SESSION NOTES: Relative Stamina (779-787)

This session contains alternating sets of upper body pulling based movement, with upper body pushing based movements.

The push movements and the pull movements alternate, which has two effects. Firstly, there is some degree of recovery between movements of a similar type to maximise volume. Secondly, there is a ‘blood shunting’ effect, where your body is required to deliver oxygen and fuel, and remove waste, from large and alternating muscle beds.

This blood shunting means there will be a cardiorespiratory benefit, and you will have the added challenge of training with high levels of hydrogen ions (the acid feeling you get from high intensity exercise) in your system, and not just under localised muscular fatigue.

As this session incentivises you to push towards failure, you will achieve a very high level of motor unit activation. Motor units are the motor neurons (nerves) and the muscle fibres they ‘switch on’. When we contact a muscle, we are in fact only contracting a small number of muscle fibres. We can’t turn a muscle fibre ‘half on’, it’s either ‘on’ or ‘off’. When you stop a set before failure, you are failing to maximise the number of fibres you’re activating. By going towards failure in the sets in this session, we are maximising the number of motor units we’re activating, which means we’re able to get a lot of effect from a relatively small amount of work (albeit at a higher intensity).

This session is a form of resistance training that provides a stimulus with lighter loads and higher volume than an absolute strength or power based session. While the high levels of fatigue in this session makes it less effective to increase strength and power, it will improve your stamina – the ability of your muscles to resist fatigue.

Often, higher repetition movements are neglected for the upper body (while walking/cycling etc are included for the lower body), but by including these higher repetition upper body movements, we’re helping to develop blood vessels in the upper body which will help reduce cardiovascular risk factors.

High repetition resistance training like this will also improve your flexibility (by going through a full range of motion), posture and coordination. It will also build stability around your joints and spine to give you a healthy musculo-skeletal system and reduce joint and back pain. These movements will also help develop tendon strength.

Although this session is not designed with cardiovascular training as its priority, the higher repetitions do mean there is a crossover to cardiovascular benefits. These include improved cardiovascular endurance, respiratory function and cardiac health.

As a result of this style of session, you will experience changes in blood chemistry, including favourable effects on cholesterol, blood glucose, triglyceride and lipid levels.

In terms of body composition, higher repetition, lower load movements are an important part of an exercise program for increasing lean muscle. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, so increasing it will maximise how much energy your body burns at rest. This makes it an effective session to reach healthy levels of body fat, both visceral fat (around the organs) and subcutaneous fat (under your skin). After this session, your body will go through a prolonged state of ‘EPOC’ (excess post- exercise oxygen consumption), meaning you’ll continue burning energy long after you finish training – further aiding healthy body composition.

The high repetition movements in this session train the ability of your muscles to resist fatigue – increasing their stamina. This comes from improvements in the efficiency of slow twitch (fatigue resistant) muscle fibres.

As a result of the volume of repetitions, this session will increase the mitochondrial density in your muscle cells, allowing them to more efficiently convert energy into fuel. This means you can sustain higher rates of muscle contraction before fatigue or failure.

The higher volumes will also increase capillary density in your muscles, allowing for efficient delivery of oxygen and fuel, and removal of waste products (further adding to the fatigue resistance).

Although this session is not designed with cardiovascular training as its priority, the higher repetitions do mean there is a crossover to cardiovascular benefits. These include improved cardiovascular endurance, respiratory function, intramuscular substrate storage (increasing energy availability for muscle contractions) and increased enzyme activities (increasing the rate of energy delivery to the muscles).

Scale the movements if needed so both are at a similar level of difficulty (one should not be easier than the other). As they’re a similar level, you should aim to keep the sets of both exercises about the same size.

The aim in this session is to achieve the fastest possible time, including the time penalties. This means that you’re better off resting 55 seconds and doing the next set unbroken, than going straight into the exercise and getting a time penalty.

You should be aiming to go to approximately 80-90% of your predicted max (for that set) in each set.

Although this session will get cardiovascular, the limiting factor here should be localised muscular endurance, meaning the muscles will be burning and it will be difficult to complete reps towards the end of each exercise.

The aim here should be to achieve large, unbroken sets. Scale the movements by using band assistance (or similar) to ensure you’re able to complete 20-30 unbroken reps in the first set.

The aim in this session is to achieve the fastest possible time, including the time penalties. Change your strategy to achieve this. Also, ensure that both movements are a similar difficulty, so you’re not limited by one.