My mind started to calculate a bit. Since I have been examining the role of speed in my infometric workout as a means to recruit muscle fiber more completely and since, with infimetrics, speed is not a liability as it is with imposed load equipment I decided to try a hybrid of this protocol on my infimetric leg press.

During their discussion it was noted that the typical trainee, even advanced athletes, typically cannot make it through all 8 cycles of the interval training. This is a dangerous thing for me to hear. I never back down from a challenge. I don’t like to hear “can’t” and usually take it as a personal challenge. I was not sure but I had a feeling that the ability to generate upload and speed might make this more difficult than I suspected but I was more than willing to give it a try.

I got my timing device to keep track of the time intervals and got ready to work out.

By the 3rd cycle I was chugging like a locomotive and realized I had been ignoring the circuit training mentality so prevalent in my early Nautilus training days. This was more of necessity as I have been in recovery and healing mode from a lot of damage to my body at many levels from the damage caused by undiagnosed celiac disease. In fact, in the early stages of my recovery over the last several years I had very little tolerance for any exercise. It was very easy to push things over the edge by just doing a handful of exercise to near failure. It was still much improved from the depths of my illness when one set to failure of any exercise would take the better part of 30 days to get back to baseline of being able to handle the same weight for the same number of repetitions. It was that bad. No recovery at all. No tolerance for exercise at all. If I had any physically demanding work, any attempt to put in a full day would set me back a week or more before I could move enough to go up and down the stairs. It was bad. I had a whole host of complications and my metabolic tolerance of exercise was, for all intents and purposes, nil.

That being said, the very fact I was even contemplating attempting this protocol was somewhat of a significant event for me. I knew I could handle it, even if I only made it through part of the total target.

I pressed on to the 4th and 5th cycles and was ready to call it a day satisfied that I had experienced enough to get a general idea of what effect it might have on my post workout recovery.

Something clicked, though. I made it this far and decided that I could handle a few more. It is the closest I have gotten to nausea in years but I went all out for the entire 8 cycles.

I am quite certain that the infimetric ability to upload may be significant when implementing this type of protocol.

I was feeling fairly decent after a bit of recovery time and went ahead and finished my workout with a fairly routine upper body sequence of infimetric seated lat rows, infimetric chest cross, infimetric bicep curls and infimetric triceps extension.

This was a week ago Friday. By Saturday I was aware of the early signs of DOMS in my quadriceps and glutes, especially. Nothing I couldn’t handle but I have not had this experience for years. Sunday was a bit more intense in the DOMS department but, again, noting I couldn’t handle. This is significant as I was feeling as if it all fit in the whole normal recovery routine and not at all like when I was so ill I couldn’t tolerate any exercise.

Monday was a disaster. No sleep, hammered with excessive workload I had no choice in avoiding and then some additional stress to finish off the day. When I started the day Monday I truly felt like I might be ready for a workout later that day. By the time the sun set, I knew I was in trouble. Tuesday was one of the worst days I have had in a long time. It was as if all the stressors on Monday were more than I could handle and it set my workout recovery into a total tailspin.

I had been planning to workout Monday, Wednesday and Friday just to test out Phil Campbell’s assertion of HGH signaling for adaptation but found that, in listening to my physiology, I was in no way able to tolerate anything for the balance of the week. I still had a hellish work schedule to see to and that was my number one priority. I was trying to make modifications to three pieces of equipment in the midst of all this as well. I think tearing down a few key pieces of equipment was my way of making sure I wasn’t tempted to go full on through a workout.

Still, the whole delay was aggravating as there were and are always elements of any workout of late that make me feel much better. I do not tolerate long layoffs at all well but I knew enough to be cautious with this.

Got a number of modifications finished and decided that today was the day for a workout. In talking through the mechanics of this protocol with my son and testing the impact of ergometer based interval training (which he is much more familiar with than am I) versus the infimetric impact on the same, we both came to the conclusion that 8 cycles for the lower body with this much upload potential is just too much.

He tested out the lower body leg press portion with 4 cycles and, for him, that was more than enough.

I made a sound track. Watching a clock, for me, is deathly boring and I am very much an auditory based learner. I made a soundtrack to take me through 5 cycles. The only problem is that I cut and pasted one too many times and ended up with 6.

I went to apply this on leg press and thought had miscounted. The cues in the music let me know whether I have one more sprint upload upcoming or whether I am in my final cool down and the cycles just kept coming.

I ended up doing 6 cycles of leg press. 90 seconds light, 30 seconds all out sprint and upload times six. I then moved on to low back, seated lat pulls, chest cross, bicep curls and triceps extension to finish the workout.

It was good to be able to push efficiently through the workout with little rest between exercises. The low slow “warm-ups” are very deceiving. You end up doing a lot more metabolic work with the muscle during these respites than you would think.

I know this doesn’t fit anyone’s idea of superslow or traditional HIT protocol but I am searching for the complete synchronous mutli factorial failure that I have not been able to achieve any other way.

I think that many protocols come close.. with one or two or maybe even three factors but I also think that none of them ever hits the target for all elements simultaneously. This is what I am seeking.

I have, previously, discussed the neurological elements, the internal metabolic elements as relates to fiber type and function but have largely ignored the cardio muscular interaction. I have always turned cardio on its head throughout my training career and have contended that we get it backwards when we let the social norm focus on cardio conditioning. Folks die of congestive heart failure with strong hearts that no longer have the complementary counter pulsation provided by robust skeletal muscle that is needed to provide adequate venous return to prime the pump that is the heart.

Cardio, because it fails to generate upload and can only rely on speed over distance or time, ultimately fails to address all the muscle fiber types in a trainee thus leading to atrophy of skeletal muscle of the fast fiber type while grossly overtraining and creating the potential for overuse atrophy of the slow fiber types.

This hybrid of infimetric upload capability along with speed that does not degrade upload potential provides for some potentially interesting avenues of exploration.

Even with the excessive stress I had to endure last week, I actually came through it with relative ease and today’s workout was one of the best I have ever had. There seems to be a bit of that balance of elements in the equation I have been looking for.

Hopefully I will be able to quantify and lay out the logic behind what I am attempting to do. This workout seems to beget action. I have been working seven days a week for months lately and I am amazed at the fact that post disease state and post 50 (ok.. 51.. I confess..) I actually seem to be thriving on the demands of a schedule that would have put the finishing touches on my journey to the grave a few short years ago.

Oh, and no supplements. Just lots of raw food. There are days when it seems like I live on raw eggs and raw milk. Someday I will share my specific journey of gut flora and villous atrophy repair related to my celiac recovery.. but that’s a story for another day.

What exactly do they mean when they talk about outroading?

Seems like a simple set of questions.

Only, I think they are both highly misapplied and largely misunderstood and downright abused concepts in the high intensity training world.

Analogies are destined, ultimately, to be somewhat useless as they attempt to describe something they are not. And yet, they may be somewhat helpful in illustrating something we don’t know with something we do know. That which we do know may contain elements and parallels of truth about the unknown subject but, since it is not the actual unknown subject, cannot possibly be a direct explanation for that which is still only partially understood.

