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OuchThatHurts
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VIRT
Variable Intra-set Resistance Trainingb
by
Many of you have trained high volume and/or high intensity and are very familiar with those which are pretty specific and most of you are very familiar with plyometrics as well and some of you are maybe familiar or not-so-familiar with kinesiology. I've often seen discussions on how to vary your resistance from set to set or workout to workout or even month to month but have any of you ever considered the possible benefit of varying resistance rep to rep? Maybe you have and if this has already been discussed or written about, I apologize. If it hasn't, then I may be giving you something that will help your training or I may be giving you something that will put you in need of surgery. I can't say for sure. What I can say for sure is that I'll be giving you something that is amazing for me and right now, that's quite good enough.
I want to say really quickly at this point, that I have no way to determine what affect this will have on building larger muscles but more so focus on building stronger muscles, tendons, ligaments, and increased bone density and if it does or doesn't I have zero scientific studies to back it up. That's right. No MRI's, no EEG's, not biopsies, none. If you need that, stop here and move on to the next article. If you don't, keep reading and have a laugh or maybe an idea or two.
Let me first start off at how I discovered this in my training and if someone or many people have written books or articles or methods about it, then I didn't discover anything and all of this is just my own observations put to work. Much in the way I began to eat a diet consisting of meats, vegetables, and fruits is similar to the way I began to add these VIRT sessions into my weekly workouts and the people that train with and under me.
Many years ago, as I was studying prehistoric human history (prehistoric humans - seven to ten thousand years ago and before) as simply just a hobby, I began to consider what these people might have eaten. These early people did not have cakes, pies, processed anything, little or no sugar (at least very often), and lived mostly off of what nature itself provided. Their bodies adapted and changed over hundreds of thousands of years to maximize the benefit from what nature offered and I'm sure some of them lived their entire lives with lactose as their first and last sugar and once they were weaned as infants, meat and plants became the mainstays of their diet. What I can tell you for certain, is that not much has changed physiologically in the human species since then and in that short timespan which is just a few clicks of nthe biological clock. Okay, no big deal, but! At the time, there existed only the so-called Atkins diet and people would have scoffed at a low to zero carb diet unless you were a diabetic. I began to start eating this way and I called it, simply, my Cro-Magnon diet. The diet didn't require a book and the rules were easy and were simply that if you couldn't catch it, spear it, pull it out of the ground, or off a tree or plant, you simply didn't eat it. Many diets (Atkins, et al) had already come along but were not exactly what I had come up with and it took quite a while to train my body to eat this so-called "Cro-Magnon Diet". I began to feel like a new person! That's the short version of the story. A few years pass and I'm at a relative's house and they are raving about this great new diet that is all the rage called the "Paleo Diet". So I missed the boat on that one and I should be typing this while aboard my own private jet and not sitting here on my couch. As they say though, "Such is life."
Okay, back on track now before I digress any further. Before I explain this method, let me tell you how this came about, which is more or less by chance with a little knowledge of progressive training, plyo, kinesiology, and history. We had a leg press in my old gym (now scrap someplace just like the gym) that was old, poorly oiled, and heavily used. You put the weights on pegs and when you pressed the feet pedals, a chain much like a motorcycle chain pulled the weight. Well it was awful. It would get stuck on the cranks, it would rumble, the bearings were shot, the leverage wasn't even so it was much harder at some points in the movement than others but even despite all the problems, I would be so sore after using it. Then I looked at barbell chains that give you increasingly greater resistance within the press or squat and some things started to click inside my head. The final straw was having my SUV's serpentine belt snap five hundred yards from my home and the vehicle just died. My son steered as I figured I'd just push it the rest of the way even though it was a crappy road and although fairly level, pretty rocky and patchy. I must say, it was an incredible workout! My son was an inexperienced driver, he had it in gear at first, and then kept slamming on the breaks everytime he felt he was going too fast, and the road itself was giving me fits. Meanwhile, I was pushing all the way with all my might. I'm glad that belt snapped because I got stronger that day. Believe me! Same light bulb clicked on as back with the old leg press. Still later, the family and I were watching "Little House on the Prairie" and Charles is pushing an old fashioned hand plow through the dirt and my son said, "Can you imagine how strong those guys probably were?!?" Light bulb! Click! We've all heard the phrase "farmer's strength" and I had friends that were farmers, I live in PA and VA for crying out loud and it's for real. Those kids are mighty!
So as I'm eating my Cro-Magnon meal (fuck Paleo, I had the concept first, dammit) I started to think about a Cro-Magnon workout. What would have made men strong back then? What conditions? Pushing or pulling a plow or dragging a deer or a bison up a hill certainly would not have been "slow and steady while contracting at the peak of the movement with little time in between pulls". Pushing a wagon, or digging a hole wouldn't have been smooth. Nothing would have been. So just like the unevenness of my beloved old leg press machine or pushing my automobile (SUV, actually), I decided to try variable intra-set resistance (or now that I've written it out, let's just say VIRT (I had originally entitled it VIT for "variable intensity training" but that's not quite correct so I've changed the title). I understand that this is something that's hard to duplicate in the gym because everything is designed to be ergonomic. In addition to my training with standard practices, I now incorporate VIRT. A perfect example is instead of walking lunges, I turn my Wrangler off and push it down the road with my partner at the wheel and have them brake, turn, whatever to make it uneven. It's ridiculous on your thighs, calves, and shoulders - your entire body actually (enough to lose the contents of your stomach if you take it too far).
I wanted to throw this out there, get some opinions, here what you have to say. I'm going to continue to work on this until I feel it's perfected but I'm more than happy to give some suggestions until then.
