Parrillo Performance Guide To Muscle, Part 6
Bulletin No. 33, Parrillo Performance Guide To Muscle, Part 6
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Over the last five bulletins weíve take a detailed look at muscle. Weíve covered basic scientific concepts of muscle structure, function, and physiology all the way down to the cellular and even molecular level. Now you know about the sliding filament theory of muscle action and the details of how muscle is controlled by the 
nervous system. In the last bulletin we talked the cellular and molecular basis of muscle growth, including muscle hypertrophy, hyperplasia, and the recruitment of satellite cells. In previous series we explored the aerobic and anaerobic energy metabolism of muscle as well as the hormonal regulation of muscle growth and the way to control hormones through diet and exercise.
This month I want to talk about different training strategies for muscle and how to tailor your training to achieve your particular goals. Bodybuilding, powerlifting, endurance running and biking, and sports like football and basketball all require muscle training, but obviously the performance goals of these sports are different and the best way to train for each of these is different. The place to start is to decide what your goals are, and then map out a plan for how to get there.
Letís start with powerlifting, since this is one of the simplest forms of training to consider. Powerlifting is about one thing: the guy who can lift the heaviest weight in proper form wins. The winner will thus be determined by two factors: his shear physical strength and his mastery of technique. At top level lifting events, technique gets to be very important. Elite lifters have great skill in using their strength to lift the heaviest weight possible. The technique of competitive Olympic-style lifting is a field in itís own right, and is not the topic here. What I want to discuss here is the strength aspect. Muscle strength is defined as the maximum load (weight) that a muscle can lift one time (1,2,3). Thus, the one rep maximum (1RM) is a measure of muscle strength. At first, you would think that the only important thing would be how strong the muscle is, and since bigger muscles are stronger, the guy with the biggest muscles would be the strongest.
This is not quite true, however. The important thing is how much force the muscle can generate, which not only depends on how big and strong the muscle is but also on how efficiently the muscle can be activated by the nervous system. (Obviously, leverage factors like skeletal structure and tendon attachments also are very important, but thereís not much you can do about that.) You can easily prove this to yourself simply by comparing the physiques of bodybuilders and powerlifters. Bodybuilders have bigger muscles, but powerlifters are stronger. So muscle size must not be the only important thing. The higher the percentage of muscle fibers you can recruit to fire (contract) at the same time, the stronger a given-sized muscle will be. Estimates are that the average person has the ability to recruit only about 50% of the fibers of a muscle to fire at once, and that with training this may increase to around 70%. Iím convinced that elite powerlifters can probably do even better - maybe around 90%. It should be obvious that the more fibers you can get to fire at once, the more force the muscle will generate. This is why people see such great gains in strength during the first six months or so of training without seeing much increase in muscle size. What theyíre doing is learning how to more efficiently recruit the muscle fibers they have.
This is primarily a consequence of training the nervous system. With practice, your brain learns how to recruit more motor units to fire at the same time, resulting in greater force production from the muscle. This takes us back to one of the fundamental principles of training - that of training specificity. For powerlifting you want to increase strength, which means increasing your 1RM. To do this, you want to train at low reps with heavy weight. Since the competition involves lifting at low reps, you want to do most of your training at low reps. Scientific studies have consistently shown that the greatest gains in strength come from training in the 3-6 rep range with heavy weight (1,2,3). This rep range allows you to train with about 90% of your 1RM. You should also train some heavy singles, especially near the competition, but not at every workout since these are very hard on your joints. You should take plenty of time to rest between sets, generally from 3-5 minutes. This 
allows your nervous system and muscles to recover completely between sets so you can give maximal effort to each set. The best gains in strength usually come from relatively low volume training, around 3-5 sets per exercise. Keep the number of exercises and the total number of sets fairly low. The concept for strength training is to do a low volume of extremely high intensity lifting. Train mostly the basic compound joint exercises, such as squat, deadlift, bench press, military press, and barbell row. These are probably the best exercises for increasing overall body strength.