There are a lot of theories as to the function of skeletal muscle. There are a lot of theories about neurological function. There are a lot of theories about energy systems in muscle metabolism. There are a lot of theories about muscle fiber types. There is a lot of speculation about how all these elements actually work together. Any serious thought in this direction will always be confounded by the poorly understood effect of the plasticity of these elements on the appearance of results to the point that you can “verify” almost any pet theory if you design your studies properly. It is hard to know what is actually being measured in most studies and as a result, most add very little towards cohesive clarity of the system beyond this plasticity.

The skeletal system and the support given to it by the organs of the body is a very sophisticated biomechanical machine. It’s kind of like an automobile. When it all works together it gets you from point A to point B very effectively. There are many who take this on faith without ever knowing what is really going on beneath the surface, under the hood. Even expert automobile mechanics get lost somewhere between the theoretically perfect function and getting that unknown something extra out of a high performance race car. What kind of vehicle? One set up for optimal performance on the drag strip? That car would likely be a failure in a 24 hour Daytona or Lemans race. One set up for dirt track racing probably wouldn’t fare too well at the drag strip. You begin to get the idea. The same elements with minor but important combined differences yield performance of very different qualities. Anyone here for a Tractor Pull?

What road do we want our muscles to be on? What track are we trying to run. Do we want to travel the out road or the in road and how do we best fit in to whatever road we should be on?

I think there needs to be some sort of cursory attempt to define the important terms here.

Inroad. I believe there are those who associate the concept of momentary muscle failure as synonymous with the term inroad. They figure that failure to lift a weight after X number of repetitions equals an inroad as the net difference in a reduction between starting strength and failure. Most often there is some attempt to establish maximum strength and then to work at some preselected percentage of the starting weight, usually eighty percent. Thus, they figure, failure under these guidelines means a twenty percent inroad.

It is dangerous to assume that failure, under this circumstance, actually represents any inroad at all.

There are many possible explanations as to why a subject would reach the point of not being able to work past a certain point and many of these reasons are due to outroading. But wait, I just used another undefined term to refute the existence of a phenomenon I have still not defined.

Inroad is not failure.

Failure is simply reaching the point, due to any number of factors, in which the subject is no longer able to control, lift or lower the given weight being used in an imposed load exercise implement. It is hard to describe this to someone who has never actually performed a meaningful set of exercise in a generated force exercise like infimetrics. Failure does not occur in infimetrics. It does occur in the closely related akinetics as akinetics is infimetrics married to imposed load, albeit a smaller than normal load. This may lead to deeper inroading but most load the akinetic set too heavily to actually accomplish this leading to simple failure with the appearance of greater “inroad” without really effectively accomplishing this. Inroad is facilitated in infimetrics but can easily be confounding to the person looking for infimetrics to create failure instead of inroad. Because of this is becomes easy to create situations of outroading with infimetrics if a subject is trying to make infimetrics behave like something it is not. That being imposed load exercise.

I have still left the concept of inroad undefined. It is no small task to pull all the elements of inroading together. You have to take into account the energy delivery systems of the metabolic environment of the muscle. You then have to factor in the mechanical means with which you are either generating or imposing force with which to make this metabolic capacity set to work. There is the need, also, to consider the role of the neurological system in signaling all the parts of the system to work together without attempting to override any of the elements.

Going back to the car analogy it might be understood that the fuel tank and fuel delivery system are the circulatory system responsible for delivering elements of energy to the metabolic environment of the muscles or the engine. The electrical system is responsible for proper signaling and sequencing of firing the spark plugs in order to burn the fuel that is either in reserve (in the reservoir of the carburetor) or being delivered according to momentary need as in a fuel injection system. The engine, at idle, is sort of like basal metabolism. It is going to burn a certain amount of energy just to stay running. It can be revved without being engaged through the transmission to do any meaningful work or it can be put into gear and you then get movement. Whereas a vehicle is usually either carbureted or fuel injected, we muscle driven machines are a hybrid vehicle of sorts. Our slow twitch fibers are, oddly enough, fuel injected and rely on a steady delivery of energy to operate in an optimal way. The circulatory system is the fuel injector system but has the unique ability to run in a multi fuel environment. Fats or sugars. Flex fuel! The intermediate or type II fibers are adaptive over time and can run with characteristics like type I slow twitch fibers or more like, but not exactly like the type II a’s. This plasticity of function is influenced over time by the chosen method of training and leads to the self fulfilling phenomenon of getting the function you are training for within your genetic limits. Perhaps the type II’s could be compared to the traditional carbureted fuel delivery system where they are tapped into a fuel delivery system but have a reservoir in the carburetor to account for delivery lag when you step on it for a fast getaway. The type IIa’s? Think NiOx. BAM! huge boost and maximum speed but a short ride. Burst of speed or strength but not sustainable for long. You then default back to the delivered energy system and capacity of the prior two types.

Of course, if you have the car in the wrong gear for any of the above scenarios, it is this interface of engine speed, energy delivery and transmission where an element of inroading versus outroading starts to reveal itself.

I will interject my personal opinion here and state that I believe many training mistakes are made, of necessity, because imposed load equipment forces the trainee to always compromise the speed element in favor of load to make up for the deficiency of the source of resistance. This applies even to those who profess to move fast with an imposed load. This only exacerbates the force discrepancies and is sort of the muscle machine equivalent of a neutral slam. Fun as all get out when you are a teenager but brutal when you have to foot the repair bills as an adult.

In a manual transmission it is possible to select any number of gears in which you desire to start. It is most logical to start with low gear and coordinate increasingly higher gears with ever increasing speed. You could attempt to start out in a high gear from a dead stop but this requires a technique known as slipping the clutch and it wears out a clutch in short order. Wear and tear or failure due to working outside the ideal working range of all the elements of the machine working in synchronicity. That is not inroad. It is failure and it can also be expensive.

What analogous situation exists in the muscle machine? It is quite possible to try to override the mechanism by which the body wants to recruit in an orderly fashion by attempting maximum lifts. Strength demonstrations rely on overrides and can result in impressive displays. Strong men have been performing amazing feats of strength ever since one of our ancestors needed to hoist part of a freshly killed mastodon in order to carry it away to their cave. The bigger the chunk the better off your family unit probably was. This is not to say it is the best training strategy, however.

The problem here is that when the muscle reaches failure, it may not have created inroad of the entirety of the metabolic capacity of the muscle as a complete system. The fastest twitch muscle fibers, which may occur in various proportions in different muscles groups with distributive variety from subject to subject as well, might end up failing under a very high load scenario. If the need was for all the muscle fibers to engage to lift a very heavy load for a short duration is limited by these fibers, failure occurs when they fatigue even though there was much potential systemic capacity at a different speed or lower imposed load. If the subject is so extreme in their fiber type that type IIa fast twitch truly represents the majority of the fibers in the muscle (not all that likely) then a decent inroad may have also been evoked by this act. If, however, they are more typical of the generic genetic middle ground it is likely that the failure event circumvented inroad to any great degree because, at a much lower load or force, there is still plenty of reserve metabolic capacity remaining in the muscle. Thus, there is failure but little or nothing in the way of inroad.

So, heavy loads moved at lugging speeds might actually be an outroading event. This doesn’t even consider the necessary strategies of bracing or cheats that sometimes accompany such attempts. Please note I said sometimes. I realize there are many skilled lifters who train with the intelligent choice not to demonstrate but rather to train for strength with imposed load equipment. When this is understood you begin to realize it is not about becoming efficient in movement, which is what any power lifter or Olympic lifter seeks to do, i.e.: maximum efficiency for minimal effort. Rather, in training for maximum metabolic inroading it is often necessary to consider ways to make the exercise less efficient.

