CONSIDERING MAX CONTRACTION

JOHN: How did you first hear of Max Contraction and what led to your interest in this approach to training?

DREW: I had been working with Ken Hutchins and he had read your Static Contraction Training book (McGraw Hill, New York, 1998). And we started experimenting with that at the Superslow™ facility over here in Altamonte Springs, Florida, where I was working with him at the time. This was where I had first heard of your work – your pioneering work – with motionless exercise. And Ken wanted to use it primarily with people who had different injuries or had difficulty performing full-range exercise for various reasons – joint problems, osteoarthritis, etc. Anybody who couldn’t perform full-range exercise we were using Static Contraction with in a position where they could apply as much force as possible without irritating the joint or whatever was causing the problem. Although Ken’s version of it I think was very, very much modified from what was in the Static Contraction book in that he actually had people going for two-minutes [a much longer hold time than I would recommend – J.L.] and there wasn’t an actual “weight” used. The machine was set in a fixed position, so that you couldn’t lift it and it wouldn’t go down if you let go of it either. And what he would have people do is contract against this for about 30 seconds at a light effort, and then gradually increase it to about a 50 percent effort for another 30 seconds and then almost as hard as they could for another 30 seconds and then as hard as they possibly could for another 30 seconds. And, in retrospect, in thinking about it now, some of my initial negative perceptions of static training could be related to the fact of how Ken had people doing it, which was far from effective. There was no actual back-pressure; they were working against a perfectly immobile resistance and the resistance was entirely dependent upon the volitional effort of the subject. And, you know, a lot of people simply will not contract as hard as they are absolutely are physically capable of if they can get away with it.

JOHN: I should think that such an approach would make it difficult to measure not only effort but also to track progress.

DREW: Right. I think a lot of clients were faking it, frankly. If you lift an actual weight into position for them to hold, such as you have always advocated, they can’t fake it. And it also provides you with measurable results from workout to workout. Without that kind of feedback I also think there wasn’t that much incentive for the people to put as much into it, which otherwise they would have. Seeing it done in that way, I think, probably biased me somewhat with regard to isometric or static exercise in general. But then again, it wasn’t really Static Contraction, it was just the odd application of it that was being used; i.e., that there was no real resistance and the time of contraction was probably way too long for them to maintain an absolute, extremely high level of force application. I think they probably would have gotten better results if they had shortened the hold times and focused on going all-out from the very start.

MAX CONTRACTION AND CROSS BRIDGE ATTACHMENTS

JOHN: Right. Well, how did you go from a decidedly negative view of Max Contraction – based upon Ken’s interpretation of it – to your present vantage point of believing that the position of Max Contraction is the most productive range for training a muscle?

DREW: Well, during the time that I was working with Ken I didn’t really focus on that point – at least not at that time. However, I had received a lot of questions about it from other people in the Superslow™ community who wanted to know what Ken was doing with it. And, of course, Ken was really, really busy, so I ended up answering questions from people. I was on the Internet all the time and Ken just really didn’t get on the Internet much. He was too busy for it and really wasn’t interested in it. So a lot of times I would field questions from people on your protocols of Static Contraction and Max Contraction. And, of course, in answering these questions I had to put a bit more thought into it and one of the things that was brought up by the Superslow™ people was the logic behind the position of full muscular contraction that you advocate. Arthur Jones had also indicated that this was the absolute most important position in an exercise. Now at first I had been thinking that it probably wasn’t so important where in the range of motion a person performed a static contraction or hold with regards to joint position. Arthur had stated that the only position where all the muscle fibers could be fully contracted was in the position of full muscular contraction – but I was thinking at the time, “Well, that’s the only position where they could all be fully shortened, but not all of them would be contracting at the same time because you can only use a limited amount of fibers at any one time; you can only recruit so many motor units.” And from that standpoint the position of contraction probably didn’t make that as much of a difference as long as the weight was heavy enough – as long as the force application was high enough. (laughs) Later on … thinking along totally different lines after hearing a presentation that Ryan Hall did on more recent research on hypertrophy, and considering the mechanics of micro-trauma, I began to see the whole issue of the position of Max Contraction in a different light. I began to look more closely into the role of micro-trauma in the hypertrophy process, how that damage occurs, and that some of it was probably damage to the cross bridges within a muscle during the negative part of a repetition. As you know, when a person dies, of course, they go into a state of rigor mortis, where their muscles become stiff. A similar situation – on a much, much smaller scale – occurs as people fatigue during exercise, and you have some cross bridges which might not be able to detach due to ATP depletion – but of course all the rest of the muscle is attempting to lengthen, so there’s nothing else that can happen except damage to those cross-bridges. And the degree to which cross bridges can be formed depends of course upon the overlap of the myofibrils --- and the more overlap, the greater potential number of cross bridges that can be formed. And if you look at it that way it makes more sense to go into the fully contracted position during exercise. And if you’re going to do a static hold there’s really no other place that could be better than the Max Contraction position, because in that position you have the greatest potential for cross bridge attachments to be formed and, if you’re using a heavy enough weight, once you get to a point where you can’t hold it and that muscle has to lengthen, you’ve got more potential cross bridges that aren’t going to be able to let go and that are going to be damaged during that brief lengthening. And of course there’s other structures that are being subjected to some degree of damage as well – cell walls, etc., -- but overall being in that position of Max Contraction is what’s going to contribute to the micro-trauma and to the degree of growth stimulation. So if you’re going to do any type of isometric or static exercise, in this case you’re only limited to one position for – well, depending upon the specifics of how you’re going to perform it – at least for most of the time, like on a Max Contraction or in the Omega Set, wherein eventually you are also performing some degree of negative work, but the majority of the contraction is in the Max Contraction position – that’s it. That’s the spot!

