Using Anticipation to Your Advantage
When you see circumstances in which the same thing occurs again and again, it becomes predictable. When something is predictable you begin to anticipate that it will happen. We all anticipate things in life. We know the sun is going to come up in the morning because we have experienced the rising of the sun on such a regular basis that we simply anticipate that it will rise each day. We can also create circumstances that cause our bodies to anticipate certain things as well. If we are smart, we will use our bodies’ ability to anticipate to our advantage.
If I were to always train to failure, do you think my body might start to anticipate that I always train to the point where I can’t do another rep? If I were a body, and I knew for certain that I would keep being forced to push to failure in my workouts, would that make me want to get stronger? If I were a body and I did get stronger from always going to failure, how would it benefit me? It would never make life any better because I would be maximally stressed during a workout whether I got stronger or whether I didn’t. At some point, if I were a body that were always pushed to failure, I would give up on getting stronger because I would anticipate that it would mean increasingly heavier, harder workouts that I would rather avoid. What I would do is to stop getting stronger to avoid the obvious consequence of a more stressful workout. I realize that training to failure does work for a time, but your body will eventually consider it a futile reason for gaining strength.
So how do you make your bodies’ ability to anticipate work to your advantage? First of all, make sure you keep working out at the same level of training stress for a sufficient amount of time. This means any time that you are doing a given exercise with a given amount of weight, keep using the same amount of reps for one to two weeks if you are just starting out training; three to five weeks if you have been training for over five months; and six to eight weeks if your body doesn’t adapted to make the workouts easier within three to five weeks. How do you know when the workouts have become easier? That brings us to the next point.
Measuring How Hard You Push Yourself
If you will make yourself aware at what point in a set your rep speed slows down and becomes harder, you can keep track of this information. When you can train further into a set before rep speed slows down, you know that the weight has become easier to life and you have become stronger. Personally, I believe in stopping a set when rep speed starts to slow down as it marks that point in which your muscles are making a transition from the ATP creatine phosphate system (which is your strongest energy system), to the lactate system which invites the possibility of endurance adaptations at the expense of strength adaptations. This means your body can shift its focus from energy energy release during exercise, to energy conservation during exercise. Energy release is what is necessary for strength. Energy conservation is what is necessary for endurance. Further explanation is needed.
How Your Body Thinks and Anticipates
Watch kids run a mile in a race for the first time. What are you likely to see? They start out running at near top speed and die by about three hundred yards if not sooner. The rest of the race is either a walk, or alternating running with walking. If you keep making them run a mile week after week and year after year, they eventually anticipate that they cannot maintain a sprint for a whole mile, so what do they do? They start out at a slower pace to save or conserve energy at the start of the race so that they will have something left at the end of the race. Your body does the same thing. If you keep pushing to failure, your body knows that the end of the set will be very hard. What does your body do so that you’ll have more left at the end of the set? It holds back (conserves) energy at the start of the set to help you be stronger at the end of the set. How does it do this? By deemphasizing the powerful ATP creatine phosphate system adaptations, and emphasizing the weaker lactate system adaptations which can help you sustain exercise longer without making you stronger. Another unfortunate thing for anyone seeking to improve strength, is that pushing your training to the point of fatiguing your muscles will teach your fast twitch muscles to take on properties that are more like slow twitch muscle fibers. This is not the optimum physiological adaptation for gaining strength.
If you stop your set when rep speed starts to slow down, your muscles won’t anticipate the need to hold back energy in to make it easier at the end of the set. Your body won’t be worried about saving energy to reduce the fatigue at the end of the set because you will stop before you become fatigued. Since fatigue isn’t a factor, your muscles can focus on energy production, or a full uninhibited release of energy without any fear that it will result in the discomfort of fatigue. The result is that your body can focus on lifting stronger instead of lifting longer.
Train Your Body to Anticipate That A Strength Gain Will Make A Workout Eaiser
To summarize all of this, since the training patterns that you establish causes your body to adapt according to the anticipated patterns, set up your training so that your body thinks that gaining strength is the best way to adapt to the anticipated pattern. Do this by training at a consistent level of sets, reps and weight for a given exercise. By training consistently, your body will anticipate that becoming stronger will make the same workouts become easier, which is exactly what your body wants. I also suggest stopping when rep speed starts to slow down so that your body anticipates that improving your ATP phosphocreatine energy system is the best way to make the training stress easier. If you train to failure or fatigue, your body will anticipate that conserving energy and making adaptations to the lactate system is the best way to make the training stress easier. Energy release is what is needed for gaining strength, not energy conservation. If you learn how your body anticipates and use it to your advantage, you can anticipate that you will succeed at gaining strength. Best of training to you.