Shoulder Press 16 168sec
Lat Pull Down 14 180sec
Leg Press 20 162sec
Static holds. First number is the number of plates lifted (out of 20 on a 200lb stack) and second number is number of seconds held. For leg press the pulley arrangement effectively doubles the weight. "TUL" = Time Under Load. I hold until failure or 3 minutes. If I reach 3 minutes I stop and increase the weight next cycle.
Shoulder Press: second attempt at this weight and failed 12 sec short of 3 minutes, TUL up 29 seconds. Lat Pull Down: first attempt at this weight and reached 3 minutes. Note that due to injury I could not do chest press last week so perhaps I benefited from a little extra recovery here. Leg Press: fourth attempt at this weight. TUL up 12 seconds to 162 so starting to close in on 3 minutes but man this one is really tough.
Once again weight or TUL up for all three exercises.
I started this static hold routine at the end of March and started using the 3 minute target from mid-August. I have made continuous progress though the rate of progress has slowed. The leg press is instructive. To reach 3 minutes it took me two attempts at 17, two attempts at 18, 5 attempts at 19 and today was my fourth attempt at 20. During this period my TUL at a given weight only went down once (on my third attempt at 19) so I would call that steady progress. I should note that I do leg presses every week while I alternate the upper body exercises from week to week.
Happy New Year to all. Looking forward to what 2011 will bring....
Are there any University Studies n Static Contraction and your longer holds.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what is best or if either one way is optimum, but when I contacted a professor at UT Austin, Exercise Physiology, he didn't think it was science and had never heard of either.
Best wishes, but why haven't anyone tried to start a University study on this, so we can take it seriously?
Thanks for your comment. I am not a scientist nor am I a dedicated reader of the scientific literature so I can only refer you to secondary sources. You might want to check the older posts in the explosive fitness forum on Yahoo for citations to studies relating to static holds. You might want to check out references to various studies in the Body by Science book and at Clarence Bass' website (link at the top of this blog) for the proposition that relatively brief, intense, infrequent training can be very effective. There is a fairly recent study discussed at Mr. Bass' website that suggests that relatively longer TUL (lighter weight) lifted to failure could be more effective in stimulating extended protein synthesis than shorter TUL (heavier weights) lifted to failure but again a small, short study so hardly definitive.
ReplyDeleteIt is surprising to me how little is known definitively about the most effective way to perform weight training. It is my impression that this has not been a high priority for university researchers which is understandable if you think about it. Most of the studies that I have seen reviewed were with relatively few participants, lasted relatively short periods of time and tended to be fairly narrow in terms of the questions sought to be answered.
I have done more traditional weight training in the past but became curious about SCT and gave that a go for a couple of years. What I am doing now is based on my experience trying SCT and also on insights gained from reading Body by Science and some of Mr. Bass' stuff among others.
I don't see why static holds to failure should not be effective. As far as muscle is concerned a contraction is a contraction and statics held to failure certainly demand that the muscles contract. I see some potential benefits to using statics, among them:
- Largely eliminates questions of form and technique so results are more readily comparable from workout to workout. With statics it is pretty easy to know if you are making progress or not. Only two variables to keep track of, weight and time, which are both easily measured. If you believe it is important to know whether or not you are making progress then statics are helpful.
- Quality/adjustment of the equipment is not so important so inherently lower cost.
I suppose what I am doing is in the nature of an experiment with a sample size of one. The results so far are interesting enough for me to keep at it.
From a number of studies we know that lifting 75-90% of 1 RM through a full range will build muscle and strength. But, I don't see any good peer-reviewed research showing that static holds can contribute to muscle growth or full-range of motion strength. Could it be that you are stimulating only a small portion of your muscle fibers by doing statics? Have you tested your strength for full range carryover? Have you increased your bicep, chest, quads, etc?
ReplyDelete@Ed
ReplyDeleteI am not aware of any studies that have compared the efficacy of full range of motion to static hold protocols over any appreciable period of time for any significant number of subjects so with respect to peer reviewed literature all you can say is there is no good evidence either way.
I think it is unlikely that I am only stimulating a small portion of muscle fibers for those muscles involved in the exercises I am doing. That is not consistent with my understanding of how muscles work. Fibers are activated as needed and holding a up a relatively heavy weight certainly creates the need. If you think about it a static hold is just a perfect balance between a positive movement and a negative movement. If you push just a little harder then you generate the positive and if you relax just a bit you get the negative. Subjectively, the feeling after failure of a static hold is not very different from the feeling after one set of a full range of motion exercise to failure.
There may be other aspects of full range of motion exercises that make them better for building muscle/strength than statics but not simple recruitment and exhaustion of muscle fibers. Such an aspect might include friction generated between tissues as a muscle changes shape while under tension which happens in full range of motion exercises but not in statics.
My experience so far shows that over an extended period of time statics can generate progressive improvement in strength as measured by the amount of weight that can be held in place for a given period of time. As I have mentioned previously I also observe some improvement in definition.
Improving my performance on full range of motion exercises is not particularly an objective of mine so I don't test myself that way. For anyone who has a particular interest in improving performance on say a classic bench press it is clearly better to train by doing full range bench presses.
For that matter improvement in static strength is not in and of itself my objective. My objective is to progressively overload my muscles thereby triggering beneficial adaptations which include but are not limited to generating a net increase in muscle tissue and to do this in a safe and efficient manner. Statics may fill the bill, they may not. Hence the experiment.