Quote: (10-08-2014 01:41 PM)Hannibal Wrote:
Neurological efficiency. Take 135 (or even lighter) and rep it out a couple hundred times with good form. You should have the movement pattern ingrained by then, so depending on your build (bone length, etc), you should already know which muscles are getting hit the hardest and shore up whatever you feel is lacking from there.
You're only half right.
Neuro-muscular adaptations are very specific to intensity (think relative load to a 1RM). Or look up the Law of Specificity.
If your goal is to squat light weights for lots of reps (e.g Crossfit), doing light weights for lots of reps is suitable.
If your goal is to squat heavier weights, you need to practice more often with heavier weights. Common range is 75~85% of 1RM, where you can train with decent volume and have good transfers to 1RM attempts.
The groove for heavy loads is very different to light loads, especially relative to one's bodyweight. Usually, it's more efficient to move a light load in a path that you cannot reproduce with heavy loads.
Regarding muscles being hit hardest meaning they're the weak link, that is a very wrong way to think about it. I already mentioned the low back in a previous example. A muscle working too hard doesn't mean it's weak, necessarily. In many cases, it's actually very strong (since it's being worked hard all the time) but appears overworked only because other muscle groups aren't doing their fair share.
You gotta stop thinking about the body as a collection of separate muscle units. The body is a system. Think movements to fix movement and force production issues, not muscles.
Regarding flexibility, it is of course very important, but mobility is a better term here. What you want is to be able to get into a position AND produce maximum force from there through the whole range of motion. That is mobility. Flexibility only means you can get into the position. For example, girls in my yoga class are very flexible and can get into say a very deep squat position, but they are not mobile and once they're in that position, they have zero strength coming out of it.
As for the guy who stretches like crazy, you need to ask yourself what damages you are doing to your body so regularly that you have to stretch so much just to do a fundamental human body movement like the squat. This is a root question in one of the first chapters of Becoming A Supple Leopard, which I've used to fix my old injuries and lack of mobility, as well as stop wasting so much time on stretching and warmups.
