I dont think youre at a place that you have to go to extremes to accomplish your goal of getting leaner and building some muscle. Youre not on either extreme end of the spectrum, and could easily do both ( build muscle, lose fat) simultaneously right now imo.
Youre going to have to do two things religiously though, eat enough good foods and protein, and train hard as fuck. IF youre willing to do that, you can do both things at once.
You would be surprised at how small boned and thin framed a lot of the most explosive athletes are, people always think they weigh much more than they really do from the appearance.
Muscle moves the skeleton around, and the heavier the skeleton, the more heavily muscled the athlete needs to be to move those limbs well. When you have a very light frame, with a decent amount of muscle hanging off your limbs, you can move those limbs FAST.
So with a thin frame, you have the advantage of even a small amount of added muscle tissue making a bigger difference in locomotion. However, you also have the disadvantage of added fat making a larger "relative" contribution as well, and one that will make you move much worse.
I dont know why you have that random number in your head though... Why not focus on building some muscle as you lean out a little, youre not at a place where this is hard to do right now. The numbers will take care of themselves if you train and eat right.
I think that some posterior chain hypertrophy would actually make you LESS likely to get hurt, as long as youre jumping enough while youre training and dont go overboard on calories. The body has a pretty damn efficient way of working those things out in your favor as long as you show it what youre going to be doing with this new strength/muscle.
Look at this way Raptor, if you put on 10 pounds of muscle, and lose 10 pounds of fat, thats a 20 pound change in your body, which would most definitely HELP you right now. The rate that you can truly build muscle at will allow your joints, tendons, etc. plenty of time to adapt as long as youre still doing athletic events.
I think youll do well as long as you jump plenty along the way and dont get fat. Ive never seen a true lbm gain be detrimental to athleticism in the event the athlete didnt stop running/ jumping/ playing their sport at a high frequency.
Think about this, grab a 5lb piece of steak and take note of the space it takes up and density. Now imagine that on your glutes and hamstrings, and keep in mind thats ONLY 5 lbs of meat... The amount of lean tissue you can likely build, that is contractile, and HELPS you move, will not hurt you. fat that is not contractile will.
People look at elite sprinters and high jumpers and correlate their weight with performance, only they dont note the bone structure. Many of those guys have insanely light frames, and even though they appear "thinish" they often have quite a bit of muscle relative to the bone structure, especially in the right places.
Bosch and Klomp (2005) wrote that hams, calfs are more pennate muscles bi-articular more suited for reactive work and energy trnasfers (isometrical), while glutes and quads are more parallel and uniarticular suited for concentric explosive actions. The more the 'elastic' jump, the more the contribution from hams and calfs.... the deeper the jump and slower, the greater the contribution of quads and glutes.
LBSS, if youll work on your approach a little and Id put money on it you would improve some almost instantly. Lead with your TORSO as you start the approach, youre leaning to the rear when youre trying to accelerate.
Simply doing that will help you stay lower and accelerate more into that last step. Watch some of the good dunkers that plant lr like golden child and look at their torso position as they approach, compare and see if it makes a difference for you. At the very least it will help you smooth out that approach and come in lower with more speed and power.
I hope you do well, and I think it would work, for a while, at least until supercompensation is complete from your previous training, and the peaking effect of that style of training wears thin. Its only my OPINION, but the guys who seem to do well with that type of set up are .1) newbs and 2.) guys that are slightly or massively over reaching, whether they know it or not.
For 2. it almost seems like magic for a while, then gains stop and usually things start to go backwards. Ive seen that scenario play out lots with guys switching to a HIT type plan, they swear its the golden truth and magical in providing progress. Whats really happening is its a a GREAT way to deload, pushing intensity so gains continue throughout the deload, but a massive drop in volume and frequency.
Once supercompensation is done, and the actual gains from their previous training have come through, coupled with the peaking type effect those low freqency/low volume/high intensity programs provide, lifts, gpp levels, etc., start to slide.
Im not saying I dislike Woodhouses methods, and its nice to have some trains flying in from both sides of the high/low frequency issue, but I do think people make up their mind too quickly about whats happening with that type of program, and why its happening. Most of those gains are often made in their previous training cycle, not the peaking/deload program that allows those gains time to simply be realized.
So that you have some info from two sides of that coin, here is one of the guys who didnt feel like that set up worked well for him.
