hey guys this is Steven Low and we're going to be covering overcoming gravity online part two and this is going to be still the first part of the fundamental knowledge base and in chapter two we'll cover the physiology uh strength and hypertrophy what is strength and how to understand it uh the central nervous system and its role in improving neural adaptations for strength the mechanisms of hyper hypertrophy and then also closed and open chain exercises so let's get started so what is strength the strength equation can generally be expressed as strength equals neural adaptations times
hypertrophy or the muscle cross-sectional area and so if you took a muscle such as your biceps and just like grabbed it and was able to pull it out the cross-sectional area is basically the the circular round shape of the muscle here and that is the has all the components of the myosin and actin heads as they overlap and are able to pull and contract the muscle because of the individual muscle cells within there the sarcomeres Contracting on top of each other so body weight training in general for holds or movements is fundamentally based on strength
and hypertrophy much like barbells and so there are lots of factors that influence strength training and a lot of the different ones that we won't be covering in the series are like different limb lengths the angles of the muscles crossing the joints some people have better ones of those than others the insertion points of muscles usually the further it is or closer the insertion points of the muscles gain a specific leverage Advantage a lot of these things can't be changed and some are change as your muscles grow bigger which give you a better Advantage so
those things can play a role but obviously can't play a role in our training so we're not going to cover those in super depth generally speaking going over like one of the common misconceptions of bodyweight training is that usually those people who have the highest strength to weight ratio for body weight training gymnastics climbing whatever body weight support out there they're the most jacked for their weight so for example if you think of Rings gymnasts or the top calisthenics athletes usually those people have the most amount of muscle as possible to Naturally Fit on their
frame and that is giving them the most strength to body weight ratio so common misconception that staying lighter and not having a lot of muscle mass is going to maximize your strength body weight ratio so if you're aiming for upper level movements like the the planche or Maltese or any of the like super hard calisthenic exercises you're going to want to put on as much muscle as naturally possible generally to maximize your body weight to strength ratio likewise we see a similar thing happening with weight classes as well your Olympic lifting your wrestling most of
these people are like super jacked for their size so yeah that's a common misconception and most people think with their sport that yeah staying lighter is the best but things like climbing even if you look at most of the elite performers they have a lot of muscle mass for their size or at least more than your average Joe who is you know in the middle or even Advanced and wants to get stronger I'm usually putting on more mass is more helpful let's see so the central nervous system some of the basics on muscle fibers your
fast twitch fibers and your muscles are comprised of type 2A and 2x fibers and these are General termed as your high threshold variants whereas slow twitch fibers are your type 1 fibers and their term low threshold what low threshold and high threshold means is that when your brain sends an electrical signal from your motor neurons to your muscle basically it sends them at a certain threshold so so if it's lifting something light like a book although my book is pretty heavy if it's lifting something light it'll send a lower threshold signal to your muscles in
order to lift the book since it knows it's not as heavy whereas if you're lifting a piece of furniture that is you know hundreds of pounds it's going to send a stronger signal to your muscles in order to recruit more muscle fibers so this process follows the Henneman size principle which says that low threshold ammonians are always recruited before your high threshold motor units and what this means in terms of us for strength and hypertrophy is that usually the high threshold motor units your fast switch fibers those are have the greatest potential for hypertrophy and
strength which means that we want to preferentially try to get those working during our strength training and hypertrophy training more as more fatigue and more work onto those muscles are going to make them stronger and bigger over time so this is why strength training uses the low repetition maximum so usually like one to five or six reps because low repetitions usually means you're using heavier weights and heavier weights means you're recruiting more muscle fibers similarly this can actually be gotten around with the accelerating Tempo so the the common one zero X zero the x specifies
that you're accelerating the move very fast so like instead of doing a deadlift you may do like a power clean where you're pulling the weight up really fast or with push-ups or dips you're performing the concentric where you're pushing really fast yeah during those motions in order to get most of the muscle fibers recruited during that stage to fatigue your fast twitch ones which will lead to Greater strength and hypertrophy benefit in the long run so some of the common neural adaptations for strength recruitment is a common one I believe in untrained individuals if I
