MAX CONTRACTION AND THE AEROBIC AND ANAEROBIC PATHWAYS

The following is an excerpt from John Little's new book Max Contraction: The Scientifically Proven Program For Building Muscle Mass In Minimum Time.

There exist but two types of energy systems that govern contraction of the muscles, consisting of two types of processes or pathways that are mapped out by the Central Nervous System: Anaerobic and Aerobic. And for the purpose of building your muscles to their absolute biggest size (i.e., to the uppermost limits of your genetic potential), your training efforts should be exclusively anaerobic.

Aerobic, as the name implies, burns mainly body fat for fuel and requires the presence of oxygen to do so. Aerobic training is a necessity if your objective is endurance-related activities such as distance running, cross-country skiing or other enterprises in which endurance is a factor. When your objective is building additional muscle mass, however, you will not be burning oxygen, but rather glycogen as your fuel of choice, which is stored within the muscles you are training. The first 1 to 6-seconds of muscular contraction are, in fact, fueled by ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is a compound responsible for all bodily functions, from muscular contraction to thought. There is generally enough ATP within each muscle to sustain a contraction for up to three seconds. To reach six seconds of contraction, additional ATP must be created, which the body does by breaking creatine phospate (or CP) down into its constituents of creatine and phosphate; the energy that is released from this breaking down of CP can take an ADP molecule (adenosine diphosphate) and attach another phosphate, thus creating a new ATP molecule. There is sufficient CP stored in the body to keep one’s muscles in ATP for up to 10 seconds of contraction – which is more than enough for Max Contraction exercise.

THE TIME FACTOR IN ANEROBIC EXERCISE

There is actually an anaerobic window of approximately 60 seconds in which a set can last, theoretically, and still be considered anaerobic. However, anytime an exercise extends beyond 90 to 100 seconds, the aerobic system kicks in and begins to take over. In fact, by the two-minute mark of a set of exercise, the aerobic system is responsible for 50 percent of your energy output which means, in effect, that if your set lasts this long you will be splitting your training stimulus for muscle mass in half – 50% going to the aerobic system and 50% to the anaerobic – when, had you kept your set duration within the anaerobic confines, you could have had 100% of the training effect fall within the anaerobic (or muscle building) system. This is why training protocols that have you performing one exercise for up to two minutes per set (such as Superslow ^TM), are not as efficient for stimulating maximum muscle growth as protocols such as Max Contraction.

The aerobic pathways work wonders for your endurance, but do precious little of anything in the way of promoting muscle growth. And this is where most bodybuilders make a serious tactical error: they equate the idea of more training with muscle building training. As they get stronger, they realize (correctly) that something about their workouts must progressively increase if their muscles are to grow progressively larger and stronger. But not knowing that what must increase is the intensity of their workouts (perhaps not being familiar with the scientific data in this regard), and that with every increase in intensity there must be a corresponding decrease in duration, they instead subject their muscles to more exercises, more sets, more repetitions and thus gradually convert what had started out as anaerobic muscle building workouts to aerobic endurance building workouts. The result is that their muscle building progress comes to a complete halt. The obvious fallacy here is that, if it were true that as one progressed toward the upper limit of his size and strength potential he would have to increase the amount of exercises one performed and the length of his workouts, one would ultimately end up training 10, 12, 20 hours a day. This, as Mike Mentzer repeatedly pointed out, would be impossible as the body only has a limited ability to recover from an exercise session (i.e., to compensate for the exhaustive effects of training stress).

In order to make your muscles grow progressively bigger and stronger, it is not the duration but the intensity of your training that must increase. If you are not progressing in your bodybuilding training, it is either because you have begun training longer (a step toward aerobic conditioning) or because your muscles have adapted to a particular level of training intensity, and further progress will not come until you increase the intensity level and thereby decrease the duration of both the exercises you perform and the length of your workouts. And this is precisely why advanced trainees in Max Contraction who are looking to make further progress in strength and size, have, of necessity, reduced their TOC (Time of Contraction) to 1-to-6-seconds and rarely perform more than one minute of total exercise per workout. Again, as you grow stronger the length of your workout sessions, perforce, must be reduced.

Article copyright © 2003, John Little and Northern River Productions, Inc. Any reproduction in whole or in part without the expressed written permission of the author is strictly prohibited.