This is where the idea of strict form, in the extreme, can actually become a barrier to proper inroading. Warning: adult content ahead. This concept is not meant for the novice or those who try to rationalize away the whole concept of strength demonstration as a substitute for proper strength stimulus training regardless of whether your tool of choice happens to involve imposed load or generated load equipment. Form is important, just not as important as some may think when dealing with infimetrics.
What I am about to say might be heresy to machine geeks, of which I have long been a member of that fraternity. Form in its single planar linear manifestations on a machine or with a free weight, it will be discovered, is hampered by deviating from the single optimal plane of movement necessary to move the most amount of weight for a given exercise. Lifts and exercises will lure the subject into greater and greater efficiencies through the imposition of “perfect” form. This is, I believe, responsible for the “stronger but not bigger” phenomenon many advanced trainees encounter to great frustration. I am not even addressing the element of speed here, merely the whole concept of planar movement. There was a lifter a few weeks ago relating how he failed to get the set number of repetitions during a given workout and was further discouraged when he discovered that he accidentally underloaded the bar as well. This could have turned out to be more productive than he thought if he were to realize that, perhaps, he was less efficient in his lifting mechanics. He might have deviated from the optimal lifting path with force being deflected off line thus involving more metabolic effort of the target muscles (good from a training perspective, bad from an ego perspective) than had he been efficient. That underload might also have not overloaded the neurological signaling as much which might have prevented the exercise from crossing into the adrenal stress realm. ( I just made that last part up… but I will think about that some more.. Not willing to retract the possibility at this point.)

As an illustration of intentional inefficiency I think about some of my infimetric single joint machines. Since biceps exercises are relatively familiar to most readers, I will use that as an example. When I use the simple cable and pulley set up I demonstrated in my last video it doesn’t matter in which plane I am moving. There is really no lateral deflection possible with that set up as it all results in the generated force being directed through the single pulley and its attachment. Granted, angular deflection does reduce the efficiency of transfer to the pulley and scale but it is hard to deviate too far from the optimal line of pull for accurate readings with this set up.

On the seated bicep curl prototype, however, the machine rotates in a single plane. If you move your arms, in flexion, in that exact plane, the reading on the scale reflects accurately the work being done in the metabolic realm of the muscle being worked. If, however, you deviate by trying to create movement that is slightly out of the single plane while still limiting yourself to bicep activation (this is quite possible, BTW) the movement is far less efficient, there is more metabolic work going on in the muscle, which is a very good thing from an inroading point of view, but the scale does not reflect the deviation from the single plane. I have designed a multi axis sensor set up that would allow for readings in multiple planar intersections but the cost would be so ridiculous for such a negligible return on meaningful information for the average trainee as to be worthless outside of extreme theoretical discussion.

Suffice it to say, strictness of form and limitations of speed may have the unintended effect of reducing the efficiency of getting at the muscle’s metabolic capacity thus creating accidental outroading. Our bodies have an uncanny propensity to make hard work as efficient and easy as possible. We want to be inefficient in order to make significant inroad into the total metabolic reserve of the muscle in question if we really want to create a strength stimulus of any meaning. Otherwise we are merely producing toil, not stimulus.

But wait. Where does speed come in?

This is so difficult to put into a cohesive argument without just resorting to the poor example of just saying “whatever.” No one knows all the answers and I am only trying to spur serious thought and further examination of all the possible elements.

When dealing with a multifactorial event, you ignore or favor only some of the elements at your own peril.

There is a need to examine the role of all the elements and see how they may potentially interlace to create potentials that go beyond the simplistic mechanical work analysis models that have so paralyzed the proper perception of how it all works together. This is further complicated by the propensity to adapt the machine of the body to machines that are deficient, regardless of how well crafted they may seem to be. A limitation is still a limitation, even if it is a limitation that is less limited but very expensive.

As I have noted before, speed may play just as important (and possibly even more important)  a role in the recruitment of all muscle fiber types as relates to overall metabolic impact and depletion for the purposes of stimulating hypertrophic response in skeletal muscle provided you have access to a method or machine that does not restrict speed, either by cam profile requirements or gravity limitations. At this point it appears that infimetrics is the only type of exercise that allows for all of this and the ability to create whatever upload needed. Pure speed based body weight exercises suffer from the same limitations of imposed loads in response to things like momentum and inertia but fall short of weighted exercises to the degree that it is difficult to change resistance levels according to increasing capacities unless you are into radical binging and purging or ankle weights.

I need to step back and take a breather here.

Load thresholds versus speed thresholds as an entree to muscle fiber recruitment.
In the past I was just as inclined as most to view increased in working load via more weight as the way to access functional fiber type thresholds. The theory being that if an initial working weight in a set was too let you would never cross over the threshold into anaerobic muscle fiber recruitment. Speed had little or nothing to do with the whole equation other than to make sure you moved slow enough to cancel out the momentum that would be possible by moving too fast and throwing the weight. This limit on speed, slowed to extremes, was entirely load dependent to cross this threshold below which toil but not stimulus would occur.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when speed came in to the picture. I was toying with the idea of maximum speed with my pneumatically based negative assist equipment. the interesting thing about this method of training is that the lifting portion was dependent on a maximum speed effort for maximum resistance. The way I had the cylinder plumbed and the valves actuated and vented meant that, when the negative upload released, you could move very slowly to lift the device back into the contracted position. By doing this, you gave yourself a very big rest phase. The alternative was to push as fast as you possibly could. The exhaust was controlled and I could set it with a limiting device so that this didn’t cause a fast release of cylinder pressure. In trying to move as fast as possible you were trying to force the exhaust of the compressed air in the cylinder. The faster you attempted to do this, the more resistance you got. All along, I thought I was doing a negative focused activity. In hind sight I realize I was doing a maximum speed type of training with the positive and negative being optimally uploaded. The negative phase was not really the heavy negative most associate with straight negatives. The fluidity of compressed air, when regulated for optimal effect on these machines, would allow for a stopping of the negative and even a slight reversal in the early repetitions. In all, it was a unique combination of speed and relative contouring. Ultimately, though, it is imposed load and, as such, does not have the flexibility on the fly to follow the metabolic contour as it changes throughout the working set and is limited as a result just like other imposed load equipment.

So, even though speed was seemingly less limited and inversely in the positive with this type of machine, it did tend to push things in the direction of load thresholds. Speed was, of necessity, very slow.

Speed under generated load seems, at this time to have metabolic consequences unlike any other form of exercise I have ever encountered. There is the load threshold but it also seems there might very well be a speed threshold of greater significance when it comes to recruitment of the fastest twitch muscle fibers. The systemic impact if speed based infimetric training takes me across certain metabolic respiratory factors in a much different way than imposed load. Load based threshold crossing would take me to failure but do very little in the way of inroad. On the other hand speed based generated load seems to exhaust the entirety of the target muscle group much more effectively.

Certainly speculative and very unscientific and anecdotal at this time but I throw this out there for further discussion.

In the meantime, I will continue to make attempts at pulling all the elements together into a more cohesive, plausible working model.