remember correctly you recruit about 30 percent of your muscle fibers and percentage can go up as you strength train rate coding is the faster firing of the motor units so for example usually in more of the postural muscles and calves and forearms usually you have a greater percentage of slow twitch fibers which means Rate coding is the primarily primary way in which your body increases strength in those particular muscles so that's why a lot of calf and forearm and back training may use higher Reps for hypertrophy just because they have greater percentages of slow twitch
muscle fibers and that's how you can fatigue them more effectively in order to produce gains synchronization is basically motor units firing at the same time motor units comprise of they go when they go to the muscles basically they go to various fibers with muscle fibers within the muscle randomly and so as a group when in your brain your body wants to fire them all at the same time kind of like tug of war if you have people pulling out of sync they can't pull as effectively as all the people on the same side pulling at
once going one two three pull you know one two three pull you get more Force output because pulling at the same time gives more Force than one person trying to pull at one time another person trying to pull at a different time so that's a good analogy for that contribution is the timing of different motor units firing different muscles so for example you could work out your biceps and your lats and chest with like pullovers for the chest and lats and bicep curls for your biceps to get stronger but once you started training pull-ups obviously
you need to coordinate the chest and lats as well as biceps in order to get better at that movement so like someone who had only trained the muscle separate is not going to be as coordinated as someone who has trained the pull-ups or rows from the beginning with the compound exercises with the muscles coordinating with each other finally we have antagonist inhibition and motor learning basically antagonist inhibition is decrease in resistance from muscles opposite of the muscle group you're working so for example with an l-sit when you're working your abs and your hip flexors sometimes
people's hamstrings can be tight enough that it's pulling your legs down instead of you know being looser to hold the muscles hold the l-sit and even go into a v-sit and that's why decreasing the resistance of the opposing muscle groups can help increase your strength on the opposite side muscle groups and similarly with motor learning the more used to a mode pattern the more practice you get with it the better you get it so this is where the common saying strength as a skill the more you practice a specific movement the better you get at
it and this is also the one of the fundamentals underlying Grease the group training where you do a lot of non-failure work with a specific exercise in order to get better at that specific exercise and learn it better so the central nervous system in general works as a governor of exercise and has a set amount of work capacity I talked about a little bit in the previous video but you can think about the work capacity of the central nervous system as a pool and so exercise is going to take away from that pool whereas recovery
factors like sleep good Sports Nutrition low stress is going to add recovery ability pool Add Water back in and so you actually build a bigger pool over time so a beginner who does like four to six sets of exercises pretty gonna be pretty fatigued in those particular muscles groups but if you've been training for several months or several years you'd generally be able to handle a greater capacity of exercise and this is one of the reasons why when beginners who want to try like specific professional athlete athletes workouts they don't do well because they're the
app the professional athletes workout capacity is way higher because they've been building up for years usually decades or longer and they have the capacity to train very often and they're not usually training you know with super high intensity all the time either so understanding that workout work capacity increases over time is important and to make sure that you're within the range of the specific work capacity that you have right now because that is the best way to get gains be within the range and be able to work out enough to stimulate your muscles and your
strength to improve because if you do too much you could get overuse injuries or you plateau sooner because you have excessive fatigue accumulating and so you need to understand that your work capacity is a set amount and that you want to be within its specific range so one example that we can use is power lifters who are developing like 600 plus pounds since deadlifts use pretty much all the muscle groups in the body from your upper body all the way down through your lower body they can be very fatiguing on the central nervous system because
you're firing all the motor units at once and so in understanding that basically the you can switch exercise power lifters often may only do deadlifts maybe once or twice once every one to two weeks and not more and use other exercises to provide a continual stimulus to the body either lighter with more explosive exercises or variations of deadlifts like rack pulls or deficits in order to train specific range of motions that they're weak at in order to improve at the movement without necessarily training super heavy with the deadlift all the time so overreaching in that
