
via motor unit synchronization, motor unit activation, nerve firing frequency).
Just look at lightweight Olympic lifters who throw more than double their
bodyweight overhead. These athletes are great examples of how powerful (no pun intended) neural
adaptations are.
Time to talk about structural
adaptations. The type of hypertrophy (increase in muscle size) is dependent on
the amount of reps and the load you use. If you use submaximal loads for
8-12reps (bodybuilding), it usually results in sarcoplasmic hypertrophy: an
increase in non-contractile proteins, and when you use heavier loads for
1-6reps, it usually results in myofibrillar hypertrophy: an increase in
contractile proteins. Your goal should be to increase the force producing
capacity of your muscle, regardless of its size (myofibrillar hypertrophy).
Hopefully you now
realize that you can become strong without becoming big. Myofibrillar
hypertrophy increases the density of your muscle, not the size, and neural
adaptations teach your nervous system to recruit your muscle more effectively.