So, at this point in time it would seem that inroad is anything that allows you to get to the total metabolic capacity of a muscle without working outside of supporting circulatory, neurological or profile characteristics. Working in the right gear at the right speed and the right load to allow a total exhaustion that is in no way short circuited until all the fibers are sufficiently fatigued to signal the adaptive response of hypertrophy.

Outroading would be any element not properly accounted for, be it speed, load, inertia, energy utilization false concepts of range of motion, improper use of statics or other elements that may short circuit the process.

Infimetrics challenges the user to experience a shift in the thought processes to combine these potential elements in ways not accessible in imposed load exercise.

Still a lot to think about!

No small project is actually a small project, especially when you think it’s going to be a small project. That being said, here’s the video I have been promising:

Infimetric Demo

Thanks for your patience.

I don’t know if this will be helpful but I will also include the text of my narrative so you can make out my mumbling:

Basics of infimetrics

As you can see by the demonstration with this basketball, as long as I’m moving slowly, the imposed load provided by the mass of the basketball gives me consistent resistance.

However, as soon as I accelerate, momentum takes over and in throwing the basketball, it no longer provides consistent resistance and, in fact provides no resistance for most of the repetition.

That sound you hear as it hits my hand is a good indicator of the increase in the force it is generating that is greater than its actual weight as I have to decelerate it as I catch it.

These same concepts apply to this sixteen pound bowling ball I am now using.

Momentum alters the force generated by an imposed load source of resistance. The faster you move the higher the variability of forces.

In this basic bicep curl exercise the weight remains constant at 75 pounds which is half my body weight. It is easily done and does not reflect my momentary metabolic muscle capacity for work. The imposed load of the weight is not able to change in accordance with my strength contour. Watch the scale and you will see that, in addition to the 75 pounds I am already lifting I am also uploading an additional 200 pounds of generated force against an otherwise immoveable dead stop. Thus, my momentary metabolic work capacity is actually 275 pounds.

In this chin up, as long as I am moving slowly, the imposed load of my body weight remains fairly constant. As soon as I start to vary the speed of movement, I can nearly double the amount of force my 150 pounds exerts on the muscles involved. I also encounter far less than my body weight at points.
With imposed load I am limited by weight. Force is inconsistent with variable speeds. This requires slow movement for those wanting to even out the forces.

This simple infimetric device of a cable and pulley allows me to use bilaterally paired muscles to generate my own force relative to my momentary metabolic muscle capacity as one side of the body is linked to the other to generate the force.

You should be able to see the muscle under load. I show a “dishonest” effort for a moment where I move but do not generate imposed load. This requires discipline to provide relative resistance when you have no feedback device to indicate generated force.

The same principle applies when I am using this simple infimetric bar device. Contraction of one bicep is resisted by the opposite arm as it lengthens.

See if you can tell when I make a dishonest effort here. I am unlimited by speed constraints, either fast or slow.

I can flip my grip and use the same device for a triceps extension or a lateral raise as well as a number of other exercises.

I now move to a bicep curl prototype and am generating a load of 75 pounds. If I want to I can target a set generated load, in this case 75 pounds just like the barbell curl earlier.

Next I upload to a maximum effort which is now only 140 pounds as a result of all the work I have already done.

Following a short series of fast repetitions my maximum metabolic capacity is now momentarily reduced to 85 pounds. The metabolic contour is quite plastic. The generated load is low but the relative load is very high at this point.

This is typically how I have been training with infimetrics. I move as fast as I can with a limited range of motion that deteriorates as momentary metabolic capacity diminishes.

When movement is no longer possible I transition to a pulsed static. Relative load is extremely high but generated force is now less than 15 pounds.

When I can no longer generate any increase I transition to a non pulsed static and finish when I can no longer generate even 5 pounds of force. Failure at 5 pounds when I was able to initially generate an upload of over 200 pounds.

I hope this helps in understanding some basics of infimetrics.

Thanks again and keep asking questions and sharing the excellent observations from your infimetric experiments. I have another essay upcoming but have been side tracked by the not so simple, simple video project.

Strength for the journey!

CS

infimetrics

Thought I would finally give a little tour of the equipment I have been talking about. These first three prototypes are the mainstay of my workouts. If I really had to, I could get a full workout on the machine in front. It is currently configured for a seated lat row exercise but the frame, movement arms and attachments can be configured to do just about any exercise you can think of for infimetrics. I am currently working on the next generation of this machine and hope to have a rendering of the new design, which will have an App interface for recording purposes.

The piece in the corner is the Leg Press which I actually use primarily for Calf Raises now.It has a simple scale mechanism to allow for real time feedback.

The piece in front of the window is a chest cross. This is the first piece of equipment in all my years of working out that has actually allowed me to make progress on chest development.

Leaning against the wall are two infimetric implements. The first is a simple pulley and cable that can be used for a number of exercises and the bar with the two handles is the most basic implement for infimetrics short of a towel or a stick. If absolutely necessary I can get a whole workout with this last piece and a door frame and some creative problem solving.

Also, there are my posters in the corner of the ever beautiful Terri (and Mickey who is not necessarily beautiful) as well as the Arthur Jones poster from Brian Johnston plus an anatomy chart from Dean Ripon at Springfield College.

Prototypes

Next up are some more of my prototypes in the basement gym. The piece in the foreground is what is left of a simple attempt at creating a negative upload through mechanical means. It works, to a degree, but I have found too many flaws in the whole negative upload paradigm over the years. I made my first negative upload equipment back in the early 1980′s and kept coming back to infimetrics as the superior approach. Immediately in front of that machine is the infimetric bicep curl that also doubles as a low back dead lift unit as well. There is a simple scale mechanism on this machine that allows for feedback during the exercise but I find that I don’t need that anymore. It was helpful in understanding just how hard I was actually working so is useful as a training tool for the uninitiated. To the right of that is a pull down unit. This unit has the computer interface I have used in real time graphing of the effects of infimetrics on strength and endurance. I prefer the low lat row I do on the machine upstairs. To the right of the pull down is a seated chest press. It also has a simple scale mechanism. I find it far more useful as a triceps isolator than for chest press. the mechanics of a chest press irritate my triceps tendon too much. It is too easy to brace to the extreme in the machine as it now sits. Across from that is my infimetric leg extension. It can be converted to a negative upload machine with a pneumatic device but I much prefer the infimetric iteration of the exercise. Coming back towards us is the newest family member. This is the triceps extension machine I put together this past week. It is, bar none, the most effective triceps exercise I have ever experienced. A number of these machines will have to wait until the weather gets a bit nicer to be cosmetically cleaned up and painted.

vintage Nautilus equipment

This is my small collection of vintage Nautilus equipment. The duo squat came from Joshua Trentine and is rumored to have belonged to Jim Harbaugh. (I know, I am name dropping.. but it’s fun to think it might have been his.) He supposedly had the machine chopped and the seatback modified to convert it to a leg press version. They messed it up big time, though. I remodified it to allow for a number of seatback positions including the original position. The weight stack had to be purloined from an old abdominal curl machine because the Ren Ex folks needed the original 510 pound stack for one of their machines. Hence the need for pinning on a few hundred extra pounds. No coincidence that you can use this machine for infimetrics or akinetics. Next is the Double Shoulder machine from a strength coach from s school up north. I use it for statics, mostly. Too much friction for my liking otherwise. Beside that is a Pro Maxima kids pull down that we extended the weight stack on and added an extra hundred or so pounds to the horns we added. Doesn’t get used much anymore. Beside that is a Nautilus Duo PolY Hip and Back machine I have modified from time to time to experiment with beltless restraint systems and for use as a low back machine.

