Over the years, fitness training has gone from lifting bags of rocks in your back yard, to barbells and dumbbells, to machines utilizing springs, cams, gears, levers, and pulleys, to techniques stressing balance and flexibility, all in the quest to find the most efficient way to increase muscular size and strength.
The newest trend, as taught by professional strength and performance coach, Zach Even-Esh, seems to be a giant step backward, but in fact, it resolves all of the deficiencies in the earlier techniques.
To start with, let's review why exercise works to develop muscles.
What happens is that muscular tissue responds to the load that is placed on it, in the most efficient way possible.
This is important because it means that the muscle will only do what is asked of it, and in the least way.
In other words, lifting a pint at your local pub will never develop eye-popping biceps because the load is simply not sufficient.
Therefore, the load placed on the muscle must be more than the muscle is capable of doing, in order for it to be stimulated to grow.
When the muscle is overloaded to the point of failure, i.
e.
to the point where it will no longer perform the requested action, the muscle is actually damaged.
During the recovery phase, as the body repairs and heals the damaged muscle, more muscular fiber will grow, as the body attempts to be ready for the next request.
Thus the muscle becomes larger and stronger.
The tried and true technique of lifting rocks, for example, will do this rather nicely.
All one has to do is to look at the size and weight of the shields, swords, and armor used in the Middle Ages to see what was achievable with primitive techniques.
The only drawback to this form of training is the inherent limitations on what can be done to isolate individual muscles.
It works well for large groups of muscles performing complex actions, but single-joint actions are challenging, at best.
Barbells and dumbbells were developed to allow better gripping, more precise control of the increments of weight, and to allow more muscle isolation.
This led to the rise of the modern, sculpted athlete, with seemingly every muscle ready to burst through the skin.
But there was a problem with something called "the plateau".
Remember earlier, when I said the the muscle performed the load in the most efficient means possible? The result of that is that from time to time, the muscle simply stopped developing as fast as before.
The technique needed to be switched around to keep the muscle "surprised" as it were, in order to maximize growth.
Enter the machines.
By using machines with gears, and cams, etc, the motion could be varied much more so than with just free weights.
This effectively combatted the plateau.
But the problem with both free weights (barbells and dumbbells) and machines is that the motions were typical to the gym, and not typical to the everyday world.
In other words, you might be able to curl a one-hundred pound barbell, but not be able to pick up the awkwardly sized eighty pound lawnmower and put it into the trunk of your car--or get it out.
This gave rise to the the "core" exercise phenomenon, where the weights were generally lifted while standing, frequently on something that challenged one's balance.
The idea here was to make the exercise more "useful" in real life.
Zach Even-Esh studied all of this and has developed something he calls his Underground Strength Program.
He has gone back to the basics with a highly sophisticated "rocks and ropes" technique that puts all the other techniques currently available to shame.
If you, or someone you know, plays football, or wrestles, or plays basketball, or tennis, in short any sport consisting of high speed applications of strength, often while not in the most balanced position, then you owe it to yourself to check out Zach's methods.
He shows you how to overload your muscles, every single one of them, like they have never been overloaded before, in ways neither you nor your muscles ever imagined.
Try it and you will never look at fitness training the same way again.