elitefts™ Sunday Edition
Minimalism in training has gone too far. For the last three to five years, the trend in the strength world has been toward streamlining training and nixing everything except for a few main lifts. I certainly think that it’s an improvement over endless stability ball and Bosu exercises, but minimalism, when taken to an extreme, can be counterproductive. It seems like we all forgot that muscles move weight. Sure, technique is important and of course there should be a priority on ingraining proper motor patterns, but at the end of the day, patterns don’t move weight. Muscles do. Now, there are plenty of neural changes that occur to improve strength before muscle mass becomes the primary issue. That’s the piece of this discussion that the minimalists have 100 percent correct.
Improved synchronicity of motor unit recruitment, improved coordination of muscles in a motor pattern, decreased activation of antagonistic muscles, improved activation of synergist muscles, improved rate coding (how quickly your nervous system can make a muscle fiber fire many times), and decreased inhibition of the prime moves all contribute to moving more weight. To reap all those benefits, you have to practice a pattern. This is why when you first start lifting, you may become 20–30 percent stronger on all your key lifts very quickly without getting much bigger. However, once those neural gains start slowing down, the only thing to do is get your muscles bigger. Sure, you could keep trying to eke out incremental gains by practicing the lift much more often or finding a few minor energy leaks in your form, but to see big gains again, there isn't any way around it—you have to grow. You can tinker with a four-cylinder engine all you want to get more horsepower out of it, but drop an eight-cylinder under the hood and it’s a whole new ball game.
Another drawback with a purely minimalistic approach to training is that the big lifts alone don’t evenly develop all the muscles involved. This is one of Louie's gems that many people forget in the rest of the Westside approach. For example, take the deadlift. If you consistently miss deadlifts at knee height, the culprit is probably weak hamstrings that can’t pull hard enough when your hips are still a long way behind the bar. Slight flexion of your T-spine can help you lift more by shortening the levers to compensate for your weak hamstrings, but it’s also going to exacerbate the strength difference between your strong upper back and your lagging hamstrings. Having a good coach watching and cuing every rep may help solve this problem, but it’ll go unnoticed if you’re flying solo. Adding in isolation work for your lagging muscle groups helps fix this problem. Once you fix the weakest link of the chain, you can move more weight in those big lifts that you’re concerned about.
In my opinion, isolation work actually improves motor learning, so beginners can master a motor pattern in fewer reps than simply practicing the pattern itself. By having a beginner do isolation work, he learns to feel his individual muscles working and contracting. With that new found awareness, he can better integrate those muscles into a cohesive motor pattern. I’ll admit that this is more bro-science than pro-science, but it reflects my experience very strongly. If you teach someone to squat by only squatting, he may be able to get his body in the right position, but, for example, he may be relying too much on his quads to get the bar moving in the hole rather than sharing the load with his glutes, hamstrings, and adductors as well. How better to teach someone to use his hamstrings than with leg curls and Romanian deadlifts? How better to teach glute engagement than with hip thrusts? Once that awareness is developed it can be more readily integrated into more complex motor patterns.
I’m not saying that hamstring curls and hip thrusts are better than squats. I’m saying that squats in addition to isolation work are potentially better than squats alone. Although you may master the motor pattern in six months with a minimalist approach rather than a year using a more traditional approach, it may only take 2000 reps with the traditional approach as opposed to 3000 with the minimalist approach. By more evenly distributing training stress toward more isolation work and away from solely the big three, you’re also sparing your body a lot of wear and tear.
Finally, isolation work allows you to simply add in more volume and achieve a greater hypertrophy stimulus than you can get with only heavy compound lifts. But hypertrophy-specific isolation work is just for bodybuilders, right? Nothing could be further from the truth. In a study on elite level powerlifters (1), researchers found that muscle thickness of major muscle groups could very accurately predict powerlifting performance (for those of you who like statistics as much as I do, many of the muscles examined had correlation values of 0.8 or higher and some exceeded 0.9). These are guys at the top level of the sport who have probably maxed out the neural factors contributing to performance. At that point, domination is predicted by degree of "swole." Look back through the routines of the great powerlifters of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. You’ll see curls, triceps extensions, delt raises, leg curls and extensions, and pec flyes aplenty.
So what’s the verdict here? Am I totally anti-minimalism? Well, not exactly. I’m pro-optimization. At the end of the day, lifting heavy stuff is about maximizing neural factors and muscular factors. The minimalist approach substantially shortens the learning curve for neural factors. I won’t argue that point for a moment. But it neglects the muscular factors. So when you finally exhaust your neural gains, you’ll have a lot of imbalances to fix before you can start forging ahead again. Although possibly a slightly slower track of success, adding in some old-fashioned bodybuilding work develops both the neural and muscular aspects simultaneously, leading to smoother sailing over the long term.
References
Brechue WF, Abe T (2002) “The role of FFM accumulation and skeletal muscle architecture in powerlifting performance.” Eur J Appl Physiol 86(4):327–36.