So, there you have it. This is the stuff I am talking about when discussing infimetrics. Who knows.. video demonstrations should be next as well as a candid shot or two of me.. but first I need a haircut!

Back to our event intersection, though. The problem with this is that, and with virtually all imposed load exercise equipment (anything with a weight source, be it a weight stack or a weigh plate, a bucket of rocks, water or sand, or some other dead mass,) this event intersection may only occur one time during a given set, if it happens at all. It may but doesn’t necessarily mean that it will. This is, in large part, due to an insufficiency of the source of resistance. Even with the most sophisticated cams, lever arms and friction reduction, even the best protocols on the best equipment are only able to create this event intersection at one point, commonly referred to as momentary muscle failure. The nature of the resistance makes this so. Any imposed load equipment, minus the potentially misleading labels like variable resistance, only provides absolute resistance. Relative to the ever-changing metabolic landscape of a muscle at work, any movement up and until the intersection of momentary muscle failure is relatively deficient when considering the metabolic potential for movement.

I must address certain biases at this point. Those of you with your thinking caps on will begin to reason along the lines that I am suggesting that maximum load relative to momentary ability is the solution to this problem. Herein lies the problem with imposed load absolute resistance sources. It is all or nothing. It has severe limits. In fact, things like accelerated speed of movement, while being able to create a momentary upload or overload (the short road to injury) followed by underload, are inversely affected by speed of motion for the most part. For that split second of increased force, you than have a pretty severe drop off of force through the rest of a range of motion. So, load based systems, by their very nature, demand an ever slowing movement in order to negate the vagaries of momentum. This is especially important when linked to a machine with a particular cam profile.

Taking this the next logical step that most assume is necessary is that in order to then recruit muscle fibers, one must evoke this response through increased load. This argument is especially important in light of the need to slow the exercise down to negate the undesirable effect of momentum that speed creates on imposed load equipment.

The most dangerous and counterproductive of biases are those that are unseen or merely accepted as an unwitting part of the necessary compensation to make a deficient model as effective as possible. It’s even more dangerous when that model provides a modicum of positive outcome.

So, does this whole model of slowing things down and increasing the resistance through increased weight square with our physiology? Just because a limitation of equipment technology dictates a certain protocol be done at a certain speed necessitating a recruitment through load approach does not necessarily mean that is how we function optimally in all circumstances.

There are many biases in the weight training world when it comes to talk of fiber recruitment patterns. Sometimes approaching the ridiculous when discussing things like alactic training and recruitment windows. To take the argument to the extreme, those that espouse the alactic window as occurring only in the first fifteen seconds of activity better have their heavy training equipment at the ready at bedside upon waking. Fifteen seconds isn’t very long after the alarm goes off.

Metabolic pathways and thresholds are much more elastic than one might imagine. Recruitment of Type IIa fibers can occur much later than most would imagine relative to metabolic requirements. I also suspect they may be recruited for reasons other than the load based model we are accustomed to in strength training lore.

Confounding all this is the mostly overlooked neurological issue. True, it does seem that hammering away with heavy imposed loads on the system to achieve that singular intersection of momentary muscle failure does seem to have a negative impact on neurological functioning and recovery. Could it be that this is a disproportionate and inappropriate overloading relative to the overall neurological potential of the muscle innervation system hence the seeming limit to tolerance of it?

We are forced, with imposed load paradigms to always consider speed in its negative manifestations which has potentially been painting us into the artificially slowed corner.

Emphatically, any exercise, if it requires some sort of imposed restriction on speed of motion, is an acknowledgement of and an accommodation of some insufficiency. The more severe the restriction (and this can be either fast or slow depending upon the machine, implement and method of resistance) the more deficient the resistance relative to the ever changing metabolic landscape of the working muscle system.

In general, weighted exercise advocates advise a slowing down to make the resistance more even or more effective through the ever elusive and somewhat specious claim of a full range of motion. Some devices, such as in isokinetic machines, only give resistance at one controlled level regardless of speed of attempted motion. This may seem to be ideal but is yet another insufficiency of design. It considers the wrong machine even though it is a novel solution to a non existent problem and is the ultimate in absolute resistance where it is not necessarily a good idea.

Picture, if you will, a mountainous terrain. Some will see the Alps, some the rolling hills of Ohio. I didn’t specify. For analogy purposes I want many different contours. This mountain illustrates the terrain potential of the metabolic landscape of the muscle. It may very well be that this differs from one muscle group to the next within an individual.

What imposed load controlled training paradigms have all been doing is attempting to create a tunnel from one side of the mountain to the other. Picture hiking halfway up the mountain and then being able to traverse to the other side via a perfectly level tunnel. When you reach the other side you will have, ostensibly, reached the failure slope intersection without having to endure the challenges of maneuvering the uncertain terrain above that tunnel line. Some equipment and protocols have managed to create some pretty level tunnels. Some, intentionally, have a careless approach and weave back and forth, up and down before emerging through to the other side. Some of those approaches might even actually mimic the contour to a small degree, although usually by accident.

But, what about all that terrain above? Why do we avoid it and what elements are required to successfully negotiate it? It might be that, given the right tools, the best approach to train the terrain is to go as fast as you can while trying to climb over the whole mountain in all its rises and falls. The problem is, that with conventional equipment effort supplants speed of necessity. A slow climb with a heavy weight might not truly address the metabolic terrain of our muscles adequately. Hence, the tunneling approach. In a way, it’s easier to try to level the terrain and go heavy when, in fact, that might not address the inherent metabolic capacity of the muscle in question. Now, if the subject in question has a fiber type distribution that doesn’t have many peaks as to maximum strength/speed potential (the coupling of those two words might get me in trouble for those who fail to follow where I am going with this) this tunneling approach might not be that far off from going over the terrain in the first place and might lead to pretty good result. For another subject with extreme profile peaks and valleys, that approach might be totally ineffective or even counterproductive.

I keep getting in to trouble with my infimetric equipment because I continue to be burdened by biased assumptions that are derived from using protocols of insufficiencies. I feel like I am somehow breaking some sacrosanct rules if I start experimenting with speed. There are no practical limits to speed of motion possible under generated load with infimetric equipment. Granted, I may have to reinforce some lighter frames now to create a bit more stability now that I have hit the Mach range of speed… just saying. But, I haven’t come close to burning up even any of the cheap bearings as of yet. That means I still have more headroom.

Speed under load is an interesting thing to experience. In order to move as fast as I am with this with, let’s say, a barbell, the weight would be so light and momentum so counterproductive that nothing worthwhile could possibly come of it. On the other hand, when the range is correct and the body position is stable, speed of movement and up loading happens in a very strange way. Increased speed begins to mean increased load. There is a strange sense of coordination that begins to happen. I have given myself permission to maintain speed at the expense of range of motion so that it is range that deteriorates and not speed. This leads to a very interesting phenomenon in which the range of motion eventually becomes nil and the whole exercise naturally progresses to a static upload. The interesting thing here, also, is that, depending on the muscle group in question, the post speed static contraction allows for a considerable upload relative to the normal degradation seen in traditional “imitating the heavy slow load” infimetrics I have been trying so hard to let go of.

