Warm-up Strategies and Potentiation

See, for me, because I was a power lifter before I did any type of physique stuff. So for me, everything's all mathematics. it's all a numbers game so for me it's like that just so that the people listening can understand the mentality of like warm-ups between two different high-level coaches for me it's like 50 for five 60 for five 70 for four 80 for three then i might do a couple of 90 at like one or two reps And then I jump into my first work set Or if I doing I may even do some post tannic facilitation or potentiation by I might actually warm up to over my work weight. So I might actually work up to 110% over what my first work set is going to be. So then when I go to my work set, my nervous system is ramped up. I tend to be a really fast twitch, high nervous system dominant, like strength athlete. So it takes me a long time to get the nervous system to wake up. But you're pyramiding your weight and reps, right? So if you're doing 110% for five reps, your working set will be like eight or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So if, let's say, let's say if I'm benching, say one, I'm going to bench say like one. 180. I think it was 180. 180. I wish I was, I could still do 180. Let's say I do 120 for a set of five. I might work up to like 127 and a half. And then I'd give myself like eight or nine minutes of rest, and then I'd begin the warm-up. Right. And you just do like a single or a double? No, for that warm-up, yeah, just a single, just a single. You know, I've thought about playing around with really super max, like seeing what would happen if I – because I've got weight releasers. what would happen if I did like a 10 second 140 percent super max eccentric and then gave myself like 15 minutes and then worked out and see what happened but I haven't got I don't have the nuts to do it yet I'm still too scared to do it so please film it yeah it's a really interesting concept that I've certainly um found it to be something I've enjoyed I used to do it back in the day with pressing off a pause work up to a heavy above the working on a pause and then put it on like normal and then use some recall and a lighter weight and it's just like fuck man is there a rubber band attached to this yeah but i'm also like you though i can only kind of do that a couple of times and then i just gas out i'm 100 like a sprint and drop guy like man if you're training hard you need all of that rest because some people might be listening to you saying five or six minutes rest, eight or nine minutes rest and thinking, what the fuck? I have a client who emailed me less than a week ago and she said, Oh, just so you know, in between sets, I've been skipping with my skipping rope to keep my heart rate up. I know that's just kind of how I felt. And I had to kind of break down why we need that rest and why it's so important. Um, and I, can we break that down right now? Sure. Do you want to, do you want to unravel that a little? Yeah, look, um so you've got different systems that you need to rest right so you've got metabolic systems and you've got neurological systems okay so those are the two main things you're thinking about so the higher reps you do you're thinking more metabolic things so we're recycling atp the body's energy currency so when you're doing lower reps you have to replenish more it's more creatine phosphate but that that doesn't really it doesn't take that long to replenish that because it never really breaks down below you know 50 60 percent so um you know you're talking like two to three minutes you've you've pretty much topped up about 90 of your creatine phosphate right so i like to do i almost always do antagonistic pairings so i'm either going to do like a push with a pull or a squat with a knee flexion or upper lower so i might do a squat with pull up so that you get actually get almost complete as much as you can recover from creatine phosphate. But when you're doing the really high rep, the really low reps, despite the energy flux that you're trying to manage, the energy substrate, you're also trying to manage your nervous system. So you're looking at, like, I've got to manage central and peripheral fatigue via my brain going, okay, what the fuck is this guy doing? Holy shit. Your brain doesn't know that you're doing this to get a 200-kilo squat. Your brain thinks you're wrestling a fucking gorilla, right? So your brain is going to limit your body from doing things that you're doing so that you don't hurt yourself, right? Which is like when we look into things like different forms of maximal strength, or we might be talking about absolute strength and relative strength, and then the one that a lot of people don't talk about, which is limit strength, which is that the strength you can't really tap into consciously. That's the story of the grandmother pulling the call off of her kid and then ripping every tendon off of her bone. That's that strength that, you know, you're basically your GTOs and some of your organelles will, will control that so that you can only contract your muscles at a certain amount because any more than this might lead to injury. Like, like I said, like ripping a muscle or ripping a tendon. But the closer you are to that, the more rest you're going to need to allow the nervous system to calm down enough to then potentiate another reaction in the muscle or another contraction And then there some other things going on Like if you looking at more peripheral fatigue you looking more thinking about like a single choline release from the end of an axon. You're thinking about calcium and the relationship between calcium and phosphate. Okay. And how fast calcium is being recycled through circa between the sarcoplasmic interplasmic reticulum. I'm sorry. I need some more coffee now. Shit. and the tropomyosin or the troponin, right? So there's a lot of things going on peripherally that we have to manage. pH level from hydrogen ions, excessive amounts of phosphate binding to calcium, inability to recycle acetylcholine. So that's from a chemical side and an electrochemical side, but then you've also got the brain portion too that you have to recover from, which is, you know, that can take eight minutes if you're doing a really, really heavy lift. if you're doing something super maximal there's a reason why power lifters think right now that quarantine is just a rest period for them right so that's the thing like they rest a lot because you need that and the stronger you get the more rest you need it was difficult explaining the ins and outs of that in an email to a gen pop client um especially if you explain it like i just did yeah there was a lot of like three syllable and above words there um i i basically just said to her, you're not just trying to keep your heart rate up to burn X amount of calories within a session. If you were skipping between sets, it would be helpful to be burning more calories. We're using that rest period so that you can repeat your performance. And what if you're not resting between sets, your performance is going to go down. And we know that there's a really strong relationship between performance and muscle growth. So yeah, I kind of wrapped it up in a really pedestrian bow. I mean, what they what they have to understand is like you're looking at, okay, you've got these switches in the body, and depending on what you do, they turn switches on or they turn switches off. It's just like a light switch. So if I'm doing weightlifting, the goal is to increase mechanical tension. The goal is to increase some metabolic fatigue and metabolic waste buildup and build inflammation that I then have to recover from. And most of that, for most things that you would be doing for your clients, most of that would be anaerobic in nature, correct? Because what is the outcome of what we're doing is I'm wanting to build more muscle, and then I'm probably going to want to get stronger because I'm putting on more cross-sectional muscle mass. That's fantastic. In order to do that, we need to do the things that cause the adaptations and the switches to be turned on for that. And if you're skipping in between lifting, you're impairing your ability to switch those, to turn those switches on harder. Right? So your results are going to be subpar. So you can skip. I like that. But we're going to skip in a separate session. yeah we might skip before you work out we might do skipping as a warm-up or something like that or we might just do it as a separate session but you're you're i would be embarrassed if one of my clients was that person that was doing a leg extension and then skipping next to the leg extension you always see them but they're still not as bad as the guys who shadow box on the gym for oh my god i love these guys are the worst i know yeah i um i've likened the switch for so many different analogies but uh