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28 March 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Mark Burnett looks like a Purposefully Primitive guy: The producer of Survivor, The Apprentice and The Contender looks like our kind of man. Far from some simpering Hollywood effete elitist, Burnett, born in 1960 started life out as a dead end kid and joined the military service at age 17. He ended up in an elite British paratrooper unit and saw combat in the Falkland Islands. After mustering out he began competing in long distance endurance races in which squads of men traveled for hundreds of miles. The French established the ultra-marathon team concept and Burnett began entering on a regular and professional basis. He decided that this type competition would make for great TV viewing and sold the idea to a production company. He wanted to take the TV show to the States and the outcome was The Eco-challenge. After seven successful seasons he made his bones and talked a network into the Survivor series. The rest is history and his hard edge is welcome relief in our bland world.
New writers: Speaking of The Apprentice, John Goode has agreed to begin a training column called Primitive Apprentice. John is a programmer and a detailed oriented type guy. I thought posting his log entries on a weekly basis would make for great reading. John will write down every exercise, set, rep and poundage plus outline his cardio and provide us a rough outline of his eating. He is aiming to compete at the AAU national powerlifting championships in October and should establish some national records in the process. John will post a weekly summation that will touch on what has happened the previous week and what he wants to have happen in the coming week.
It should make for great reading. Readers will have an opportunity to see how a pro makes in-flight corrections on his way to a specified goal. Keith Wassung is a superb writer who has graciously consented to post some of his terrific articles on this website. Keith is an experienced powerlifter, a medical professional and an individual who has great insight into the art & science of physical transformation. His two articles, Joe versus the Squat Rack and Human Genetics and Weight Training make for fascinating reading. He has a tremendous writing style. Santana Hana is one of my old school acquaintances and he is, shall we say, unique. Santana was gonzo before gonzo was cool and carries the hard-edge banner forward, ever forward. He is abrasive and rough and not for everyone, but his musings on training and life are always right on the money. Folks either love him or hate him.
Muscle isolation: You hear a lot of talk about making the mind/muscle connection so I thought it might be informative to provide a concrete example. If you want to test drive a new exercise I would suggest that you use the new movement all by itself. For example I have never gotten much out of one arm dumbbell rows. For whatever reason I have never been able to isolate the latisimus dorsi at all when using this particular exercise. Yesterday the lats came up in my workout rotation and I was a little bored with my regular lat routine so, what the hell, I decided to try something different. The methodology was as follows: I would use the single arm dumbbell rowing motion keeping the upper body braced while pulling the elbow past the parallel plane of the torso. I would not heave the weight to get it moving and I would not arm pull the poundage, on each rep I would let the weight dead hang pull and stretch at the bottom before commencing the pull.
Using this method I would concentrate 100% of my brain on using the lat and the lat alone to pull the weight upward. I would perform four sets using a static weight after two warm-up sets to kick the kinks out of the technique and establish, feel and rhythm. I wanted to use high reps for two reasons: one, I sought muscle soreness since next day muscular soreness would be my report card and alert me if I had hit the target. Second, high reps would force me to use lighter weight, relatively speaking, and this would allow me to maintain perfect technique. The exact technical execution of every subsequent repetition allows for a technical conformity. I wanted concentrated precision.
In the four subsequent work sets my reps were 15, 16, 14 and 12. The rest time between sets was not measured and I would hit another set when my breathing had normalized and I felt totally rested and ready. I used wrist straps (another article is forthcoming on the why and how of wrist straps) so that the grip would not be an issue. Often on back training (which always involves pulling or tugging poundage towards the body) the grip can give out before the back muscles. This is true particularly on high rep sets. The results would be measured by the degree of next-day-soreness and if that soreness resided in the target muscle. In this particular experiment the results were disappointing: zero, nothing, nadaonce again one-arm dumbbell rows failed to hit the mark with Marty. No soreness anywhere. So back on the shelf they go.
Does this mean that one-arm rows wont work for you? Not at all, my wife loves them - but youll need to judge for your self. Make sure that you do only one exercise for that entire region otherwise results could get skewered. For example: overhead pressing affects my lats to an amazing degree and had I decided to get in some shoulder work while doing my one-arm dumbbell row experiment, I could have gotten a false positive. So use a lone exercise. If I had wanted to throw in some calf work or hamstrings, that would have been all right as the geographic muscle regions are so far apart and the mode of attack so different that no mixed signals would have been received. Good luck in your own mind/muscle isolation experiments.
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