What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
I'm here at Winter Meetings 2016 and I wanted to bring you guys a video.
More importantly, a topical video because here this year I have a chance, as always,
to get together with some of my great friends, my colleagues, strength coaches in Major League
Baseball.
One of the topics that we're talking about this year was occlusion training.
Constant training.
I've covered this topic here on our channel before, but here you can actually see me going
through the protocol.
Yes, it blew me up.
Yes, I think they asked me to do this because they think I have human balloon arms.
I'd be the perfect demonstration for this.
The fact of the matter is, this protocol relies on three different types of failures that
you would either stop your set based on reaching any one of them.
That would be a change in tempo, a change in your tolerance to the activity that you're
doing, or a change in the technique, or the form that you're using.
Now, that brought me to the question that we get a lot of times here.
That is "Jeff, should I be training to failure all the time?"
We advocate here, all the time you should be training to failure.
The big difference is that there is different types of failure.
So, like we just talked about here.
Tempo failure, tolerance failure, technique failure, and how you incorporate them and
what you're training for will dictate the entire difference.
So I jumped right down into the hotel gym because I figured this would be a great opportunity
for me to show you what it is I'm talking about.
So here I am doing a pullup.
Not a pullup.
This is more of a strength based, hypertrophy based exercise that I'm doing here to try
to reach typical, or usual failure.
That would mean that I would do this until I reached a failure in my technique.
I want to go as hard as I can.
If my tempo hadn't have slowed down – as you can see it happening here – that's okay,
as long as I continue to follow good, and practice good form, and follow the same technique.
You can see me struggling to get reps here, but I'm still doing that.
Tolerance wise, this is burning.
This is killing me, but I'm still pushing through this because I'm trying to train to
failure.
Now, what I don’t want to do here is change my technique and actually drop down from the
bar, or actually continue to do my reps by changing my technique to just plain-ass, shitty
form.
Which is what you can see me doing here.
That wouldn't be training to failure because that's not really productive reps at that
point.
Moving on, we can extrapolate this out.
If I was doing something with tubing, something that is high rep in nature, what you're trying
to do there is rely on your change in tolerance.
So we know that we're going to be able to maintain the tempo, most likely.
As I rack up rep, after rep of this.
We know that I'm likely going to be able to maintain the technique.
The weight's not hard enough for me to really start struggling with technique, but my tolerance
level will change.
How much can I withstand the burn?
At what point does the burn get so much that I have to let go and fail?
That is actually what we're looking at here.
I finally have to just give in because I can't maintain my resilience to that burn, and therefore
I've reached failure again.
This time in terms of my tolerance.
Finally, we can look at an exercise like this.
Here I'm training to be explosive.
When we talk about athletes, explosion training is actually very, very key.
Power training.
With power training there is certainly a component of speed built into every rep.
if you're not hitting the speed, if you're not getting the proper tempo in less than
1.2 seconds per rep, you're not getting that tempo; then you're not training for power
anymore.
So guess what?
If your goal was to build your power, you should stop that step.
So here you can see that as I start to get slower and slower, that is an indicator to
me to stop it and quit.
Again, the goal dictates that you have reached failure.
Understand what you're training for, and that will dictate what type of failure you're training
to.
But understand this: if you want to make change you'd better train to some type of failure.
Those that tell you not to don’t necessarily understand the varying types of failure, and
I want you guys to make sure that you understand that because if you just show up and just
do sub-maximal sets, not touching any of these types of failures you're literally just spending
time in the gym not doing anything productive.
You're not challenging yourself in any way to come back bigger, stronger, and better.
So guys, I've got to get back to work here, but I wanted to make sure I cover this for
you.
Again, coming here live from 2016 Winter Meetings.
I'll be back here again in the gym next week covering all of the things that you want me
to talk about.
If you're looking for a program that puts all the science back in strength the way we
do here – and what I try to bring here to these meetings – then head to ATHLEANX.com
and get our ATHLEANX training system.
In the meantime, I'll see you guys back here in just a few days.