Bodybuilding is a close cousin of powerlifting, and the training styles are very similar. The goal of bodybuilding is to maximize muscle size, more than strength, and to minimize body fat. Of course, muscle size and strength do go together, and big bodybuilders are indeed very strong. As we discussed last month, the main adaptation responsible for increases in muscle size is hypertrophy - an increase in diameter of muscle fibers (1,2,3). This is accomplished by addition of more myofibrils inside the muscle cell. Packing in more actin and myosin filaments will make the muscle bigger and stronger. The training strategy for this is similar as for powerlifting. For maximal increases in muscle size, it is best to train mostly in the 6-12 rep range with a moderate load (1,2,3). By “moderate” I mean the heaviest load you can lift for 6-12 reps in good form. This rep range allows you to use about 70-80% of your 1RM weight. It is important to train to failure at each working set, which means keep performing reps until you absolutely cannot get another. When you can perform 12 or more reps with a given weight, increase the weight by about 10%. This is the concept of progressive resistance.
Bodybuilders generally get better results from a slightly higher volume of training as compared to powerlifting, say 4-6 sets per exercise, and more exercises per muscle group. Powerlifters might do 8-12 total sets per workout while bodybuilders usually do 15-30. Rest intervals between sets are usually 1-2 minutes for bodybuilding. It is crucially important for optimal gains in muscle size for the bodybuilder to emphasize the eccentric phase of the muscle action. This means lower the weight slowly and resist the weight on the way down. This results in greater micro-trauma to the muscle fibers, and this damage serves as a stimulus to the adaptation process resulting in increases in muscle size. Refer to the Parrillo Performance Training Manual and High Performance Bodybuilding for detailed information on the best exercises for bodybuilders and for instruction on proper exercise performance.
The best bodybuilders also incorporate powerlifting-style training into their workouts. Many bodybuilders actually start off as powerlifters for a few years to get a solid foundation of strength, and then use bodybuilding-style workouts to refine their size and shape. There are several ways to incorporate both training styles into your workouts. One way is to do some very heavy sets to failure at 3-5 reps, followed by some moderate sets to failure at 6-10 reps in a single workout. This approach trains for muscle size and strength at each workout. Another increasingly popular approach is called “periodization,” Which involves a cycle of relatively light break-in training, followed by a cycle of bodybuilding style training, followed by a cycle of powerlifting style training. Each cycle can last from about 4-12 weeks, depending on what works best for you. When you hit a plateau in your training, it generally means itís time to move to a new workout.
Sports like sprinting, football, and basketball require maximal muscle power, which is different from strength. Power is work per unit time, which is also equal to force times speed. Power requires generating a lot of force, and generating it quickly. Force is equal to mass times acceleration, so the faster you accelerate a given weight, the more force youíre producing. In sports like football and boxing, the transfer of kinetic energy from one player to another is very important. Kinetic energy is equal to one half the product of mass times velocity squared, so the faster youíre moving the more kinetic energy you have. To sum up, powerlifting and bodybuilding are just concerned with muscle size and strength, but these other sports add in the factor of speed.
As an example, if two athletes have a 1RM of 200 pounds on the bench press they have the same strength on that exercise. But if one athlete can perform the movement in 2 seconds while the other requires 4 seconds to lift the weight, the former is generating twice the power of the later. While absolute strength is an important component of performance, power is probably even more important for most sports (1). Muscle power is the product of strength and speed, both of which are obviously central to football, basketball, and like sports.
Training the speed component adds another factor to your training. As you might guess, this involves trying to lift the weight as quickly as possible. One effective approach to weight training for speed calls for using about 30% of your 1RM weight and performing the positive (lifting) phase of the movement in explosive fashion. This is usually done for about 10 reps per set. Another technique to increase muscle power is plyometrics. Plyometrics is a way of overloading the muscle prior to an explosive contraction with speed-strength as the goal (3). An example of plyometric training for legs is to step or jump off of a box, land and squat, and then jump up as fast as possible. This does two things. First, potential energy is stored by stretching the connective tissues, such as the muscle sheath, the tendons, and the muscle itself. Second, the rapid eccentric movement of landing and squatting evokes the stretch reflex, or the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) of the same muscle (3,4).