.
Variable Intra-set Resistance Trainingb
by
Many of you have trained high volume and/or high intensity and are very familiar with those which are pretty specific and most of you are very familiar with plyometrics as well and some of you are maybe familiar or not-so-familiar with kinesiology. I've often seen discussions on how to vary your resistance from set to set or workout to workout or even month to month but have any of you ever considered the possible benefit of varying resistance rep to rep? Maybe you have and if this has already been discussed or written about, I apologize. If it hasn't, then I may be giving you something that will help your training or I may be giving you something that will put you in need of surgery. I can't say for sure. What I can say for sure is that I'll be giving you something that is amazing for me and right now, that's quite good enough.
I want to say really quickly at this point, that I have no way to determine what affect this will have on building larger muscles but more so focus on building stronger muscles, tendons, ligaments, and increased bone density and if it does or doesn't I have zero scientific studies to back it up. That's right. No MRI's, no EEG's, not biopsies, none. If you need that, stop here and move on to the next article. If you don't, keep reading and have a laugh or maybe an idea or two.
Let me first start off at how I discovered this in my training and if someone or many people have written books or articles or methods about it, then I didn't discover anything and all of this is just my own observations put to work. Much in the way I began to eat a diet consisting of meats, vegetables, and fruits is similar to the way I began to add these VIRT sessions into my weekly workouts and the people that train with and under me.
Many years ago, as I was studying prehistoric human history (prehistoric humans - seven to ten thousand years ago and before) as simply just a hobby, I began to consider what these people might have eaten. These early people did not have cakes, pies, processed anything, little or no sugar (at least very often), and lived mostly off of what nature itself provided. Their bodies adapted and changed over hundreds of thousands of years to maximize the benefit from what nature offered and I'm sure some of them lived their entire lives with lactose as their first and last sugar and once they were weaned as infants, meat and plants became the mainstays of their diet. What I can tell you for certain, is that not much has changed physiologically in the human species since then and in that short timespan which is just a few clicks of nthe biological clock. Okay, no big deal, but! At the time, there existed only the so-called Atkins diet and people would have scoffed at a low to zero carb diet unless you were a diabetic. I began to start eating this way and I called it, simply, my Cro-Magnon diet. The diet didn't require a book and the rules were easy and were simply that if you couldn't catch it, spear it, pull it out of the ground, or off a tree or plant, you simply didn't eat it. Many diets (Atkins, et al) had already come along but were not exactly what I had come up with and it took quite a while to train my body to eat this so-called "Cro-Magnon Diet". I began to feel like a new person! That's the short version of the story. A few years pass and I'm at a relative's house and they are raving about this great new diet that is all the rage called the "Paleo Diet". So I missed the boat on that one and I should be typing this while aboard my own private jet and not sitting here on my couch. As they say though, "Such is life."
Okay, back on track now before I digress any further. Before I explain this method, let me tell you how this came about, which is more or less by chance with a little knowledge of progressive training, plyo, kinesiology, and history. We had a leg press in my old gym (now scrap someplace just like the gym) that was old, poorly oiled, and heavily used. You put the weights on pegs and when you pressed the feet pedals, a chain much like a motorcycle chain pulled the weight. Well it was awful. It would get stuck on the cranks, it would rumble, the bearings were shot, the leverage wasn't even so it was much harder at some points in the movement than others but even despite all the problems, I would be so sore after using it. Then I looked at barbell chains that give you increasingly greater resistance within the press or squat and some things started to click inside my head. The final straw was having my SUV's serpentine belt snap five hundred yards from my home and the vehicle just died. My son steered as I figured I'd just push it the rest of the way even though it was a crappy road and although fairly level, pretty rocky and patchy. I must say, it was an incredible workout! My son was an inexperienced driver, he had it in gear at first, and then kept slamming on the breaks everytime he felt he was going too fast, and the road itself was giving me fits. Meanwhile, I was pushing all the way with all my might. I'm glad that belt snapped because I got stronger that day. Believe me! Same light bulb clicked on as back with the old leg press. Still later, the family and I were watching "Little House on the Prairie" and Charles is pushing an old fashioned hand plow through the dirt and my son said, "Can you imagine how strong those guys probably were?!?" Light bulb! Click! We've all heard the phrase "farmer's strength" and I had friends that were farmers, I live in PA and VA for crying out loud and it's for real. Those kids are mighty!
So as I'm eating my Cro-Magnon meal (fuck Paleo, I had the concept first, dammit) I started to think about a Cro-Magnon workout. What would have made men strong back then? What conditions? Pushing or pulling a plow or dragging a deer or a bison up a hill certainly would not have been "slow and steady while contracting at the peak of the movement with little time in between pulls". Pushing a wagon, or digging a hole wouldn't have been smooth. Nothing would have been. So just like the unevenness of my beloved old leg press machine or pushing my automobile (SUV, actually), I decided to try variable intra-set resistance (or now that I've written it out, let's just say VIRT (I had originally entitled it VIT for "variable intensity training" but that's not quite correct so I've changed the title). I understand that this is something that's hard to duplicate in the gym because everything is designed to be ergonomic. In addition to my training with standard practices, I now incorporate VIRT. A perfect example is instead of walking lunges, I turn my Wrangler off and push it down the road with my partner at the wheel and have them brake, turn, whatever to make it uneven. It's ridiculous on your thighs, calves, and shoulders - your entire body actually (enough to lose the contents of your stomach if you take it too far).
I wanted to throw this out there, get some opinions, here what you have to say. I'm going to continue to work on this until I feel it's perfected but I'm more than happy to give some suggestions until then.
.
