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Specifificitity

"Life is tough, it's tougher when you're stupid"

In the '70s the originator of HIT (high intensity training) Arthur Jones wrote a series of articles for the Athletic Journal - they were hard hitting, profound and accused the athletic community of being thick.

One of the articles he wrote was entitled Specificity in Strength Training - ­ Facts & Fables - here is a section;

"An exercise that is nearly specific will simply mess up your skills... an exercise that is almost specific will have the same bad result. So do not try to be specific in your exercises... in any case, doing so is impossible, and the closer you come, the greater the danger of hurting your skill.

Build strength in the best way possible... with little or absolutely no regard to how that strength is to be used; then learn to use that strength to your greatest advantage in the only way possible, by practice of the sport itself."

This seemed to be a revelation, it was logical, evangelical and it was wrong...

Specificity

You can never be 100% specific until you actually do a task. So if I lift 950 lbs and my goal is 1000 lbs then I cannot be totally specific until I lift 1000 lbs which I cannot do if I am currently at 950 lbs. Thus at best I will spend my time being 'almost specific' which according to Arthur is the best way of messing up my 'skill'.

Let's say I am training for the 'skill' of tyre flipping. But I can't actually flip the tyre yet, because it is too heavy for me. If I had progressively smaller tyres I could work my way up them. But let's say I don't have such tyres... I could make myself a tyre frame device which I could progressively load weight into. But let's say I don't have such a frame I might do a Plate Lift... and so on.

So there is a hierarchy of lifts which are of use to tyre flipping. It might look something like this;

1. Tyre Flip
2. Progressively Smaller Tyres
3. A Tyre Frame Device
4. Plate lift
5. Sumo Deadlift
6. Partial Sumo Deadlift
7. Medium Stance Squat
8. Partial Squat
9. Zercher
10. Atlas Stone
11. Hack lift
12. Regular Deadlift
13. Hammer Deadlift
14. Leg Press
15. Pistols
16. Duo Squat
17. Hip & Back Machine
18. Leg Extension
19. Leg Curl
20. Calf Raise
21. Bowling
22. Darts
23. Knitting
24. Typing on the Internet

Movements not Muscles

"To flip a tyre one should prioritize single joint moves and target specific muscles if they stood out as weak links in the chain."

That's an actual quote by Fred Hahn. But such advice is bodybuilding rubbish, guaranteed to stop you lifting anything substantial.

If I was having trouble getting the tyre started from the floor I might do a deadlift. I would not go, "Maybe I need to strengthen my gluteus maximi!" or some such nonsense.

Similarly if I lacked strength to hitch the tyre up my body I would not think, "Maybe I need to work my biceps!" instead I might do a Zercher.

Motor Learning

HITers get very confused by Schmidt's writing;

"A common misconception is that fundamental abilities can be trained through various drills or other activities. The thinking is that, with some stronger ability, the athlete will see gains in performance for tasks with this underlying ability.

For example, athletes are often given various "quickening" exercises, with the hope that these exercises would train some fundamental ability to be quick, allowing quicker response in their particular sports.

Coaches often use various balancing drills to increase general balancing ability, eye movement exercises to improve vision, and many others. Such attempts to train fundamental abilities may sound fine, but usually they simply do not work. Time, and often money, would be better spent practicing the eventual goal skills.

There are two correct ways to think of these principles. First, there is no general ability to be quick, to balance, or to use vision. Rather, quickness, balance, and vision are each based on many diverse abilities, so there is no single quickness or balance ability, for example, that can be trained.

Second, even if there were such general abilities, these are, by definition, genetic and not subject to modification through practice. Therefore, attempts to modify an ability with a nonspecific drill are ineffective. A learner may acquire additional skill at the drill which is, after all, a skill itself, but this learning does not transfer to the main skill of interest."

Motor Learning and Performance: From Principles to Practice - Richard A. Schmidt (as sent to me by Fred Hahn)

Schmidt of course wasn't writing for lifters of weights it was those pesky HITers who interpreted his writing so that it would fit into HIT theory.

However look only a little closer and you will see that Schmidt's Theory was not about practicing the specific activity to the exclusion of everything else;

R.A. Schmidt developed the "schema theory" of motor learning

Schmidt argued, partly against J.A. Adams' (1971) closed loop theory, that people don't learn specific movements. Instead, they construct "generalized motor programs." They do this by exploring programming rules, learning the ways in which certain classes of movement are related. Then they learn how to produce different movements within a class by varying the parameters that determine the way in which movements are constructed.

