coach,will your ‘best damn workout plan for natural lifters’ be helpful for strength building too? thanks in advance
Well, everything that leads to muscle growth will increase your strength to some extent. However when the muscle is gained through lighter methods the strength gains are not “immediate” because there will be little neurological improvements.
Both muscle mass and neurological efficiency are important for strength gains.
See it this way…
Muscle mass = your strength POTENTIAL
Neurological efficiency = how well you can use that potential
If I were to make an analogy, having a lot of muscle mass is like having a factory with lots of employees. “On paper” it should make the factory more productive. BUT if the employees don’t work/are lazy, if they don’t work together or if they fight against each other, they won’t live up to their potential and a smaller, better run factory can outproduce them. It’s the foreman’s job to make sure that the employees work to their full potential.
Same thing with strength.If you have lot of muscle mass but you are not good at making it work (muscle fiber recruitment), do quality and productive work (fiber firing rate) and work together (inter and intramuscular coordination) you will not be able to produce a lot of strength. That is the job of the nervous system to make the best use of your muscles.
To improve your nervous system’s capacity to direct your muscles to produce a lot of strength you must practice lifting heavy weights.
That’s why adding muscle via lighter training can make you stronger BUT you first must learn to use that muscle by doing a phase of heavy lifting.
That having been said, BDW does include some heavy lifting (normally one exercise per workout). Either in the form of rest/pause sets (in BDW 1 and BDW 2) or cluster sets (BDW 2).
However we’re not talking about maximum effort (90%+ weights). People have reported strength gains with BDW but of course these will not be equivalent to the amount of strength gained via a program that is geared toward limit strength development.
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thanks for explaining coach