Ninja turtle arms.

"guns for show, bi's and tri's for a pro!"

Ah the tickets, the pyth's, the cannons, the swans aaand the list goes on

what am i talking tosh about

The Arms of course!

what follows is hopefully a wee bit of information to add to your science of shirtsleeve-stretcher-y.

lets increase the ammo in your arsenal.....Bring forth the cannons.

what do we need to do to stretch sleeves? - grow muscle, also known as hypertrophy.

But what do we know about muscle growth (hypertrophy)?

Hypertrophy occurs when the contractile elements (stuff that contracts, see image) enlarge and the extracellular matrix (other stuff) expands to support growth.

when we train, skeletal muscle is subjected to an overload,  it causes perturbations (damage) in myofibers (stuff that contracts) and the related extracellular matrix (other stuff that doesn't contract) 

The stimulus provided from training ultimately leads to an increase in the size and amounts of the myofibrillar contractile proteins actin and myosin (2 little things that contract), and the total number of sarcomeres. 

This increases the diameter of individual fibers and thereby results in an increase in overall muscle size.

check out Enrique below;

image courtesy of - http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/572/flashcards/745572/jpg/picture31322835898277.jpg

and a little deeper we go....

Zatsiorsky  - science and practice of strength training

the figure above shows 2 types of hypertrophy

sarcoplasmic (other stuff) and myofibrillar (stuff that contracts)

1. Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy of muscle fibers; this is the growth of the non-contractile "other stuff", the fluid and protein between the myofibrills. 

this basically means while the actual cross-sectional area (overall size) of the muscle fibers increases, this doesn't come with an accompanying increase in muscle strength.

2. Myofibrillar Hypertrophy; this is where we increase muscle fiber size via gaining more myofibrils (stuff that contracts) and, at the same time, more actin and myosin filaments. Furthermore, contractile proteins are synthesized and filament density increases. This type of hypertrophy leads to increased ability to produce force.

although we will stimulate both types of hypertrophy we are obviously more interested in the myofibrillar kind that gives us an increase in strength.

How does the actual hypertrophy occur?

we know thanks to the recent research from guys like Brad schoenfeld and Bret contreras that hypertrophy occors via 3 main mechanisms.

1. Muscle damage - this will make sense, you can probably relate to the muscle damage and repair pathway because of how you feel the days following a tough or new session, usually 2 days later. the damage occurs when you apply an unfamiliar or new stimulus, like a change in your  training program or quite simply the addition of a new exercise, we also know that negatives or an increase of the eccentric phase of a lift adds to the tension and strain a muscle is subjected during a lift, this increases the magnitude of muscular damage. 
2. Mechanical tension - mechanical tension - makes logical sense too, as you perform your biceps curl with full range of course your muscles go through passive and active tension through the stretch and flex cycle, and a high magnitude of tension through out full ROM also creates the greatest muscle magnitude of damage, going through full range prolongs the tension thus increases the metabolic stress also, you see all these 3 mechanisms are interrelated.
3. Metabolic Stress - this is the one you may not be aware of directly, but you will know the feeling. Think about when you're nearing the end of a tough set of incline curls for example and the burning in your biceps begins intensifying as you fight to complete the set, upon release the pain subsides and you notice the pump in your arms as they feel twice the size. 

The burning sensation you probably know as lactic acid and the good old pump are two factors of metabolic stress. 

Basically while performing muscular contractions the blood is prevented from leaving as the veins are constricted or "occluded" adding to the intra workout pumps you experience, this occlusion of the veins that supply the muscle means that the supply of oxygen is also reduced known as hypoxia. These two factors contribute to the increase of metabolic byproducts that cannot be cleared and also leads to a further pump. 

how does the pump lead to hypertrophy?

As the metabolic byproducts and fluids build up the swelling increases and places more and more tension upon the muscles cell membranes, this is perceived as a threat to the structure of a cell, this threat signals what are known as satellite cells (muscle stem cells) and these are then "aroused" and become active when enough mechanical stimulus is placed upon the muscles, the satellite cells then provide the stimulus for repair and growth of new muscle tissue.

These factors all combine to aid in hypertrophy, 

looking at the 3 pathways above we can see that tension is very effective at damaging fibers as long as the muscle is stretched while being activated.

So high tension sets combined with full range of motion also produce high levels of metabolic stress, as the time under tension is prolonged and the veins are constricted preventing the escape of blood and metabolic by-products which induce an increased pump and stress intramuscularly.

OK so how do we go about putting those factors together to create an environment conducive to growth, if we put them together we end up with a systematic approach to programming that allows increases in strength, combined with creating high tension sets, and also sets that increase the time under that tension (TUT) to increase the metabolic stress.

