Doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Just because you can measure the duration of anaerobic muscle capacity doesn’t necessarily mean that you should extrapolate any significance to that particular measure in ways that are presently assumed When trying to figure out the overall impact of infimetric exercise.
Just because you can see some sort of correlation between a maximum repetition in weight based exercise and some increase in size doesn’t necessarily mean that is the only way to evoke a change in the direction of hypertrophy when training a muscle.
Just because you experience a certain pattern of fatigue when loading an exercise with a certain percentage of maximum weight for a given number of repetitions doesn’t necessarily mean that this translates in any sort of equivalent to infimetric exercise.
I am haunted by the words of Arthur Jones when he was speaking about infimetrics at West Point in 1979. He was speculating that, perhaps, a good place to start with infimetrics would not be with eighty or seventy or sixty percent of strength but perhaps as little as fifty percent of max strength to begin a “set” of infimetrics.
I was so busy trying to map out contour slopes and fatigue slopes and all measurements relative to known, measured and studied capacities that I was unwilling to discover from the inside out.
I get into trouble any time I begin to see a pattern emerge and then take the Mendelian shortcut of jumping to a conclusion based upon the seemingly apparent evidence. I then make the mistake of turning this into a guideline and then a target and then, ultimately a limiter.
I have not been writing much lately because I have been going to a place in my workouts that doesn’t easily translate to any sort of recap.
There are no numbers to report. There are no repetitions counted. There are no times accounted for. I am sure that, had I made a video record of the workout it would have been possible to do a post workout analysis of all those factors. But, then I would start to make those numbers the target all over again.
No. Instead, I have just been sitting down on any particular exercise and moving and linking and shutting out anything other than being in the moment. No targets, no expected feel or result. Just discovery. Moving without a target speed. Oddly enough, when I have glimpsed at readouts here and there, I have been shocked to see that loads were almost nothing at times I fully expected I was creating great uploads. Speed generally tends to be much slower than when I was doing structured sets and speeds. Duration of each exercise routinely exceeds parameters of known limits of certain capacities as commonly applied in gym vernacular when relating to aerobic and anaerobic capacities. I have read some Scandinavian studies that refute the window of limits that I see assumed in present gym knowledge, however, that seem to bear out in present experiences.
Sometimes an exercise will fully involve the muscle to fatigue in a relatively short time an might even appear to be happening within currently acceptable windows that would fall somewhere in the ten to fifteen rep range. There are other times when, for that same exercise, the exercise both in duration and repetition count might be quadruple or more the expected number.
Yesterday, while doing leg press, I was amazed to note that with extremely slow repetitions with what I thought were relatively low loads and long duration that I reached a point where I could not create movement any further no matter how hard I tried. I chanced to look up at the readout and was shocked at just how low the number was. I was hard pressed to get a reading above twenty kilograms. I could barely make it up the stairs. Standing was a challenge for longer than I expected relative to past experiences with any other form of lower body reps/weights/schemes.
Why has it taken me so long to be willing to experiment with infimetrics in this way? Faced with a little bit of knowledge, of measured and studied capacities that drive formulations and expectations, it becomes far to easy to be driven by false guidelines. Just because it can be measured doesn’t mean it should be the guiding factor. I have continued to be as free form as possible with the exercises and am beginning to have a little bit of understanding as to why this confounding form of exercise is so different at so many levels. It strikes me that there is some element of linkage in the form that, once understood and mastered at the coordination level changes the impact of percentage of constant load to the muscle that far exceeds any weight bearing exercise. As a result, it has a far different metabolic effect than expected. Respiratory effects are incredibly different and for a variety of reasons. I suspect that there is much more to understand before I can help make anymore sense of this beyond the intuitive.
Stay curious.
go2strength 