As people practice a movement, like throwing a ball various distances or in various directions, or climbing stairs of various dimensions, they learn the relationship between the parameters and the outcome. By collecting "data points" like the ones in the figure (adapted from Schmidt, 1988, Fig. 14-7), they improve their understanding of the relationship between a movement outcome and their control of the movement's parameters (the "best-fitting straight line" in the figure).

An important prediction of the theory is that people will more quickly learn the relationship between manipulating parameters and achieving a desired movement outcome if they practice a task in wide variety of situations, and experience errors in the process. To use the figure as an illustration, the theory predicts that people will more quickly appreciate the underlying "best-fitting line" (the rules by which a generalized motor program produces a class of movements) when they accumulate a large and broad scatter of data points (a varied experience of movement).

In other words don't practice specifically but practice things similar to the 'goal' lift.

Principles of Strength Training

There are 2 aspects to strength training and they are both stimulated by nervous input from lifting weights;

1. Structural - Increased size or density of the connective tissues along with associated biochemical changes (hypertrophy).

2. Functional - Increased performance such as static strength, speed-strength, etc (nervous improvement).

There are 4 divisions to the functional aspect;

1. Intermuscular Co-ordination - for example to extend the leg, the hip extensors and knee extensors have to contract in synchrony.

2. Intramuscular Co-ordination - to contract a muscle forcefully or fastly the muscle must exhibit; Recruitment - initially the nervous system increases muscle tension by increasing the strength of the nervous impulse to the muscle which activates more motor units; Rate Coding - the tension of individual muscle fibres is then further increased by increasing the frequency of nervous impulses; Pattern Coding - the greater the synchronicity of the motor units activated the stronger the contraction.

3. Reflexive Processes - facilitatory and inhibitory reflexes and their adaptation to movements. What PNFers are always going on about.

4. Motor Learning - what Schmidt talks about above, i.e. the 'programming' of the brain to carry out movements.

Together these 4 terms might be though of as 'skill', though most people only think of skill as number 4.

Strength Deficits

Zatsiorsky talks about strength deficits which I suppose fits into all 4 divisions of the functional aspect of training.

He calculates explosive strength deficit as (Zatsiorsky 1995 Science and Practice of Strength Training Human Kinetics p. 34);

ESD = 100 ((F_mm - F_m)/F_mm)

F_mm is the absolute maximum force that a person can generate whereas F_m is the force generated in the task. He gives the following example;

"For instance among the best shot-putters during throws of 21.0 m, the peak force F_m applied to the shot is in the range of 50 to 60 kg. The best results for these athletes is in an arm extension exercise (F_mm, bench press) are typically in the range of 220 to 240 kg, or 110 to 120 kg for each arm. Thus, in throwing, they can only use about 50% of F_mm."

It isn't of much use to a shot-putter putting in much more effort to increase his bench to say 280-300 kg because in an actual shot-put there wouldn't be enough time to develop more force. In other words the force time trajectories of a 240 kg and 300 kg bencher are pretty similar up to 50-60 kg.

The strength deficits in strongman are typically much lower so time developed on increasing maximal strength is correspondingly higher.

Strongman

You may wonder why it is that strongmen don't do hypertrophy work like bodybuilders. Well they do. Its just that lifting large weights in a variety of 'odd' lifts for max strength via heavy singles and for time for strength-endurance and eating vast amounts is not viewed in the same manner as pumping, squeezing and consuming loads of supplements.

Bodybuilding methods in general employ weights which exhaust the muscles in under a minute and rest intervals that tend to maximise the pump. Dave Tate employed a system which basically ignores the rep times but just goes on set times of 30-40 seconds with 90-120 rest intervals between sets.

Strongman events/training tend to be around a minute or two long but the events are generally not of a continuous tension nature, the rest intervals can be as large as required for the lifter to feel at full strength.

The goals are different but the outcome hypertrophy-wise is similar, but in strongman the lifts not only build up structural strength, they build up functional strength. Functional strength that through generalised motor programs can be applied to other lifts.

So what I have learnt is...

• Build up a strength deficit at each point of the lift. Not only a static strength deficit but a dynamic one. In other words be stronger than the lift requires at each point. See the hierarchy of lifts list.

• Build up a 'generalised motor program' by not just lifting specifically on the goal lift but lifting on things which have something in common with the goal lift. See the hierarchy of lifts list.

• Use a hierarchy of lifts that best correlate to what is being strengthened. A bench press specialist can work further down the hierarchy of lifts. A strongman-powerlifter-weightlifter-oddlift-armwrestler will be doing pretty much exclusively all the top level hierarchy of lifts as he will have little time to do low hierarchy lifts.

• Lift heavier and heavier weights.

27^th September 2023