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The nervous system and training part 1: the Neuron

The nervous system plays a role in weight training at multiple levels. It influences your state of being and how your whole body functions. The fight or flight and rest and digest mode. Today however we're diving in to a more cellular level of the nervous system the Neuron itself. We'll try to answer questions like, why does slapping your muscles before a set help increase strength? Why do 10-15 rep sets require 45-90 seconds of rest and why does a heave 1-5 rep set require up to 300 seconds? And how do neurological adaptations increase strength? Now the basic function of a neuron is to transport electric signals to either a neighbouring neuron and/or target cell. The target cell usually defines the function of the electric signaling. For instance when a motor neuron signals a muscle to contract, its axons will end up on a muscle fibre (the target) and result in muscle contraction. Thus giving us the function of a motor neuron. Neurons can also to this for the endocrine sys
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Active and passive insufficiency and why it matters

Make a fist and squeeze your hand as hard as you can. Good! Now flex your wrist towards the palm side of your hand and try again. Now you probably failed to apply nearly as much force as in your first try. Why is that? In this article we'll explore the definition of passive and active insufficiencies of muscles. We're going to find out how muscles contract optimally, why regular incline bench press barely works the upper chest, how to target the individual heads of the bicep and how this all ties in to further optimise your exercise selection. Hope you enjoy! How do muscle's contract? To create an understanding of how muscle contractions become insufficient we need to know how they become sufficient first. A sufficient muscle contraction is a contraction where the myosin and actin filaments can comfortably slide over each other. This means that there is an optimal amount of distance the actin filaments can travel to facilitate an optimal contraction. On the opposite
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Anatomy made easy(-ish) part 2: The shoulder girdle

Last time we discussed the main movements that can be viewed in the saggital plan. Main movements being flexion extension. In this article we'll focus on the shoulder girdle, the most complex set of joints in your body. Unlike the large hip joint that is able to bare strong external forces. The shoulder joint needs to work very hard for it's stability. We'll explore how the shoulders are involved in posture, why you need strong lats to be good at arm wrestling and how shoulders get depressed. So the shoulder does a lot of different movements. It elevates, depresses, rotates, tilts, retracts and protracts, flexes and extends. And it has the ability to do multiple movements at the same time! Due to the shoulders ability to move so freely, it pays the price of decreased stability. How do you solve for a decrease in stability? You slab on a lot muscle to keep it in it's place. The shoulder joint. The shoulder joint itself consists of the upper arm and the glenoid ca
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Anatomy made easy(-ish), Part 1: Saggital view

Anatomy of the musculoskeletal system in itself is pretty straight forward. Muscle group/name, function, joints and location. Depending on the source you use, there could be between 650-800 skeletal muscles in the body. Now learning all these muscles by heart would be a drag. In this article we're going to look in to a system that'll make it a lot easier to remember the main muscle groups. Want to find out how you can easily categorize and derive the muscles function? Are you curious about anatomy but a lazy student? Read on. So today we're going to talk about all the movements that can be perceived in the saggital view. The saggital view is where you stand perpendicular to a person (ie from the side). We're going to look in to how to easily derive function from position. Now imagine a line going straight through the middle of someones body. And we'll lable the front, the anterior side and the back, the posterior side. As a rule: All the muscles in the front o
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Energy systems explained

So training in energy systems is quite an abstract concept. Most trainers are familiar with the aerobic, anaerobic lactic and alactic systems. But what links the systems and how do they work together? Are they always active at the same time or does your body pick and choose? And why is that if you walk your 3-4 flights of stairs everyday, you still feel out of breath when you reach your appartment? So a very important concept in explaining your energy systems is the use and recycling of ATP. ATP stands for Adenosine triphosphate. Tri being important pat in the name. Now when our cells want to create energy they do that by splitting of one phosphate group, leaving you with ADP, Adenosine DIphosphate. This leaves is with a problem because our Adenosine can't infinitely give away phosphate to create energy. So how does the body solve for this? The body has multiple methods of recycling ADP back to ATP. Let's explore this. So when your body needs glucose it attaches one of t
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The VO2 max series: Part 3, do all your muscles like oxygen?

An introduction in to muscle fibre types. So in the previous two parts of the VO2 max series we talked about how the oxygen gets delivered in the cells as efficiently as possible and also how oxygen is utilised in the cell. Today we're going to talk about the different characteristics in muscle fibre type. Some muscle fibres are very efficient with energy. Some are not. Why is this important, and what underlying functions do these differences have? And also, can you get an idea of what your muscle fibre types your muscles are made of? The two muscle fibre types at both ends of the spectrum are slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibres. Slow twitch fibres are more energy efficient in comparison to their fast twitch counterparts. Now this whole series we've been talking about creating energy for the body to use. How do you classify the two above mentioned muscle fibre  types? Since we've talked about endurance a lot, let's delve in to the powerhouses amongst the m
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The VO2 Max series part 2: The heart

Oxygen and creating energy from it plays a large role in our fitness. One of the ways to measure fitness is by how efficiently our body utilise oxygen, the VO2 Max. We all breath the same air and more or less breath in the same amount of oxygen. Now, why then are some people fitter than others? In this instalment of the VO2 max series I'm going to answer questions like: - Why does a fit person have a lower resting heart rate? - What adaptations take place in the heart and why does this help you perform? So before we start out it's important to understand how the heart functions. Now it would be an insult to your intelligence to explain that the heart pumps blood around the body. I'm going to explain how the heart manages to do this more efficiently as you get fitter. We'll start of with a little bit of terminology, the diastole and the systole components of the heartbeat. The diastole is the phase where the heart chambers fill themselves with blood, the systol
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