For those who don't know every type of these muscular fibers, here is a simple description:
Fast muscular fibers - can be tired quickly and have a great potential for height and strength.
Slow muscular fibers - can be tired slowly and have no potential for growth; however they can be more persistence.
Medium muscular fibers - have a medium-sized potential for growth and quite good persistence. Every single muscular group has different fibers.
How can you find out in which muscular group are you?
There are many exact methods. Here is one of the methods which is not complicated at all.
- 1.) We choose an exercise for single muscular group (for example: for front part of our legs we choose extension; for biceps we choose concentration bend ...)
- 2.) We do one serial of our exercise just for warming with approximately 30 percent of our weight. Don't warm up too intensely, because one part of our muscular fiber can get tired really fast. Therefore results would be all wrong. When these exercises are right, you don't need to warm up as much as you might have thought.
- 3.) You are now ready for your first exercise. We do this exercise as long as the time below our weight is longer from 60 seconds. We must repeat it so the repetition time will be always the same. We lift our body in 5 seconds and hold it for about a second, than let go in 5 seconds. We hold our body for a second also in lower position, yet we never relax our muscles. Be careful that you don't push it to hard. If you want correct results, you have to do this exercise precisely as we instructed. We measure our time of this exercise until our muscles can't handle it anymore (for example: when you can't repeat the whole exercise again). Do not cheat or use any other kind of assistance.
- 4.) After a complete exercise we rest for about 3 minutes. Meanwhile we don't stretch (we do the stretching after our training).
- 5.) After 3 minutes we do the whole exercise again.
- 6.) Now we can calculate percent of our muscular fibers in the group. We do it like this: If the time in second set is smaller for at least 50% below our weight than in first set, it means there are mostly fast muscular fibers in our muscular group. If the time in second set is smaller only for 15% or less, or it is even bigger than in first set, it means there are mostly slow muscular fibers in our muscular group. Every results in between are representing mixed muscular fibers.
- 7.) On base of given results we can define which is the optimal time below our weight in single sets for our muscular group.
The same goes for:
- Fast muscular fibers: one set should be from 30 to 45 seconds long; you should do small number of sets (1 till 2) and a tiny bit of warm-up.
- Slow muscular fibers: one set should be from 90 to120 seconds long; you should do from 4 to 5 sets. Warming can be longer.
- Medium muscular fibers: one set should be from 60 to 75 seconds long; you should do from 2 to 4 sets.
In forming of this training we must pay attention to a structure of muscular fibers in muscular groups, which cooperate with the exercise at the same time.
For example: bench press. Here are the main parts: chest, triceps and shoulders. Granted that chest contains mixed muscular fibers and triceps contain mostly fast muscular fibers. Though chest would progress the most, if we do an exercise from 60 to 75 seconds, the triceps would present a problem. They would be tired after approximately 40 seconds. The main cause for that would be in large quantities of fast fibers which can be found in triceps. This means that triceps are more stimulating than chests.
Solution of this problem lays in the exercise introduction which isolates chest. That is why we do this exercise first and than we do the bench press. With this we reach our goal, which is: to tire chest first, so triceps can remain fresh. We call this super series and it is similar for other muscular groups.
Techniques for increased intensity of training:
We use these techniques only now and then, so there can't be any problems. Here are some of the techniques:
- Rest pause technique - we choose weight which will give us a bit shorter time under weight, than the optimal time, considering muscular fibers structure. We do this technique until our muscles can't handle it anymore. After, we relax for about 10 minutes, than we do everything again for a couple of times.
- Partly repetition - we do the exercise until our muscles can't do the whole exercise again. Than we continue it in the easiest part of repetition.
- Forced repetition - when we can't do the whole exercise, we can use our training partners help.
- Negative repetition - when we can't do the whole exercise, we use our training partner to lift our weights in positive part. Meanwhile we do the negative part alone. The muscle is so much stronger in the negative part because there is a lot of friction in the positive part. Therefore we can use more gravity in the negative part.
Studies have revealed that the negative part is more important for stimulation of growth because of many micro injuries of muscular fibers.
We use these techniques rarely, especially the negative part. When we exaggerate with these exercises, it can come to over-trained body. We use every single technique only when we can't do this repetition with our weight.
