Ultimate Exercise - Stasis vs. Dynamism

Stasis Versus Dynamism

Recently I attended a lecture and book signing by Virginia Postrel. Ms. Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine and author of the new book The Future and Its Enemies. The subject of Ms. Postrel's book and lecture was the concept of stasis versus dynamism. In her introduction Ms. Postrel states "Stasists and dynamists disagree about the limits and use of knowledge. Stasists demand that knowledge be articulated and easily shared. Dynamists, by contrast, appreciate dispersed, often tacit knowledge...Those conflicts lead to very different beliefs about good institutions and rules: Stasists seek specifics to govern each new situation and keep things under control. Dynamists want to limit universal rule making to broadly applicable and rarely changed principles, within which people can create and test countless combinations." Having heard the above definition, I was embarrassed to realize my own stasist tendencies. Stasist tendencies tend to be highly represented in the H.I.T. and SuperSlow communities, as can be easily seen in much of my own writing. What I came to realize as I listened to this lecture is that every improvement I have ever brought to my own training came from breaking away from my stasist tendencies and incorporating dynamist thinking and problem solving.

What follows are some representations of how we have broken out of stasis at Ultimate Exercise in the past and some of the experiments we are currently involved in. As I present these to you I must offer a few disclaimers... First, while these investigations are controlled experiments they are not research. Research implies randomization, removal of bias and statistical control which we are not able to incorporate at Ultimate Exercise. Second, the theories we are testing are not endorsed by Ultimate Exercise (except where noted), the SuperSlow Exercise Guild or any other person or certifying body. Finally, much of what we are trying is unproven and may not work. We are not advocating that everything we are trying will work, but if it seems to, we will make it known in future articles.

Stasis in H.I.T.

In Chapter 1 of the SuperSlow Technical Manual Ken Hutchins describes some of his early training with Jim Flanagan... "I continuously trained with Jim Flanagan for eight months-from August 1979 to April 1980...Eventually, Jim knew my exact resistance requirements for each Nautilus exercise. I, likewise, knew his and remember some of them to this day". How was it that many years later Ken could recall Jim's resistance requirements so well? I believe that, like so many of us in H.I.T., the resistance never changed over that eight month period. I remember doing the same Arthur Jones prescribed routine every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 1979-1989 with no change in resistance. I can still recall the exact weight on every movement in that routine. I always used a rep range of 8-12, but because I never quite made that 12th rep, I never progressed the weight. I assume a similar pattern occurred with Ken and Jim until Ken broke stasis with the SuperSlow protocol, producing rapid results for the first time in months. Like many Nautilus enthusiasts of the day, I rationalized that since intensity was the key stimulus, it was acceptable that my weights not progress...after all, I was training to failure and beyond. Talk about Stasis! I was using my stasist beliefs as a shield against the undeniable fact that if your weights aren't progressing, then you aren't getting stronger.

Training as a Dynamic Process

I am finding one of the major flaws in our attempts to understand the nature of the weight training stimulus is the assumption that there must be a single key stimulus that underlies the stimulus-organism-response relationship. At Ultimate Exercise, Terry Carter and I are finding that the stimulus is actually multi-factorial and that the relative contribution of each stimulus changes as a subject progresses. What was once a positive stimulus can become negative in the changing context of progress. What does seem to be a constant however, is that for strength increases to occur, resistance must progress over time. While this seems obvious and straightforward, there are several barriers to weight progression which occur at different stages of training. To understand these barriers we need to discuss the contribution of the various stimuli. The stimuli we are currently focusing on are inroad, metabolic effect, and exposure to resistance.