This is way too early in my personal experimentation to draw any really useful conclusions but I do suspect that I am removing limitations of a neurological signaling nature when I do this type of training. The impact, I believe, is potentially significant in understanding better how neurology, metabolic muscle landscape and speed of movement may interact with the right equipment to get more efficient workouts.

All day.

I didn’t intend to.

I have been thinking about the workout as a signal.

I have been thinking about the issue of recovery.

When I wait five, six or seven days between workouts, my body seems to cycle on a five, six or seven day cycle so that I am “up” for the workout” on that given day. This is especially true if I fall into a regular schedule over time. It’s like my physiology adapts to the expectations  of that workout schedule and ramps up on a weekly basis for that big day of work. It also seems there is little carryover as to adaptation long term.

Plasticity has me intrigued.

I have been doing a lot of daily interval training of necessity. Let’s just say I am in training for something right now and leave it there, but it involves interval work every day.

I feel great, in better condition than ever, except that my strength really begins to lag by the third or fourth day off of heavy muscle work.

I really wasn’t scheduled to work out until Thursday.

I decided to test a particular element of protocol on one exercise yesterday. I did so early in the day.

Triceps.

That was supposed to be it.

By the time I shut down for the evening I had surreptitiously managed to “test” that protocol on Chest, back, quads, bent leg dead lift mid range pulls, and biceps as well.

Looks like I actually worked out.

My early morning training was incredible today. I was really feeling sluggish the last two days. That happens.

I usually attributed that feeling to over training in the past.

I mean, I have the charts and graphs to show my recovery over the course of four and five day cycles from oh, so long ago.

That was then. This is now.

Back then I was sick and didn’t know it.

Now, I recover so fast that it amazes me. I have to realize that I used to shuffle around the house like a cross between a drunk chimpanzee and the tin man after a week of rain for so long that I thought that was normal.

Normal now is clean diet, healing body and recovery that is so fast that I get measurable increases in peak strength within a twelve hour window.

This got me to think about signaling.

As always I seem to come up with multiple levels of understanding for a single term.

The primary focus of this signaling is that of recovery and physiological expectation.

Am I trying to signal for optimal recovery or am I trying to signal for a strength adaptation?

Again, as stated earlier, when I give myself the luxury of rest, the body seems more than willing to cycle on that schedule.

When I put demands of performance without excessive fatigue on a much more regular basis, I get results of a different ilk.

I guess I am not willing to go where I am tempted to go with this.

Read between the lines if you will.

I have access to my equipment, my personal gym, anytime I want.

Yesterday’s workout was not one compressed fifteen minutes of hell on earth. I spread the “testing…oops accidental workout” over a good twelve hour span.

I had also tested a lat exercise the day before.

Irregular play, the testing of strength in fits and starts, no particular schedule. My body seems to respond well to this.

Kind of messes with the whole, “let’s schedule a regular weekly workout on such and such a day” paradigm.

I am not suggesting that isn’t a good model for those without access that I have to my own personal gym full of prototypes.

I am also not sure that the infimetric static protocol I am using might very well facilitate a much different schedule than the imposed load hyper demands on the neurological signaling that would burn someone out were they to try to play like I am playing.

I have a lot more questions than answers, that’s for sure.

When you miss the sweet spot, accuracy goes out the window, excess strain is put on the arm and unintended things happen.

Strength training has its own version of the sweet spot. It’s often hard to find, but when you encounter it in an exercise, it is unmistakable. It’s all muscle and no joint strain. It’s focused stimulus and no distractions. It’s brutally efficient and effective. It gets everything out of the way. It’s like being, no, make that living, in the zone.

Thing is, it’s pretty hard to find consistently.

I’m an old machine guy. I am a geek when it comes to training. Once I tasted my first workout on Nautilus equipment way back when, I swore off free weights. Something about those early encounters pushed me in the direction of the sweet spot and I was hooked, for better or for worse.

There is nothing more dangerous than blind allegiance to an idea.

It’s very easy to become so enamored with something that seems to create a sea change of result that you can become unaware that what initially worked incredibly well is now failing to create that same depth of effect. And so it goes. You analyze and over think, all the time willing to believe that the problem is some personal deficiency. You convince yourself that you aren’t working hard enough. It couldn’t possibly be the equipment… or the concepts of use that were being taught with them.

The sweet spot rapidly shrinks until it isn’t there anymore and yet you keep looking for it.

Novelty will create a profound effect.

For a little while, anyway.

There was such a radical change in the metabolic demands of a high intensity rush factor workout during my initial workouts as compared to the lazy day in the gym lifting free weights for multiple sets with lots of rest (and BS-ing in between)  that it was easy to get to the point of no return very rapidly. That lovely feeling of being ready to finish with a Technicolor yawn, of puking your guts out as a result of hammering out a workout. The whole level of intensity coupled with the speed of moving quickly from one exercise to the next will do that to any novice. The sweet spot is huge and the target is very easy to hit early on. The body and musculature is plastic and shows great adaptability… at first.

And then, it can get real ugly.

For the hardcore Hit Trainee the workout stops looking like a workout, a challenge to be met, and sometimes starts looking much more like a brutal initiation ceremony. The more the body adapts to that initial shock, the smaller the sweet spot becomes and the harder you have to swing to evoke the same appearance of effect. That’s the problem. Once the level of fitness has been initially improved, and in a seemingly exponential way, it really should have been about maintenance. It should have been about finesse and accuracy.  Instead, it turns into a brutal brute force torture session with the seeming need to hammer harder and harder.

The fun pretty much is gone, except maybe for those demented trainers who loved to inflict pain on their brethren. I was one of those. It’s like we had our elephant gun or fighter plane where we would notch a victory every time we hammered some poor victim so hard they collapsed in a puking ball of human pain and misery. Not cool. Pointless.  And downright dangerous at times.

It took decades to divorce myself from that notion of training. I still see it raise its ugly head now and again.

I am not so sure this takes things in the right direction. The need to over ride the body’s own desire to stop the madness and refuse to partake in such an exercise should be enough to make anyone stop such nonsense. But, peer pressure can certainly be a powerful thing.

What is the true objective of strength training? Is it to increase strength? Don’t be shocked that I would pose such a seemingly obvious question.

As I write this, I must confess that I am heavily under the influence of a ton of information overload as of late. First and foremost being a week spent watching and re-watching videos from the recent Ancestral Health Symposium on You Tube. Highly recommended and time well spent. Mark Sisson’s talk on play poked my brain in this direction a bit. Couple that with Bill Desimone’s Congruent exercise videos and interviews and you will probably be able to come up with much better content than I am presently putting into the digital realm.

There are those academically minded exercise theoreticians who wish to reduce the definition of exercise to a clinical dose of medicine, injected into the body at no more or less than the exact proper amount. Great. Good luck with that. You see what you want to see and you pretty much get what you want to get with that. See my prior essay on plasticity.

Working out under these conditions has become akin to taking cod liver oil. Not an event to be savored, enjoyed, merely done because “I know it has to be good for me.”

Thing is, it all started out, and made me continue, because it initially hit that sweet spot.

Then, the number crunching academician took over and it became analysis by accounting and book keeping. It would all make sense if there were some guarantee of lifelong linear progression. If that were the case every workout should have evoked such consistent responses that all of us should look like Jay Cutler’s bigger sibling.

