This is from Mike Mahler's newsletter but I'm posting it because it sounded very familiar to me. I think I even hear Bill's voice in the back of my head, too. If you want to get stronger (or faster) at something, that's what you need to train but training is fairly specific in terms of the benefits. If you change your training style - tempo, in the case below - you get better at that but it won't always carry over to another style. If you drop certain exercises to get better on others, chances are that you'll get better on the ones you are focusing on but you'll lose ground on the ones you spend less time on. I know this happens to me anyway. So, if you change things up regularly, it helps to improve your overall fitness and helps to avoids stalling out on specific areas that you are hitting over and over.
Are You Getting Stronger Or Just Kidding Yourself?
Many trainees get excited about switching to a new program or training
style and allegedly making progress. However, if you really evaluate
things objectively you may realize that you have not made any progress at
all. Let me provide a personal example. Years ago I decided to give the
super slow training a shot (I know, I know the foolishness of youth). The
protocol called for a ten second negative followed by a five second
positive. While I could bench press 315lbs at the time for a single using
a regular tempo, I found that I could only do 135lbs in super slow form
for five reps. A month later I was doing 200lbs for five reps on the bench
press in super slow fashion. I was excited because I though that I
increased my bench press by 75lbs in a month. Moreover, I thought that my
new gains in strength would carry over to the bench press using a regular
tempo. In other words, I thought that I would now be able to bench press a
minimum of 350lbs+. Well, I was in for a rude awakening when I put 315lb
on the bar and barely pressed it once. It actually felt harder than it did
before I did the super slow program.
Training is a very specific thing. If you train in one fashion do not
expect to carry over effectively to another fashion. Just because you are
getting stronger in one style does not mean that you will get stronger in
another. In my case regarding the bench press, increasing one-rep strength
requires focusing on fast twitch muscles. Training in super slow fashion
works slow twitch fibers. Thus, super slow is not an effective training
protocol for fast twitch strength. If you want to get strong at something,
look at the kind of strength that you need to build to get the job done
and focus your training on that.
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