I am sure there is no scientific backing to Broz' claims. But I find the reasoning somewhat plausible. The technical execution becoming more staple when doing a movement A LOT certainly makes sense as well. But no matter the mechanism, it is certainly true that via very high frequency the training intensity HAS to be lower compared to what it could be when training in a rested state.
If we would assume for a second that higher intensity increases the risk for injury and higher volume makes for more opportunities for an incident to happen, albeit not increasing risk via an additional mechanism, then high frequency training would have you train at safer weights while still providing a very potent training stress. This look at things puts the Bulgarian method, that gets critiqued in the article, in somewhat of a different light. It also leads to the question what the training percentages in the article actually mean: What is 80% of 1rm? 1rm of that particular day? Training 1rm? Competition 1rm? And did every writer always mean the same thing with those?
Good point, I would say that the Bulgarian(ish) approach could actually be even less risky, due to the reasons you listed, and also the very frequent "practice".
Its kind of funny when people react to this type of training as "harder" and "insane" etc. Imo, its actually easier, and a lot less draining than many other set ups. The use of the word "max" is partially to blame. Ive mentioned it before, but if you look at most of the a.b.g. videos, theyre not showing a grinding, screaming, true MAX, MOST of the time. Its more of a routine, heavyish lift, that looks like it could be repeated if need be.
There is a coach named David Woodhouse, who has recently pushed his program nicknamed the "syyyystem", that entails lifting only 2 x a week, and VERY low volume on those days. It entails front squatting to a MAX, along with doing the classic lifts in a similar fashion. This would entail more of a "real" max, and here is an example of one of his guys on a "max" front squat in one of their sessions.
It would be more accurate, to say woodhouse has his guys going for a personal best each session, and the a.b.g. guys are going to a daily "heavy single based on autoregulation". When training that frequently, the autoregulation will happen to some degree regardless of desire or will power to lift past a certain point.
I was reading earlier an interesting programming thread on Glenns forum where some of this is discussed and found some of the experiences to follow along with the same line of reasoning.
I would be interested to know people's opinions about John Broz' statement, that very high volume protects from injuries because the ever present fatigue hinders the body from using intensities where such injuries are likely to occur.
This is obviously in respect to weight training, not throwing a baseball etc. But that is a perspective that stands in large contrast to the points made in the article.
I think this position, volume as the main predictor of injury, can only be argued for when there is a minimum intensity requirement. To effectively train there certainly is. But regarding the bench press example one could certainly ask whether an injury had occurred, when 395 lbs were used for 5x5. I think it is less likely. So my counter-argument would be that injury risk is best predicted by an interaction of volume x intensity - much more so then one of those alone (which again leads to the author's point of view and the real questions: how much intensity is required to make progress and at which intensity can efficiency be maximized?)
On a side note: Volume as a predictor of injury could also have nothing to do with improper programming, but simple statistics. If there was a fixed injury risk of 0,1% per repetition at a given intensity, then doing more repetitions would increase the likelihood of an injury. But NOT because of fatigue and improper mechanics, but just because there are more opportunities for the incident to occur. The injury risk of 0,1% could still remain the same and injury could even happen when a heavy single is programmed (although less likely). The take-away message is that injury cannot ever be ruled out and not every injury is due to improper programming.
I dont know if there is much *or any* scientific backing to what broz is claiming, but if he thinks that from years of doing his program his way, then I would think there definitely may be some merit to the idea. Even if the reasoning behind WHY it works is different, eg. lifting a heavy weight more frequently actually makes you better "practiced" at lifting that weight, hence the less likely form breakdown, etc.
I agree with you on your analysis of the rest of that, though the comment posted was in context of his problem with the max effort method, which would entail only ONE set of 405, and that set would in that context in fact be less likely to cause injury.
There is also no real PROOF that working up to one heavy set is actually more draining on the cns than doing something like 5 x 8, only speculation from what Ive seen. In my personal experience I would say the days when working up to a low(ish) rep max, compared to the days with more volume via "bodybuilding" type schemes are actually LESS cns draining, and those days can potentiate things like sprints, jumps, etc, much more effectively.
In fact, thats what many program those days via the max effort method for, stimulation, not annihilation of the cns. The higher rep range work at a lower intensity is programmed as a hypertrophy stimulus primarily, and athletic events need to be spaced further apart from these days, as theyre actually MORE draining.
In the long run, progression of LOAD over time is king, however you choose to get there remains trivial as there is more than one way to skin a cat.
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sick!