We have to attack muscle growth from all the pathways, some argue to focus solely on getting stronger and some say you have to get the pump.

looking at the above its probably a wiser decision to include all pathways and training more like a hybrid of a bodybuilder and a Powerlifter.

so how do we create hypertrophy

1. create mechanical tension
2. create metabolic stress
3. create muscle damage
4. create the right environment

 Eat -  

hypertrophy occurs when protein synthesis exceeds breakdown. i don't think i need to tell you that you need to eat enough food and especially enough protein to make this a possibility.

Get busy getting strong - this is what the powerlifter brings to the table; progressive overload for the win, however you achieve that can be argued until the cows come home and leave again because they are bored of the discussion. 

Put simply, if you systematically focus efforts to get progressively stronger year on year and you will find it hard not to gain muscle, so in some way shape or form try periodizing your training (article coming shortly). 

Getting stronger is where a good portion of your focus needs to be. Focus on the big compound moves such as squats, deads, bench and chins etc with near full recovery and setting new records, this will provide most of your gains going forward. With regards to arm size/strength you won't go far wrong with heavy pressing and pulling moves like close and neutral grip chins, rows and heavy presses and and dips. 

But remember strength doesn't just increase via muscle size alone, we can increase strength without a subsequent increase in muscle via an increased ability to recruit the muscle we have via up-regulating the neural pathways and simply the skill of a specific lift. so as important as gaining strength is, its one part of the spectrum, we cant ignore high intensity techniques in the quest for hogan arms too.

Search for blood - 

 This is where the bodybuilders adds their flavor. Now the heavy stuff has been taken care of its time to get the pump and you know how important that is, as Arnold said "can you imagine how i am feeling".

This is where we work to failure, use higher rep sets and add intensification methods that increase total time under tension (TUT) to induce that skin splitting pump! The pump that draws herds of lads to the preacher bench on their weekly migration to club-flex in that overly tight new shirt come Friday night, but of course you have never done this though!.......

When searching for the pump use medium to high reps, drop sets, rest pause, super slow, pre exhaust, take your pick but focus on sqeeeezing hard through each rep, taking only short rest periods for some partial recovery, the heavy work took care of recruiting all available fibers now its time to fatigue them, so be sure to settle in, create as much of a pump and metabolic stress as you can with a dumbell or whatever equipment you choose to do the job. 

search for blood and embrace the burn!

Out angle 

Stretch and squeeze! by changing the angles we perform work at we can target both tension and the pump, for optimal coverage we need to hit the working muscles in both their stretched and shortened positions.

Stretch for tension;

We know full ROM is vital to create optimal tension, but we can take this a step further by changing the angles we work at,

to create the most muscle damage we need to create tension. This is achieved when the muscle is put through its greatest lengths under load, in terms of the biceps and triceps this basically means hitting them in a stretched position.

For the Biceps try -  DB inclined curls; this will ensure you place the most tension from your set onto the biceps in their most lengthened position.

To hit the triceps in their most stretched position requires you to get over head, so try overhead triceps extensions using the rope attachment to allow some movement and get most out the contraction. If you should happen to have a set of olympic rings or a trx you can also try overhead triceps fallouts to feel as if you have been kicked by a horse in the arms the following days.

Squeeze and pump;

we know how great the pump is for hypertrophy, so in addition to stretch based exercises we should also include moves that hit the muscles in the shortened or contracted position too;

this is easy try adding preacher or concentration curls, but also try different implements to curl with, bar, Db, KB or especially the cable.

and for the triceps try single arm cable push downs or kick backs to get as much pump as you can muster.

Strengthen the mind.

create a solid mind muscle connection.

  

The mind-to-muscle connection is scientifically referred to as neuromuscular communication, neuromuscular control, neuromuscular concentration, or neuromuscular innervation.

The concept involves increasing the focus on the working muscle by actively concentrating on the singular contractions of the targeted muscle. 

The power of the flex is a result of the output signal from your brain, commonly referred to as neural drive, another term (yes another) for the mind muscle connection. A strong connection gives you the ability to enhance the signal being sent and recieved for a stronger contraction, much like upgrading from a standard Internet cable to super fast fibre-optic broadband.

That signal travels down the spinal cord to the motor neuron that heads to the biceps where the electrical impulse sent by the brain reaches the space between the neuron and the muscles where that impulse triggers a release of chemicals known as neurotransmitters that attach to specific receptors in the muscle where a transfer of more chemicals triggers filaments within the muscle cells to attach and cause your muscles to contract.

Go ninja turtle on them 

It wasn't just pizza that got the turtles arms so jacked, they are reported to have used Kaatsu training also called occlusion training and Blood flow restriction training, This method not only helps you beat up shredder it is highly effective at inducing a pump and thus high levels of metabolic stress even though it uses lower loads and generates less muscular tension like with traditional methods.

results not typical.

what does KAATSU training involve? 

