After reading countless posts and answering questions daily at work I decided to write this as a means for those that seem like they are in a rut with their training, want to stimulate some new growth and/or want to challenge themself in a different way.
I entitiled it "changing the stimulus" because that is exactley what we need to do in order to keep our body moving and progressing. In order to progress we must change the stimulus going to our central nervous system every 6 weeks or so(often reffered to as perodization) to prevent accomodation.
First some defenitions:
Overload principle: Stimulating our nervous system in manner that deters us from becoming accustomed to a given level of stress in order to induce adaptation responses.
adaptation: refers to the process that occurs in our body in response to effective stimuli
accomodation: refers to the body reaching homeostasis in response to repeated stimuli
Okay, now what the hell does this all mean??? Basically it means that we always want to try and keep our body in the adaptation phase because once we accomodate to a given stimuli we are no longer overloading our system...hence the term plateau.
So how can we overload our system and keep it continually adapting to stimuli without accomodating??
There are a number of different ways to do this:
First the most basic is increase the resistance (more weigth). As bodybuilders we are ussually always going heavy, trying to push big weight (about 6-10reps) in order to gain more mass. This is a great way to overload our senses the only problem is is that we accomdate to this pretty quickly as most of you have probably figured out when you hit your first plateua. So what did you do??
The second way you can change the stimulus is to change your workout around. This is another great way but you will eventually accomodate to this also.
Another way is to change your rep range (high, low, high, low, moderate...etc) this also works well.
However these are not the reason for my post because most of you are familure with this. My main reason is to give you guys a new way to challenge yourselves:
Oneway I have found to change the stimulus is to challenge my balance/coordination and my proprioception (our postition sense with regard to our body in space. Senses rate and length of change of joints and muscles). Try do something like barbell squats or stiff leg deads on one foot or even millitary presses now things are completly different. Now propriceptivley we need to sense our libs in space and sense the rate of change of our joint actions because they are way off now.. Another way is to do something on a swiss ball. Sit on it and do millitary press, to easy?? Put one foot up in the air and see what happens. Still to easy?? Do it with dumbell unilaterally or recipricoally...Now you are asking you body to solve for equilibrium in a whole different manner. Work so that you can stand on the swiss ball and do squats. Wobble boards are another great tool to help prevent accomodation. One of my favorite things to do to my central nervous system is uneven loading. I will do something like incline dumbell flyes (with my legs up in the air to challenge my core stabalization) with my right hand holding a 45lb dumbell and my left holding a 25lb dumbell. This is really hard, especially when you switch the weights in each hand on the second set and then switch back on the third set. Now your central nervous system is really messed up because it can't figure out what is going on or what to expect next. Trying doing uneven loading on a barbell squat if you are really brave.
Most of you are probably thinking that all this circus crap is stupid (I felt that way also at first). But I can tell you that after doing this stuff my results have been amazing as far as increasing size and strength on my other more normal lifts. One thing about this stuff is that it is so hard to acomplish the task that when you go back to something like a regular squat your able to more effeciently stabalize weight, drive through your center of gravity and in the end produce more force and push more weight. Also doing things like this increase stability around the joints. The shoulder joint, for example, is the most mobile joint in our body. For joints there is a mobility/stability trade off......the more mobile a joint is the less stable it is. This is why people injure their shoulder so often. So by doing things like this your body has to stabalize weight more effeciently which will lead to great joint stabalization. This alone has helped me a ton.
So next time you are at the gym try throwing some of these in once in a while to challenge your nervous sytem. You may be amazed at what you find.
