SESSION NOTES: Relative Stamina (788-799)
Complete one rep of exercise A in the first minute, two in the second, three in the third etc until failure to complete. Then, immediately, repeat for exercise B. All unbroken. Choose difficulty where you will reach approximately 10 mins of each.
Programming Science:
This session contains one upper body push based movement and one upper body pull based movement.
The ascending repetition scheme is designed to progressively increase difficulty as you ‘graduate’ to each new minute. Not only does the amount of work being done each minute increase, but, as a result, the rest decreases. This results in an exponential increase in difficulty as the session progresses.
As this session requires you to go to 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 to failure in the latter 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).
Health and Body Composition Benefits:
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.
Performance Benefits:
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).
Strategy:
The need to make the sets unbroken removes a lot of the strategy in this session, it’s simply a matter of getting the work done. The priority should be efficient movement to ensure as much work can be done as possible, with minimal effort.
How it Should Feel:
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 session will go from being very easy, to very difficult, very quickly.
As you change exercises, you will get a respite, both because of the immediate drop of volume, and the change in movement type.
Scaling Guidelines:
The intent of this session is to achieve very high repetitions, so scale as required to achieve this. Scale the load (with some form of assistance) rather than the range of motion. You should scale so you reach the same level of both exercises (approximately 10 minutes of each).
Modify around injuries with exercises as close as possible to the stimulus of the movement you’re modifying.
Common Mistakes:
The main mistake seen here is failing to start a set because you don’t think you’ll finish it. Even if you only just complete the previous set unbroken, you should still attempt as many as possible in the following set.
