Best of the Best of the Back



It was one of the best compliments I've ever received. The
year was 1989, and I was the only Canadian selected to work at the L.A.
Musclecamp, which was a huge deal back then. The experience changed
several lives in this industry, and launched a dozen careers, mine
included. Once I settled in to life in Southern California, I
started training regularly at Gold's Gym, but I didn't like it there.
Even though I trained at 5:30 AM, I found the atmosphere too much like
a party, and not conducive to my level of intensity and focus. I
decided to try World Gym, just down the street. I'd heard the stories,
but I wanted a change. I loved World Gym! No music, no chrome,
just the weights and the people coming and going, training hard, and of
course Arnold's private parking spot!
Eddie Guiliani, Joe Gold and assorted World Gym denizens, from a bygone era. The
first day I was there, I was greeted by the well-known and
always-smiling Ed Guiliani. He was very nice to me, and we were just in
the middle of a conversation, when Joe Gold came up to us, looked me
right in the eye and said, "You come to my gym, you drop my weights,
you leave, got it?" That was all he had to say that day. I saw
Joe again about a week later. He walked up to me and greeted me, his
attitude completely different from that first day. "You're that
Canadian guy from a couple days ago," he said. I started to respond but
he cut me off. "You know, kid, the best of the best train at my gym, and I gotta say that you've got about the best back that I've seen in here, in a long time. Keep it up." I think I just stood there with my jaw hanging down, saying "Wow, an actual compliment
from Joe Gold." That scene has stayed with me, vivid as ever, for
nearly twenty years. I'd found my home, and Eddie sealed the deal by
supplying me with the obligatory World Gym tanks and other attire. Fast
forward to now. A new era of training is upon us, yet in many ways
nothing has changed. I realized a long time ago that Innervation
Training went against the status quo, but the results have been
undeniable for nearly three decades. Our most recent success is two
class wins up here last weekend at the Canadian Nationals, and a pro
card for young Lou Joseph.
Scott Abel's latest success story: Lou Joseph, new IFBB pro Innervation
Training is a viable bodybuilding methodology in an era where exercises
are mistaken for programs, and programs are mistaken for a methodology.
Both of these are based on faulty logic. A Chinese proverb
says, "To know the best way up the mountain, ask the man who travels it
every day." In terms of back training, I've been going up the mountain
most of my life, so in this article I'll show you the best way up, and
touch on some of the principles of Innervation Training along the way.
The mountain

Muscular Skeletal Bias Researchers
in the strength game who fail to acknowledge the neurological component
to training adaptation can often miss important variables, or use them
within a context that's illogical in the grand scheme. One example is "exercise bias." There's currently a bias toward specific movements as the
key exercises for development. The best thing that can be said of this
bias is that it doesn't work on an individual basis. The worst thing
that can be said is that it misses the point entirely. A
young lad recently wrote to me that he couldn't do a single chin-up.
When I asked why he wanted a program to make him better at chins, he
said that he wanted to build his back. I told him that in his case, his
back development did not depend on his ability to do chins. My advice
was to stop wasting valuable gym time in a futile attempt to master a
single movement, and move on to a more appropriate and viable program.
Unless
you're being tested on how many chins you can do, there's no reason to
consider it a priority in your development. Your precious gym time is
better served doing other movements to which your physique will be more
responsive. Responsiveness is a neurological biofeedback mechanism of
great importance to the training protocol.

Some Principles to Innervation Training
Neural Adaptations The following are well-recognized mechanisms of neural adaptations to training:
1.
Increased agonist activation. This means becoming more efficient at
recruiting the largest motor unit thresholds and increasing firing
rates, within targeted agonists.
2. Selective
recruitment of motor units within agonists. Specifically, rotation of
motor units and PMS (pre-movement silence) are important neural
adaptations in advanced trainees, indicative of this adaptive response.
3.
Selective activation of agonists within a muscle group. Staying with
the right exercises produces a neural response that I call "performance
mastery," which is a good thing. This shouldn't be confused with
habituation, which occurs when the same exercise is done in the same
way, for the same reps, in the same sequence, all the time. This would
be a bad thing. These are quite general. There are other
factors, such as increased firing frequency, motor unit
synchronization, altering recruitment, reflex potentiation, cross
education, and co-contraction of antagonists, which are more applicable
to sports performance than to target training for bodybuilding
purposes. The picture gets cloudier when we consider many
other studies yielding results that go against the grain of modern
training approaches. Here are a few key points:

Excitation Thresholds The
biggest factor missed by most experts is the area of excitation
thresholds of motor units and recruitment patterns. The fact is that
motor units with lower excitation thresholds will be preferentially
activated in a given movement, regardless of the intended targeted
muscles. This goes beyond what most experts address in explaining weak
muscles, unresponsive muscles, and the importance of exercises
selection. Most people with a bodypart that's unresponsive to
training usually have a highly responsive bodypart right next to it.
Even though the trainee is targeting one area, the more neurologically
dominant and responsive muscle takes on most of the work. The more
responsive muscles have lower excitation thresholds, and will therefore
act first. This is one reason you should exhaust your best body parts
early in training so they'll be less likely to "take over" the work
later on. According to Paton and Brown, the nervous system
has a marked ability to selectively activate segments of a muscle
preferentially over the targeted intention. Their research clearly
showed that angle of contraction, and joint angle, is more important
than intensity to recruiting the segments of a muscle belly targeted in
activity:
"... in the same study of latissimus
segmented contribution to contraction at both 0 degrees, and 90 degrees
abducted position of the shoulder, an increase in the level of
contraction from 20% MVC to 70% MVC decreased the contribution of
segment 1 latissimus and increased contribution of [the belly of the
muscle]." (1995:306)
Different recruitment
patterns are related more to central command (CNS) than sensory
feedback (afferent neuronal system). "The recruitment thresholds of
motor units of a muscle active in a movement may also be affected by
changes in joint angle." (Tax et al 1989, Van Zulen et al 1988, Paton
and Brown 1995, Romeny et al 1982, 1984) What all of this
suggests is that angle of contraction and exercise order are far more
important than rep ranges and load variance.

Back Training The
first mistake most trainees make and coaches ignore is that the
latissimus, like any other muscle group, receives the most overload
when the fibers are stretched with resistance. The reason so
many people lack back development is that they don't know how to put
this in to action. Whatever back movement you are doing, you must move
counter to the movement of the weight. This means that leaning into
back movements is a good thing, and leaning away is a bad thing.

Proper Rowing Technique As
important as all the variations of the row are to back development,
it's sad that most trainees don't have a clue how to row properly. Even
seemingly small mistakes invite other muscles to take over, negating
the row's benefit for your back. Consider, for example, the
"Yates row," a 45-degree bent row popularized in the 1990s by Dorian
Yates. Of course Dorian was a great champion, but this exercise was a
mistake. Remember that range and plane of motion is everything.
In that 45-degree angle, there's far too much trunk support to
contraction base. So while you can row more weight this way (and be
that much more impressed with yourself), your lats will not receive
optimal overload.
Yates: great big back