In “the science and practice of strength training,” which has
largely become a bible in the world of strength and conditioning, Zatsiorsky
suggests that for a muscle to be “trained,” it must not only be recruited, but
exhausted as well. When framed under this scope, it’s easy to understand how to
train a muscle to respond to further growth, when it seems nothing else is
working.
Break Away From The
Norm
When people hit a plateau, they don’t really care to attempt to
understand why, they just know that they want it to end, and in doing so they
try a plethora of different methods, in hopes that something will work and
kick-start making progress once again. But before one can attempt to
break out of a plateau, one must understand how they got there in the first
place.
Training normally focuses on the concentric capacities of the
muscles – meaning, we base the amount of weight we use, and reps we perform, on
what are muscles are capable of lifting concentrically. When we can no longer
lift the weight concentrically, the set is over. And this is where a lot of
people are lost – they are unaware that their muscles are still quite capable
of handling loads isometrically, and eccentrically, and as a result are leaving
gains to be had on the table.
The following are some of the best ways known to exhaust a muscle,
when traditional concentric focused training no longer seems to be working:
