POD, Patrick O'Donnell

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

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