JOHN: Right – it is the best position to then apply weight or load for optimal growth stimulation.

DREW: Right. Of course that can also depend on the equipment you’re using. If the equipment you have doesn’t allow for a meaningful resistance in the fully contracted position then it really doesn’t help you to the degree it should. You know, some barbell exercises, or some really poorly designed machines, if you go into the fully contracted position and there’s really nothing much there for you to work against, it won’t do you much good. But that’s a fault of the tools being used rather than a fault of the method. In which case the best thing to do is just drop them and get better tools.

JOHN: I was impressed as well, of course, in reading your foreword to Advanced Max Contraction Training, that like most of us in the high intensity field, you have tried all of the various high intensity training techniques to stimulate greater muscle size and strength – positive failure, negative-only, forced positives, forced negatives, etc. I recall doing these while in university, using the old Nautilus protocol of three-days per week and literally cracking my head on a desk in Psychology class as a result of simply being overtrained to the point of exhaustion.

DREW: I think the problem with a lot of that is that trainees take those techniques and apply them at the end of a set – things which just extend the amount of work that a person was performing, which if they were already training extremely hard to begin with, it’s almost like piling on a second set. If you’re already training with an extremely high level of intensity, then you have to be extremely, extremely cautious to avoid overtraining. And it probably would have been more effective if, instead of doing forced reps or forced negatives as an afterthought, if they had planned to incorporate that into the set within a reasonable amount of time. If, for example, they knew that they wanted to do forced reps or forced negatives or anything like that, rather than go to failure with the then standard 8 to 12 reps in 40 to 70-seconds, they should have used the heavier weight that only allowed them to go to perhaps half that time, and then maybe done just a very small amount – maybe one or two forced reps – afterwards. In this manner they would have jumped the intensity way up without extending it for so long that they would have ended up using up so much energy. In other words, make it a lot, lot harder, rather than making it longer. By simply adding these techniques onto their sets they were accomplishing the opposite of what they wanted to accomplish. Besides, if you know going into the workout that you’re going to have to do a couple of forced reps and a couple of forced negatives at the end of a regular set – if you know this going into the workout – I think even people who really push themselves and go all out, still hold a little back knowing that the absolute hardest part is coming right at the end of the set. And if you know it’s going to be shorter, if you know that you’re only going to be doing this much or roughly within a range, I think you’re going to put more into it. And I think that’s a major thing in favor of the very, very brief set times.

THE OMEGA SET™

JOHN: I agree with you. Moving on from this, how were your experiences in using the Omega Set™ in your training?

DREW: Painful! (laughs) To say the least! The hardest part was in convincing my training partner Jon Kilcoyne, who works with me at Overload, to repeatedly lift heavier weights for me to get back into the fully contracted position. We were experimenting with Rest-Pause for a while and then just decided to switch over to just do the Omega Set™ after I had read the preview you had sent me for the book. And it hurt! I actually first tried it in my garage using a barbell and a squat rack to do curls. I would load up the barbell and then squat down to get into the fully contracted position for a barbell curl and then stand up and lean forward a little bit so that I had meaningful resistance in the fully contracted position. I used a heavy enough weight so that I could only hold it for about maybe a quarter or half a second before lowering it. I did three or four reps like that and … just pain! You could feel the deep fiber stimulation. I mean, my biceps were just, just sore. Of course a feeling isn’t an accurate gauge of an exercise’s effectiveness, but having experimented with that for a while after having done the Rest-Pause training, which we got good results with, I noticed even better results. In my arms in particular, which are traditionally one of the areas that I have most trouble with, responded right away. I mean, my chest, my traps – I could look at a barbell and those grow, but my arms I have always had difficulty with. So the Omega Set™ was really helpful. The only time that I had ever made any significant progress with my arms before was doing the old negative chins and negative dips on the old Nautilus Multi-Exercise unit. But this was the first time that I actually saw such rapid progress in my arms. I mean, I didn’t measure them -- I wish now that I had, but this was the first time that I actually saw such immediate, noticeable, obvious, “in the mirror” results in terms of arm size -- from any type of particular training method.

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