Inroad (or the momentary weakening of a muscle) is a widely recognized stimulus for muscle growth and is a cornerstone of H.I.T. philosophy. Our own views on inroad can be found in previous articles and in Ultimate Exercise:Bulletin 1. Inroad is not the only stimulus for strength progression; if it were, then "hyper" training would produce rapid, uninterrupted progress. "Hyper" refers to training to failure with manual resistance added to the negative portion of every rep and then rep assist on the positives after failure with continued application of extra negative resistance manually. This is carried to the point where the subject can no longer even move the affected limb. If inroad were the only issue, this sort of workout performed regularly should produce amazing progress. Unfortunately, for those of us who tried it, it simply resulted in a rapid stalemate and profound fatigue. It appears that "enough" inroad is a requirement, but like other aspects of training more is not necessarily better. Inroad appears to be a major contributor in the early stages of training because it is hard for the novice to achieve, and it is rare for the beginner/intermediate subject to have the capability of invoking too much of it. In more advanced stages, a subject can invoke a degree of inroad that is difficult to recover from; indeed, one of the beneficial side effects of weight progression is to protect against excessive inroad. However, even with weight progression, the degree of motor unit recruitment that a subject can invoke can produce excessive inroad fairly easily. We are finding better rates of progress by limiting depth of inroad as subjects get stronger. We are even experimenting with stopping our more advanced subjects short of failure (we will discuss this in more detail later).

Another key stimulus in the growth process seems to be the "metabolic effect" of the workout: the sensation of heavy breathing, rapid heart rate, tunnel vision, roaring in the ears, nausea etc. These are all sensations of your body trying to supply nutrients to the working muscles and remove waste products and buffer metabolic acidosis. This condition seems to offer the milieu in which the growth process is most easily triggered and seems to be involved with the "indirect effect" on the non-working muscles. While no one fully understands the relationship between mechanical work and metabolic work, we can demonstrate that increased strength without a concomitant decrease in volume quickly leads to what we call "metabolic meltdown". At this point the subject requires extended "carpet time" and attempts at additional exercise require large decreases in resistance to perform at a reasonable TUL. Pushing a subject beyond this point quickly stalls progress regardless of the recovery interval. So, metabolic effect is also a component of the growth stimulus but again, more is not better. As a subject becomes stronger "metabolic meltdown" occurs sooner and sooner in the workout.

The final contribution to the growth stimulus that I will mention is what we call "exposure to the weight". It seems that exposure to increasing resistance is one of the most important stimuli in the growth process. At the cellular level, satellite cells (myogenic stem cells) seem to respond to weight exposure by upregulating their receptors for IGF-1 (Insulin-like growth factor-1) which will bind circulating IGF-1 and result in growth. Indeed, without weight progression the other components do not provide a stimulus for growth. Some degree of inroad and metabolic effect seem to augment the effect of weight progression, particularly in early and intermediate stages of training. It has been demonstrated that intensity and metabolic effect are tied to Growth hormone release (precursor of IGF-1). We can see that increased IGF-1 is integral to the growth process, but unless IGF-1 receptors are upregulated by exposure to heavier weight, the existing receptors will become saturated and all the intensity in the world and all the IGF-1 in the world will not make a difference. (Please understand that this statement is my own conjecture). However, as a subject gets stronger, he develops the capability of producing much larger amounts of inroad and subsequently much larger metabolic effects (note that I am not claiming larger percentages of inroad, just larger amounts...i.e. 25% of 400lbs is a lot more inroad than 25% of 200lbs). In the early stages of training the degree of inroad and metabolic effect seems to augment weight progression and strength gains. In the intermediate stages and early advanced levels inroad and metabolic effect appears to be permissive, not inhibiting or augmenting strength gain but still desirable because of the metabolic conditioning. In truly advanced stages, inroad and metabolic effect seems to become "toxic"; that is, the effect is so severe that it seems to prevent continued weight progression. I speculate that this may have to do with release of cortisol and other stress hormones that down-regulate IGF-1 receptors. The biological message seems to be "this conflict is so severe that rather than allowing further adaptations to this environment, it would be better to leave this environment" or something to that effect. We are finding at this point that protocol needs to be modified. Inroad and metabolic effect need to be controlled so that weight progression can continue. In the articles that follow we will describe the modifications we make as clients progress and how we manipulate the dynamic factors involved.