Thread: Keeping Muscles Guessing

After reading Vince Delmonte's myth dismissal here: Deadly Bodybuilding Myths You Don't Know Part 2

I realized something. Dismissing myths is in. You want to get noticed and respected? DISMISS THE MYTHS. Everyone's doing it.

The problem is, is that people are jumping over the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

Many myths and stereotypes are based in reality. It's just that they are found in the trenches, and what spreads around are easy to remember simplified principles. You don't have to know extensive explanations to know weights.

This is where I get pissed off at people saying "keeping muscles guessing doesn't work". Yes, it does. It just doesn't work when you interpret it literally, and it was never intended to be taken that way. It's stupid to criticize it on that.

The reason to do it on different days is usually because people get in ruts and overtrain so by adding an extra rest day you might give more time for hypertrophy or nervous system recovery or something.

The reason to switch between a variety of exercises is several. All lifts have different neurological recruitment. By doing a variety, you gain more connections, but also, when you start on a new exercise your connections suck and are inefficient. Due to this, you will probably stress some fibres more than they would be if they were recruited in an ideal fashion with others. This is a good thing for adaptation.

Besides fibre firing, different exercises, due to different angles of force, can hit different fibres in different ways, and different muscle groups at different focuses. Doing a triceps kickback, the fibres engaged near full contraction will be worked far harder than the others, because the resistance to the triceps is nothing when the weight points down, and 100% when it points behind you. Doing a bench press you will work the muscles far more while in a stretched position. Near lockout (full contraction, like tricep kickback) the stress on the fibres will be far less because your bones are supporting most of the weight. This is why a lot of people add chains or stretch bands, to alter that stretch curve so it makes more sense.

Because no one punches a guy or pushes a car with highly flexed elbow.

So it's not as simple as just exercising a muscle, it never has been. It's about force curves, leverage, how a muscle works, what it's working in conjunction with (other muscle groups, tendon stress, bone-loading) and these are factors which can contribute to altered rates of hypertrophy in tissue and rates of recovery.

good post.
makes you wonder why so many people are dismissing, cleans, jerks, and snatches...