That we don’t progress in such a linear fashion will make the hard core aficionados hold up their brand of superior protocol and condemn anyone failing to follow it as failures for not embracing their very own keys to the kingdom.

I just recently began to play again. I mean, I actually enjoyed yesterday’s workout. I will be the last to tell you I don’t think deeply and theoretically about what I am attempting to learn, understand and apply as I workout. I would like to be able to share that experience with anyone interested as I think it might just be useful to someone out there. Is it the end all, be all? Who knows. It sure is a much more plastic approach to a plastic structure.

I actually quit doing an exercise in my workout yesterday because I finally admitted I hated it.

Why did I hate it?

It’s an exercise I have never been “good at” by virtually any measurable term. It makes me miserable. I dread it. There are a dozen other exercises I would much rather do. And, I finally admitted, mid stream, that it was one that pushed my system too hard relative to my own recovery ability. Will this change as I get progressively more healthy? I don’t know. It may be that I am already too strong relative to the cumulative effect this particular exercise evokes in me when I start looking at the form of exercise I use and how that differs from my initially ability many years ago.

What exactly am I doing?

It keeps coming back around to infimetrics.

Only, early this morning I had an “aha” moment. I really don’t do infimetrics… strictly speaking. But the bilateral linking of the movement through the infimetric pathway is a crucial element. Unlike exercises where bilaterality is hard linked, the infimetric freedom of bilateral movement allows for no dominance of strong side over weak side. It is beautifully balanced.

I don’t really do static exercise, although it is also a key element in what I do. It may appear to be a static movement to the outside observer unfamiliar with the potential of the exercise but it is really more a dynamically active progressive upload exercise. Also, there is enough movement built in to the measuring device on my equipment that there is a small degree of movement even when I am not actively moving infimetrically.

Is it fast or slow? Neither and both. There is no speed limit in what I am doing and when I am moving very fast it will sometimes appear to the outside observer to be too fast, followed by a period where I am trying to move as fast as I can with no visible movement to the observer.

What about range of motion. This one took me a long time to let go of and Bill DeSimone’s explanations of passive and active insufficiencies went a long way to helping me finally believe my instinct on this.

Flashback: Deland Florida, 1984. I took one of my prototype infimetric machines down to Nautilus Sports Medical Industries to show to Arthur Jones. It never made it out of the trunk of my car (knowingly.. there’s more to that story but I have to be in a real paranoid mood to tell it.) We were in the hallway of the TV Production building when I was able to talk to Arthur about wanting to show him the machine. I showed him a few pictures, he gave me his terse analysis for why it wouldn’t work to which I then decided that this was the time to show him what I knew and proceeded to argue the veracity of his claims of “Full Range of Motion.” This was one of those immutable tenets of Nautilus training lore that took me decades to finally let go of. Even though he sort of agreed with me, I don’t think I earned any brownie points with the man.

Old beliefs die hard.

Finally getting to the point of enjoying exercise again, of finding the sweet spot of the exercise, of listening to my body and the intelligent signals it wants to give me to guide and direct a workout instead of an initiation ritual (don’t most organizations only make you go through one of those only once anyway?) Has involved dropping a lot of old dogma.

I really enjoyed yesterday’s workout. I think the sweet spot is getting bigger!

Just throwing this out there to stir the pot.

Another thing to be considered is that unless you are testing/studying subjects who are at baseline optimal health, no study is going to reflect the positive impact (or negative) of a given strength training protocol. I base this on personal anecdotal information but I have strong reason to believe I am correct in this. I was having a discussion with a lead researcher of a study involving exercise and its potential positive impact on autoimmune spectrum disease. I implored the researcher to change tack and look at the positive impact on proper dietary intervention that would eventually allow restoration of the ability to exercise. My basis for this was that as a lifelong exerciser eventually crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, once I healed the gut and began to eat a clean unprocessed diet, my body regained strength without the need for any strength training. In fact, when I trained during the healing process (which was when my body was in much better shape than when I was severely ill.. which is where they are advocating to introduce training in their study subjects) I set my healing back a number of times because the attempts at strength training were too much of a stressor for a healing body. Once the body reached a level of reasonable health, strength and function returned and it took very little exercise to evoke a fairly positive response in this post fifty year old body. I must add here that this return to health included a reversal of previously pronounced permanent joint damage. Dietary baseline and optimal health should be the starting point of attempting to study the impact of any exercise in any subject. Otherwise we really have no idea what is truly being measured.

It usually goes something like this:

For the Latissimus Dorsi you first do an isolation exercise like a Pullover machine based single joint exercise. When you reach failure on that you immediately move to a Pull Down exercise without resting between the two. Ostensibly this has been set up to sidestep the perceived insufficiency of bicep strength relative to potential lat strength. By pre exhausting the lat it then, supposedly, allows the bicep to work as an equal with the lat for a deeper inroad into existing strength thus creating a greater strength stimulus from the workout.

In theory it all sounds nice. In practice, even with strict adherence to all steps of the protocol it never seemed to deliver on the promise. We even devised some double and triple pre exhaust sequences for a number of target muscle groups. Whereas it resulted, oftentimes, in a severe case of DOMS for some poor unsuspecting guinea pigs, it really didn’t deliver on the promise.

I am beginning to think that the idea of pre exhaust may be legitimate but it is necessary to think of it on an intermuscular level and not a biomechanical model as previously conceived. And, yes, this begins to tie in to the whole equation training paradigm I seem to be chasing.

That some people or some muscle groups in a given subject seem to respond well to a given protocol may be familiar to the reasonably observant trainer. There is always the subject who can grow an unbelievable set of biceps with seemingly no effort with one set to failure. Thing is, many other muscle groups on the same individual may fail to respond in like fashion. There are some who are hard gainers all around and some who gain easily on a given protocol of rep and weight schemes.

I am convinced, but still reasonably skeptical, that this is reflective of the failure or luck at addressing the total responsive potential of a given muscle.

In a concept I already addressed and that Dr. Doug McGuff so eloquently refers to as plasticity of muscle, we are highly adaptive creatures in the muscle function department. This is evolutionarily favorable for probability of survival over the long haul and allows us to meet the changing situational demands of our environment. We are far less likely to experience wild variables our ancestors were subject to and so our window of reference is much narrower than in our more distant past. Nonetheless, there is a systemic muscular plasticity that serves our needs quite well.

This is also the reason it may be so difficult to nail down the exact protocol that will give us an optimal strength stimulus from our training regimen.

This is also where I think it might be beneficial to re-examine the whole concept of pre exhaust in a new light.

Instead of looking at weak links of different muscle groups within the compound movement chain (I personally think this is a specious argument anyway) I think we need to look at the barriers to inroad from inside the target muscle instead and begin to think of pre exhaust as a mechanism within the working set for every exercise for every muscle.

That some protocols come closer to this ideal than some others for some subjects at some times is a dangerous thing if it prevents us from examining all the factors more thoroughly.

For those who fail to understand where I am coming from in all of this I may be opening a can of worms when I throw speed of movement into the discussion but I will find it necessary to talk about speed of movement from an infimetric point of view anyway. The problem here is that this will make things very hard to understand for the person who is only capable of understanding a load based resistance exercise modality as opposed to a generated resistance modality like infimetrics. Suffice it to say that with infimetrics, speed is not correlated to momentum in the way it is with a load based resistance exercise. Because of this crucial difference, speed is unlimited at either end of the movement spectrum when it comes to resistance and is not the liability it is with load (external weights) based resistance of barbells and machines.

