Month: June 2016

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Strength and Muscle Mass Increases in Young Women

I don’t usually bother with studies on untrained beginners.  The main reason is that, to a first approximation, everything more or less works the same.  One set or three sets, twice a week or three times per week, different loading parameters…it usually ends up being about the same.  So it doesn’t really tell us anything under most circumstances.  Certainly nothing you could apply to a non-beginner.

There are occasional exceptions, studies on beginners that do make an interesting observation at least for beginners.  Specifically in this case is a study that looked at differences in strength and muscle mass for untrained women doing simple or complex exercises.  So today I want to look at the following paper:

Chilibeck PD et. al. A comparison of strength and muscle mass increases during resistance training in young women. Eur J Appl Physiol Occup Physiol. 1998;77(1-2):170-5.

Background

I haven’t done a research review in a fairly long time since I think I found it more useful to write articles and just link out. … Keep Reading

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Rehabbing an Injury

After last week got away from me talking about the neural factors in strength performance, I hope to keep it a little bit more brief today.  And what I want to talk about is how I specifically worked to rehab an injury in one of my few trainees.

The Injury

The long and the short of it is that during a workout, they got all twisted up during a ball game and their limp on the left side indicated that something was injured.   A quick trip to the doctor along with some X-rays determined that, thankfully, it wasn’t an ACL tear.  Rather, the hip joint was injured and no surgery was indicated.

It didn’t appear to be too severe but I was told to bring them back if it wasn’t improving after a number of weeks.  Painkillers were provided to be used as necessary and the trainee used them fairly continuously for the first two weeks simply to facilitate overall daily activity without pain.… Keep Reading

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Determinants of Strength Performance: Part 2

I want to continue from my discussion of the stretch shorten cycle previously to discuss the contribution of neural factors to strength performance.  At the end I’ll try to summarize this mess.

Neural & Muscular Factors in Strength Performance

Back in the very early days of the study of strength training, an observation was made that people’s strength went up far more quickly in the early stages of training than their muscle size.  Quite in fact, it was often observed that strength increased fairly significantly before any measurable muscle growth had occurred.   This indicated that there was some other adaptation, usually taken as neural/neurological (because there isn’t a hell of a lot else that it could be) that was occurring to explain it.

At the most extreme, it was felt that all of the gains in strength were neural although this is kind of questionable:  protein synthesis goes up after the first workout even in beginners and it would seem unlikely that there was no increase in muscle size occurring at all.… Keep Reading