Bassically, Donatello got the boys to tie a cuff tighly around the arms near the shoulder  preventing the blood from leaving the working muscles, the key word is leaving the muscle not preventing blood getting to them. This causes the the blood to build up or pool within the muscle. 

and as we have spoken about, this pooling creates an increased amount of metabolic by-products to accumulate within the muscles that usually get flushed out and increases metabolic stress, this is thought to be the primary pathway via which occlusion training stimulates hypertrophy

But Im gonna leave that one one with you for now as its late , so ill dedicate a whole article to Occlusion or Kaatsu training for next time.

there you have it, hopefully that will help you create a gun session all by yourself or at least add something to your own training,

in my next one ill share one of my tried and tested arm sessions with you.

until then

Sayounara.

The Human element

Traveling through the dietary fog.

In early stage dieting for any goal counting and tracking macros may well be above the level complexity required to make first steps progress, hence why people may start with a simple commercial diet or food plan purchased online and make progress.  

That is all well and good as long as sound principles are laid out and it helps that person take steps forward and actually progress.

Unfortunately many of these plans are becoming more illogical and fail to follow basic sound principles and push dogmatic views and mythical ideologies.

Sometimes they may work for a while,  sometimes not.

However if these "plans" work essentially you just got a little lucky because it's not measured therefore any progressions or regressions are a guessing game,

at some point invariably this approach stalls and frustrations occur and people jump from diet to diet or search for the missing supplements,

but the fact that it's not measured means it couldn't be managed.

So in simple terms, take the guess work out of it, at some point when very simple approaches cease to work nearly everyone will benefit greatly from applying some tracking and management of food intake at some point.

Yes some people tell me this is a pain, but the pain of simply spending all of 5 mins a day tracking food is a lot less painful than starving yourself and wondering why your current approach isn't working.



Tracking food intake not only takes the guess work away and lays it out in front of you exactly why you aren't progressing, it will show you what needs to be done.






Keeping a log and tracking is a great tool to take some of the emotional connection and rash decisions out of the process.

Dieting can be simple, it's the human element that we need to manage
and any strategies that minimize stress, maximize progress and longevity.

The fibre of the fabric - the Mind muscle connection

Mind and muscles

The Smoking barrels

Delving deeper into the fibre of the fabric

In some of the last few articles we've looked at various programs, exercises, 

techniques and set and rep schemes.

In this episode we are going dive a little deeper inside the muscles and look at more than the mechanisms of a contraction, were going to take a look at how think and even feel about the contraction can help or hinder your process.

 "put your brain in your Butt" (other good muscles are also available)! a phrase i use fairly often!

but why would putting your brain in your butt be of any use?

how can understanding and feeling the contraction benefit you and your training and what techniques and tricks can we use to enhance the process.

lets take a look at, 

Making the Mind-Muscle connection.

Why i do i make such a point of you connecting with the muscles rather than just completing a move?

lets think, when you train, where is your mind?

Are you in the zone or are you texting in between sets or thinking about work or whats for dinner?

how in the zone are you when you lift? are you even aware of it?

The mind muscle connection.

Making the inner mind muscle connection is not for every exercise, don't get me wrong every exercise requires concentration, 

but some require a different type of focus, some need large scale focus or "macro focus" of the whole process whilst some require or allow a detailed analysis with a more internal focus, where you can get lost inside the move and the muscle, a process i call "micro focus".

What do i mean?

Macro - large-scale; overall.

"the analysis of social events at the macro level"

lets take the Deadlift as an example of macro focus in action - 

Focus

the Deadlift is a fundamental lift for total body strength, this lift moves through many angles about many joints and requires nearly every muscle to work in unison to complete a well executed lift, 

you need to focus on your posture, the positioning of your body relative to itself and the surrounding environment, drive, aggressiveness when needed and breathing all with a massive load trying to return to the earth.

your aim should be to lift that load as safe, efficient and effectively as possible.

Your focus is encompassed like an umbrella over the whole process, over all facets of the lift - "macro focus".

Micro - Extremely small.

"a micro buffet area"

Now lets look at a biceps curl for an example of micro focus -

Focus

 this lift moves about 1 joint, primarily the elbow and a little from the shoulder depending on the specific variation (you could argue the wrist too, but don't go splitting hairs), 

when performing say the preacher curl your goal is total activation of the elbow Flexors,
due to the simplistic nature of the lift you do not require a great amount of skill to complete the move so external focus like balance and coordination and recruitment of large amounts of muscles are not required.

With that large portion of neural activity now free, it can be directed into the pure recruitment of the specific working muscles since its only small group needed for the lift, 

your focus can go deeper into the lift actively trying to flex the biceps rather than just liftng a bar up and down, you can concentrate and visualise the contraction taking place,  you can directly make a connection between the move and the muscle working.  from the outside they look similar but trust me these are two very different things,

One is merely going through the motions and the other is connecting with the lift.