What elements are to potentially be factored in to the whole strength stimulus response training?
A short list might well include:

Muscle fiber type and distribution
Neurological efficiency
Recruitment patterns
Metabolic energy pathways
Recruitment thresholds
Speed of motion relative to immediate capacity
Range of motion/movement issues
Systemic versus muscular exhaustion balance

Now, when you are training with an imposed load device, you may be able to address some of these issues to some degree but no imposed load device will allow the flexibility to address many of these as they change over the course of the working set. In fact, the more severe the limitations of the machine the less flexible and more rigid the potential protocol must be. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It may, in fact, be an indicator that the advocate of such a limited protocol understands the limitations and is able to control for them in a more sophisticated way.

Without an understanding of how all these elements work together it is entirely possible to fail at strength stimulus due to reaching the limits of any one of the factors before all factors have been appropriately inroaded. Fail to hit the threshold for a given muscle type and the set is limited to those muscle fibers that are exhausted at the level called upon. Failure to work at the optimal speed to resistance ratio and you will never load the muscle fully. Fail to exhaust all potential metabolic energy pathways in the course of the working set and you end up leaving too much reserve capacity on the table to evoke any sort of stimulus for positive change. Heavily favor a maximum rep scheme where you cross over into alactic too soon and, depending upon your fiber type distribution, you may demonstrate a modicum of strength without evoking any real adaptive training response in the long run.

Any one of the above scenarios might be thought of as incomplete exhaust or partial exhaust protocols. I think pre exhaust was an attempt to circumvent any of the above limitations to provide for a comprehensive inroad exhaust or a total systemic exhaust.

To pre exhaust it may be that you need to develop a strategy with the proper equipment to address all the issues.

Of course, my bias is that with infimetrics it may be possible to effectively address all the elements in one complete set. My problem, in the past, was in trying to make infimetrics behave as if it were nothing more than imposed load resistance instead of recognizing it for all its inherent potential to address all the issues thus raised.

As a result, I have been experimenting with hybrid workout protocols keeping as much of this in mind as possible. Removing the bias of preconceived ideas and limits has been a challenge. I have had to rethink range of motion issues, speed of motion issues, repetition ranges, systemic versus muscle exhaustion load versus resistance and a number of other issues in order to come up with a viable shift in thinking.
I am going to cite two examples of exercises done today to illustrate the need for plasticity of training to address plasticity of all the interlinked factors outlined above.

My chest has always been a poor responder to whatever protocol I have ever trained with from the earliest days of my barbell based training through Nautilus to negative assist to infimetric training.

I am now using a general outline for my training that follows a few steps.

Step number one: find a position of maximum activation for a short midrange movement that isolates the target musculature effectively

Step number two: once that is established begin a series of rapid partial repetitions that go as long as possible at the natural tempo the muscle is capable of maintaining for as long as coordination allows.

Step number three: When smooth coordinated movement deteriorates, transitions to a rapid pulsed midrange static repetition for as long as compression of the contact is possible.

Step number four: when compression and rhythm of contraction involuntarily slows, transition to a static hold with all out effort that precludes using bracing or valsalva sync. Attempt to hold on longer than is comfortable (comfortable being a VERY relative term here.)

Step number five: When it is impossible to hold the static mid range upload with a feeling of attempted continuous upload, use body position to draw away from the contraction thus creating one last bit of negative failure.

This is my protocol for infimetric exhaust.

For my chest workout today the step two repetitions climbed into the 220 range.. much higher than I would have expected but following the rules of form.

Step three repetitions were in the 150 range and the static hold was very difficult to maintain for more than 18 seconds

On the other hand, my bicep exercise looked much different,

Step two repetitions were hard pressed to reach 75 and the rhythmic tempo of the movement was significantly slower than the above chest exercise.

Step three repetitions barely reached 40 and the static midrange hold of step four barely lasted 10 seconds.

I have, historically speaking, trained my chest as I do my biceps which yielded decent results for my biceps but horrible results for my chest. With the above information I can begin to extrapolate just why this might have been the end result of that approach.

The thing is, It is the infimetric modality that allows for the necessary flexibility to train this way as a response to the muscle’s capability on the fly. When selecting an imposed load modality, the subject must conform to the resistance. With a generated load resistance, the resistance conforms not only to the individual, but the varied terrain of the plasticity of different muscle groups.

This training has given me a far greater total exhaust than any pre exhaust or other training paradigm I have ever experienced.

The greatest danger with this is that it becomes very easy to over train. In, out, done. Recovery is rapid and post workout days feel great. It becomes very tempting to go back and do it again too soon. This protocol  requires a great deal of self discipline to avoid overtraining.

Quick qualifier here. I had been essentially limiting myself to one workout per week. This doesn’t mean I was limiting meaningful physical activity to one time a week, just that I was only employing the use of my exercise equipment to once weekly.

As I continue to heal and get stronger I find that the whole mentality of only training once weekly flies in the face of measurable recovery and adaptive response to exercise. I find it highly implausible that our genetic makeup would necessitate limiting physical activity to once weekly as a survival strategy.

I am seeking to better understand the energy pathways inherent in different muscle fiber types and to apply a protocol that thoroughly utilizes all of them in order to evoke a strength stimulus response.

I find the argument for alactic training to be a bit disingenuous and probably misinformed though well intended. Access to energy pathways seems to read differently in the research I have read regarding such and I will have to dig up my references for this but it seems that energy pathways that many assume are systemic are actually fiber specific. To think otherwise and to carry others’ arguments to the alactic extremes, the act of getting out of bed would blow the alactic system in the first fifteen seconds one is mobile. It doesn’t work that way. There are thresholds below which the body will not access certain metabolic pathways because it has not received the necesary threshold signal to utilize those fiber types held in reserve for extraordinary circumstances.

Yesterday I started out by trying a pulsed static low back on the modified hip and back machine. I pin a weight I cannot lift and then, once properly secured in the machine proceed with a pulsed static for a number of repetitions. I am finding that I need to adjust the pulse tempo of the exercise depending on the muscle group used. I was trying to go too fast for low back in the past and would not last very long. I slowed down ever so slightly and ended up doing 250 pulsed static contractions before attempting to finish with a static upload hold that only lasted 8 seconds at the end. The result of this was that I had a much deeper effect not only on the low back but also the gluteal group.

I then applied some of this to lateral raises with much higher pulsed static reps and was up above the 200 rep mark once again. When trying to do this with a high lat pull I couldn’t last past 15o reps. I used a much higher position where the lat was essentially initiating the pulling down of the shoulders with a straight arm position. Much more work directed at the back than when I use the reverse pullover. Attempting to use full range of motion often seems to allow for a very substantial rest phase that seems to be counterproductive even though it appears to be a more substantial amount of measurable mechanical work. It is the metabolic coupling I am after and range of motion seems, at times, to be a major distraction detracting from the ultimate goal. I also worked chest in this manner yesterday as well.

I am preparing to work legs in this way today.

I hope to spell out the rationale behind this approach more thoroughly in subsequent posts but it is essentially about fiber types, recruitment, fatigue and energy pathway access that is more in line with how the body actually functions instead of how some think it does.