Yesterday @flograppling posted up a video of the training we have been doing with @victorhugojj and the six blades crew. I got several questions - one asked why we lift heavy weights with our fighters & another asked about the use of submaxmial efforts for training jujitsu players (I am paraphrasing here). - For some background, I have worked with 10s of thousands of athletes and was very fortunate to put out free programming on CrossFitFootball dot com then travel the world meeting the athletes doing the programming through the CFFB seminars I taught - for almost 10 years we traveled the globe. I learned a lot in those times and had conversations and mentorship from some of the best in the field of human performance. During that time the information supported what old man Zangas told me many years in his garage in Palos Verdes when asked a similar question, “If light weights made us strong, why would we lift heavy weights? Lifting heavy weights is work - it takes time, effort and focus. You can’t just phuck around and lift heavy weight. Everyone should lift weights, but lifting heavy weights isn’t for everybody.” Let me give you an example from Zatsiorsky - A person curls 30kg dumbbell causing the following to occur: (a) maximal number of Muscle are recruited; (b) the fast MU, which are also strongest, are activated; (c) the discharge frequency of motorneurons is optimal; (d) motoneuron activity is synchronous. When a 15g dumbbell is lifted, (a) only a portion of MUs are recruited, (b) the fastest MUs are not recruited, (c) the frequency of neural stimulation is not optimal and MU activity is asynchronous. The intramuscular coordination is different between the two - 15kg load cannot improve the intramuscular coordination required to overcome a 30kg resistance. Are sub maximal loads useless? No…not if you use compensatory acceleration and reference Dr. Fred Hatfield’s work. We can leave that for another day. Here are few videos I had on my roll. Me floor pressing 500+ a while back. PA coach & HAMR Bill Williams squatting a heavy 2.5. Vic’s ME unilateral work on the wheck boards. @arash_soofiani hitting triples. #powerathlete #sixblades #bjj (at Hill Country) https://www.instagram.com/p/CrOHkkdLWkY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
