WoD 121029

Warm Up: 3 Rounds of 5 push ups, ring rows ,dips, l-hang 10 sec w chin over bar

Strength: Back squats 1x5 75%, 1 x 5 @ 80%, 3x3@ 85% increase band tension slightly

Skill: Tabata Goat work 8 rounds @ 85%

Met Con 15-12-9 Overhead Squats Dips

 Every body who trains wants to get stronger, they may not know it, but they do. I am not saying that I know what you want better than you, I am just saying that every goal in the gym involves to some extent increasing your strength. Want to loose fat, try adding some muscle to increase your work capacity and speed things up. Want to be able to run faster, stronger legs equals more speed, or at the very least the potential for more speed. Want to be able to run longer, using less energy to propel each step means you can last longer. Have lots of injury problems, stronger muscles ligaments,tendons and bones means less injury. Strength training will aid all your goals no matter what they are. More than any other

There are two primary ways your body improves its strength.
The first is Functional and involves among other things the increase in cross sectional area of the muscle, increase in the strength and thickness of ligaments, tendons, and bones.

The second is neurological and involves among other things the improving the coordination of separate muscles, the sequencing of activation, increasing the rate of firing of the nerves, the proliferation of nerve fibers increasing the size of motor units, recruitment of motor units.

While we will not get into rep ranges and intensity ranges and all that good stuff here, I want to make one point to illustrate why we vary our programming over time instead of every single time you come in.

Improving either the neurological factors of strength or the functional factors of strength will help and while there is some overlap between the two, increasing both at the same time does not lead to optimum results. Instead I want you to think about the two areas of strength in this way.

Functional improvements in strength lead to an increase to absolute maximum strength, that is the force the muscle can exert if it were stimulated by some external force like an electronic stimulus to the muscle.

Neurological improvements in strength lead to an increase in voluntary maximum strength, that is the maximum force the muscle can exert under optimal conditions.

One important observation then is that the limit of your absolute maximum (established by the functional factors) cannot be surpassed by training in ways that improve the neurological factors of strength, and attempting to do so drastically increases chance for injury. Conversely training to improve functional strength will only have a limited effect on improving your voluntary maximum. ( this is less true for beginners who will see significant improvements in both areas from type of training for a short period of time.)

One way to think of training for strength then is to first train in a way that optimizes functional factors in order to raise your absolute maximum and then train in a way to optimize  neurological factors of strength in order to to raise your voluntary maximum nearer your absolute maximum. In this way we can increase strength on a consistent basis while reducing incidence of injury.

Training these concurrently is also occasionally advisable, however the improvements in the neurological factors typically out pace those of the functional adaptations. leading to an athlete attempting to handle excessive loads for reps increasing the rick of injury and burnout, so even as a beginner focusing mostly on one area at a time is the most effective way to improve strength.

Here at CFT we program our strength work in such a way that all factors impacting your strength and your over all fitness ( all 10 domains of physical fitness) are balanced and steady progress can and will be made over your lifetime. We will delve a little more in depth to each area in future posts so that you can develop an even greater understanding of how and why we train the way we do.