That is training. Training that boarders on meditation, the person who gets closer or at least strives to get to that place whilst training see's infinitely more progress than the person who sees it as a means to an end.

Just as with everything, its more about how you get to your end goal than merely getting to the goal.

This applies at a macro but also a micro level too, not just in weeks and years but in milliseconds to seconds, from set to rep and to smaller and smaller focus.

"You can't only do rep 12, the twelfth rep is made by the previous 11 reps. so every rep literally counts and you must feel every one"

Developing the mind muscle connection or focusing on the working muscles "has been shown to improve your workout by at least 25%"  (Schoenfeld)

The mind-to-muscle connection is scientifically referred to in a number of ways like neuromuscular communication, neuromuscular control, neuromuscular concentration, or neuromuscular innervation.

what ever you want to call it, the concept involves increasing the focus on the working muscle by actively concentrating on the singular contractions of the targeted muscle.

but what is it you are actually concentrating on?

what happens when you Flex!

When you consciously flex your biceps it starts with the brain, That urge to flex occurs as an electrical impulse that takes a rapid trip to your biceps, of speeds up to and around 120m/s!

All so you can stretch your shirtsleeves as you drink your protein shake.

the power of the flex is a result of output signal from our brain commonly referred to as neural drive another term (yes another) for the mind muscle connection. A strong connection gives you the ability to enhance the signal being sent and received for a stronger contraction, much like upgrading from a standard Internet cable to super fast fibre-optic broadband .

That signal travels down the spinal cord to the motor neuron that heads to the biceps where the electrical impulse sent by the brain reaches the space between the neuron and the muscles where that impulse triggers a release of chemicals known as neurotransmitters that attach to specific receptors in the muscle where a transfer of more chemicals triggers filaments within the muscle cells to attach and cause your muscles to contract (again we can delve even deeper here but ill save you the science).

its about more than the move

as Arnold said.

"The weights are just a means to an end; how well you contract the muscles is what training is all about."

and he wasn't wrong, the 7 time mr olympia and greatest bodybuilder in history swore by the mind muscle connection, the guy was way ahead of his time.

But what are the benefits of creating a strong mind-muscle connection and how can it increase our results?

1. Recruit more muscle fibres - this alone creates secondary benefits, recruiting more muscle fibres increases the contractile force of the whole muscle, increasing the load you can lift and tension placed upon the muscle thus increasing intensity and total work performed.
2. Increased intensity and staying in the zone.
3. Increase the pump - secondary benefits. an increased muscle pump doesn't just feel good (i wont quote Arnie here) .the pump you experience plays a role my increasing metabolites within the muscle cells. This increase in intra and extra cellular fluid increases the stress to the muscle cells which triggers recovery.
4. Increased movement quality. the increased tension and recruitment of motor units enhances muscular control.

how to enhance the mind muscle connection.

heres a just a few to get you started, i will expand on these in another article;

1. lighten up - leave the ego at the door and lighten the load slightly, by not having to focus on raw power you can really feel the squeeze of the muscles. This doesn't have to compromise the effectiveness of the lift, infact if you can make the connection and recruit more muscle or work to a higher intensity it will actually benefit you more.

2. slow down -
slow down each phase of the lift by applying a tempo method - by slowing the concentric and eccentric phases of the lift gives you more time to litterally focus on the muscle worked, especially as you contract - focus on gripping and squeezing hard.

3. Focus -

 litterally stare at the area you are trying to hit - obviously only works for certain muscles like biceps and the quads (dont let me catch staring at your own butt in the gym!). if your left bicep seems to be weaker than the right, next time on the preacher, stare at your left and focus on crushing the dumbell.

4. Sensory feedback -

maybe a tad too far....

a tactic more often used by us as coaches to enhance a working set, especially when training muscles that you can't directly see such as the lats, as a coach can supply feedback via physically applying pressure to your lats to help you make the connection between the working muscles while performing the given lift to increase the contraction. 

But there are a few ways that you can use that principle yourself - try this; next time you are on the leg extension dig your thumbs into your VMO (tear drop muscle above your knee) prior to your set, this will help you make the connection.

6. State and visualisation - 

visualize the fibres within the muscle belly contracting and squeezing together, use music pre and during workout to place you in the right state to visualize, focus on your overall goal look over previous workouts and see the numbers to beat, focus on the goal of the workout and of each lift and see yourself stronger. This is a very powerful tool, and is no exception when it comes to weight training. being in the right state allows the ability to get in the required zone for intense work to take place. this one requires an article by itself which i am working on.

i will expand on these principles in a part 2 and 3 where i will give you some tactics and protocols you can implement in your training over the coming weeks.

till then

SHHHTick ARRound

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