4. Alpha Exercise

Fatigue in Good Form

Copyright 2002, Terry Duschinski.  

Fat-to-Muscle Makeover

Ocala Family Physicians'

Medical Exercise Center

Call 804-5241

Email: Terry@FloridaFitness.com

When I was probably 7 or 8 years old, my father told me a peculiar thing. I was in our backyard whacking repeatedly a large wooden peg with a sledgehammer, hoping to erect something or other, probably a tent or a fort.

My father walked upon the scene and observed, “As you keep hitting it, that hammer will become heavier and heavier and heavier.”

I had to think about it a minute, but the sledgehammer, of course, remained a constant size and weight. What my father was putting into pre-adolescence terms was the concept of muscular fatigue.

I was repping out on peg hammering. Before long, I could no longer raise the hammer again to strike another blow onto the peg. It would be decades before an understanding of volitional fatigue reached my conscious mind, but I experienced it that day.

Circuit strength training is much more controlled and calculated than a boy driving a stake into the ground, but the principle is similar although not entirely the same. You lift and you lower, until you can lift no more. Unlike my backyard experience, however, you’ll go on to the next machine and another muscle group about 7 to 11 times before you’re ready to go into the house for milk and cookies.

There is another distinction, however, that is really important. Lifting and lowering the weight stack is mechanical work, just like driving the peg into the ground. More important is the metabolic work of your muscles involved in the exercise. Here is what I mean.

Your muscles produce force. The force many times results in movement of a body part, and perhaps movement of something you're holding or pressing against (in this case a source of resistance, such as a weight stack). But the end result – the movement -- can also be affected by kinetic energy or momentum, which are separate from metabolic work.

You’re wondering why this is important, I’m sure.

Metabolic work, which is your primary goal in strength training, often results in mechanical work, but mechanical work is not required. Muscle force may or may not result in perceptible movement.

Recruiting momentum to create movement is not effective for overloading the muscle and thus stimulating growth. It's only good for making the weight stack move. It can also be dangerous. Jerking, lunging, and stabbing – slamming and banging – will damage connective tissue. Even if that damage is not apparent at the time, regular episodes of poor technique will sooner or later manifest strains or tears in connective tissue.

I hope I’ve explained this clearly because I want you to understand the folly of poor form. Establishing good form is the chief criterion in your early workouts. Resistance level should be moderate until you’ve gotten your form into a groove.

Think about a golf swing or a tennis stroke. Form is important to the travel of the ball. How many times do you hear baseball pitchers speak of “good mechanics?” It’s all about form.

With strength training we don’t have the immediate feedback of a ball in flight, but the benefits of excellent technique accumulate in both workout efficiency and safety.

If telling you what to do is not registering, now hear this: do not wiggle, squirm, heave or jerk in an attempt to move the resistance. Keep the muscle force flowing constantly and steadily, whether or not the weight stack you’re able to overcome the resistance and generate movement. Make sure all movement is fluid.

When it becomes darn near impossible to make the weight stack rise, just keep breathing and exerting force. The weight stack may not be moving, but the muscles are working; they're producing force. If you “back off and stab,” which is a release of tension in the muscle, using the stretch reflex to get a little bounce (momentum) to move through a sticking point, you’ll reduce exercise benefit and increase chances of an injury.

Here are two examples to make this point:

If your front automobile tires are resting against a speed bump, and you step on the accelerator to go over it, you have to depress it pretty far to muster the umph to get over the bump.

Your engine was producing more force attempting to get over the bump from the dead stop, than if you had backed up, picked up some momentum and then gone over.

If your goal is merely to surmount the speed bump, then backing up and recruiting momentum is the wisest course of action. But if your goal had been to exercise your engine, to overload it, to stimulate growth, backing up would not have been effective.

A better example might be a bicycle at the base of a steep hill. Backing up to get a run at it will make it easier to pedal up the hill. But in exercise we're not looking to make it easier, we're looking to make it effective.

Had you tried to pedal up the hill from a dead stop at its base, it would have required far more metabolic work, although by the time you got to the top of the hill the mechanical work would have been the same in either scenario.

In strength training, what your muscles are doing is far more important than the action of the resistance source.

Think in terms of metabolic work. A couple of sessions down the road we will discuss metabolic conditioning, which should illuminate these points even more.

When you’re ready for the advanced training techniques, we’ll teach you how the exercise really starts when movement stops. Right now such a maniacal approach isn’t necessary. You should be able to progress, increasing either the resistance or the number of repetitions, at just about every workout.

But make sure you do so in good form.