aspect is over taxing the body system and what happens when you do that is the fake as the fatigue is accumulating you can use a deload to reduce the fatigue and improve the bias capacity over time so the three main exercises mechanisms of hypertrophy are your mechanical tension where High Enough loads are placed on the muscles usually this is in the lower rep ranges three to five RM is common usually not one to two because it's hard to get enough volume at one to two reps in order to progress muscle damage is usually in your
moderate rep ranges usually term from about five to twelve maybe five to Fifteen reps and this is about ninety percent one round Max to about seventy percent and within this range the weight is heavy enough that during The Eccentric phase or muscle lengthening phase of the exercise you get muscle damage where the myosin heads are pulled off of the actin and that creates damage in the muscles the satellite cells surrounding the muscle will donate their nuclei to the specific muscle cells and the extra myonuclei will basically increase protein synthesis so the extra my nuclei are
what are called so like if you've ever heard of muscle memory where an athlete may have gotten big muscles but then they're sedentary for a while and their muscles get smaller the reason why their muscles come back to a bigger size much more quickly than somebody who is sedentary all their life is because of the extra satellite cell donation myonuclei they sit in muscle and so like when an athlete comes back and starts working out again they already have the extra nuclei to promote protein synthesis to get the muscle back to where it was beforehand
metabolic stress or metabolite accumulation is the third mechanism and basically this is in high repetitions so usually 15 20 plus up to about 30 which is where you get the pump and you start to feel the acidic burn in your muscles and this is the third mechanism of hypertrophy so most of the recent research in the past several years has shown that anywhere in about the 5 to 30 rep range will work for hypertrophy gaining and this is a little bit different than what it was commonly thought a few decades ago usually most people are
like okay you need to train with mostly the heavier weights or at least in the muscle damage ranges and so this it kind of makes sense at least thinking about theoretically you have both fast and slow twitch fibers and so to maximize hypertrophy you want to maximize the fast switch fibers which is heavier loads and muscle damage then you also want to maximize the slow twitch fibers which are more predicated to endurance and so the the getting the pump and working the High Reps will tend to focus on the slow twitch fibers more to maximize
hypertrophy alternatively there was some debate on whether there is a difference between myofibular and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy High Reps were thought to with the metabolic stress were thought to increase the fluid retention in the muscles and make the muscles bigger but not be as good as myofibular which is increase of the protein components within the muscle the myosin in action however it's not really relevant training wise there may be some truth to that the research has kind of been kind of back and forth a little but it's not relevant training wise usually in our case a
bigger muscle is going to be a strong muscle as long as you're strength training so in that respect it doesn't matter too much finally open and close chain exercises so open kinetic chain or OKC exercises and you're generally your limb is more free to move throughout the range of motion and you can think of dumbbells with like dumbbell bench you have to control the dumbbell in space and so that is an open chain exercise alternatively close kinetic chain exercises are movements where your limbs are not free and you can think of this as like Squats
or push-ups where your hands are fixed on the ground and not moving or your feet are fixed on the ground and then you also have somewhere in between that which is semi-open or semi-close chain depending on how you look at it some a common example of this is bench press where your hands are free to move back and forth up and down but since you're holding a bar and the bar is fixed and you're not allowed to move side by side so generally speaking closed and semi-close chain exercises tend to be best for building strength
basically you're reducing the degrees of freedom of movement like with dumbbells move in you have to stabilize Any Which Way and so the less stability you have to do as long as the exercise is working major muscle groups effectively it tends to be better for strength and hypertrophy for example you can see this with handstand push-ups versus overhead press overhead press your semi-close chain you're pushing a barbell up and overhead whereas handstand push-ups you have to stabilize your body in space and so a bunch of your energy is dedicated to stabilizing your body as opposed
to moving the weight on the other hand open connect chain and semi-open can be very beneficial for specific goals such as Rings Rings is or semi mostly open chain a little bit of closed since the Rings tend to stabilize themselves very slightly prehab and Rehab such as using isolation exercises to get specific muscle groups stronger and isolation work obviously for you know bicep curls try separate extensions so basically most of our exercises we want to be mostly closed chain or semi-close chain and then we can use open chain exercises to fill in the gaps or
bring up specific weaknesses