The basis of the stretch reflex is the muscle spindle. Muscle spindles are sensory nerves located in special muscle fibers called intrafusal fibers. These fibers run parallel to the extrafusal muscle fibers, which are the ones we normally think of as being responsible for muscle contraction. When a muscle is stretched this activates the nerves in the intrafusal fibers, which sends a signal back to the motor neurons in the spinal cord. These send a signal out to the extrafusal fibers to contract. The muscle spindle is a safety mechanism that causes a muscle to contract whenever it is stretched. This reflex keeps the muscle from tearing from excessive stretching. When you add in this reflex arc, this results in a more powerful contraction from a stretched muscle than can be consciously achieved by contracting a muscle from itís normal resting length. The elastic properties of the muscle and tendons store energy during the eccentric (stretching) phase, and this also contributes to force production (3). Another form of plyometric leg training is jump squats, where a relatively light weight is used and you jump when coming out of the squat, with your feet actually leaving the ground. Baechle (reference 3) contains an extensive list of plyometric training drills and techniques for those of you interested in more information.
The best form of training for competitive endurance activities is training that activity itself. In other words, 
endurance cycling is the best way to train for endurance cycling. Thatís not to say that weight training canít help, but weight training is mainly about muscle size, strength, and power, not endurance. Endurance training is an aerobic exercise activity, while resistance training (weight training) is anaerobic. Endurance training involves a very large number of submaximal muscular contractions (3). Compared to weight training, the intensity is very low and the volume is very high (3). The adaptations to aerobic training are very different than those to anaerobic training. Endurance training reduces the overall concentration of glycolytic enzymes, the ones involved in anaerobic energy production (3). In endurance training there is increased recruitment of type I muscle fibers compared to type II fibers (3). However, since type I fibers have less capacity for hypertrophy than do type II fibers, endurance training does not result in as great an increase in muscle size as does resistance training.
During endurance training there is a gradual conversion of type IIb fibers to type IIa fibers (3). Type IIa fibers, or fast oxidative glycolytic (FOG) fibers, have a greater aerobic capacity than type IIb fibers, or fast glycolytic (FG) fibers (3). The result of this conversion is a greater number of fibers which can contribute to endurance performance (3). Endurance training increases the number of mitochondria and the concentration of myoglobin in muscle cells (3). As you know, mitochondria are the organelles responsible for aerobic energy production. Myoglobin is a protein which can bind and store oxygen, much like hemoglobin. Thus while weight training mainly results in bigger, stronger muscles, endurance training results mainly in increased aerobic energy producing ability.
Bodybuilders should remember however to include aerobic exercise as part of their training, since this trains a very important muscle called the heart. Aerobic exercise also burns fat and helps to increase capillary density in muscle. This allows for increased blood supply, which means increased nutrient supply, which means bigger muscles.
This concludes our series on muscle. Whatever your training goals, donít forget the central role of nutrition. Serious training is hard work - donít throw it away by not eating right. Try to eat every three hours or so, and include the right balance of carbohydrates and protein at each meal. Good protein sources are chicken breast, turkey breast, fish, and egg whites. Good carbs include potatoes, rice, beans, oatmeal, peas, corn, and vegetables. Refer to the Nutrition Manual for detailed instruction. As far as supplementation goes, the most important ones for increasing muscle size and strength are Hi-Protein Powder, CapTri, and Muscle Amino. For endurance performance, the most important are Pro-Carb, The Bar, CapTri, and Max Endurance. Never lose sight of your dream. Never give up. The Parrillo Program has built a lot of champions, and weíll build a lot more. Be one. Parrillo Performance - where dreams come true.
Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404
References
1. Wilmore JH and Costill DL. Physiology of Sport and Exercise. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, 1994.
2. McArdle WD, Katch FI, and Katch VL. Exercise Physiology - Energy, Nutrition, and Human Performance. Lea & Febiger, Malvern, PA, 1991.
3. Baechle TR. Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, 1994.
4. Komi PV. Strength and Power in Sport. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, 1992.
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