Dr Mel Siff Blog

We will all have tried to walk as fast as possible without actually running
and discovered that each of us reaches a certain limit speed. This walk-run
transition phenomenon has been studied in biomechanics for many years, but
it has not been extrapolated to the world of similar transitions involving
other movements.

Let us examine the possibility of doing so in the world of strength and
sports training. First we need to recall the process known as
co-contraction, which involves so-called agonistic and antagonistic muscles
acting throughout a given movement to control the movement pattern and
characteristics. In fact, some of you who have been discussing the
interaction of quadriceps and hamstrings have been alluding to this process.

However, this process cannot take place in the same way under all conditions.
In particular, if a movement is explosive or ballistic, this might involve
the ‘agonistic’ muscles (or ‘prime movers’) in contracting powerfully during
the earliest stages of the action and projecting the limb towards its end
point. The ‘antagonistic’ muscles have to stay out of the action for most of
the time because if they were activated, they would stop the movement or
cause muscle rupture. Thus, they only ‘kick in’ towards the end of the
movement to limit joint range and prevent dislocation.

In other words, there are two classes of movement: cocontractive and
ballistic. If one is to reduce HIT and ‘Superslow’ training to basics, then
it may be seen that these schools of training thought support the former and
denounce the latter, in clear contradiction of the fact that a considerable
amount of animal movement involves ballistic action for enhanced efficiency,
energy conservation, speed of action and safety. The EMG aspects of these
different types of movement are discussed in Basmajian (“Muscles Alive”).

Now let us return to the walk-run situation. Here we will note that walking
relies heavily on cocontraction, but when a certain transition locomotion
speed is exceeded, running takes over and ballistic action dominates. We
will observe the same situation arising in strength training. The faster you
try to execute a movement, the more the action has to implicate ballistic
processes, and the prestretch, neural facilitation and elastic energy
phenomena which underlie ballistic processes.

This is why it can be totally inappropriate and misleading to compare the
same exercise under different speeds (and accelerations) of movement. This
also yields clues as to the differences between ordinary fast movements
(‘plyometric drills’) and true ’shock’ method types of so-called
plyometrics, which we discussed some weeks ago.

If we apply this information to the ‘Romanian Deadlift’, we will now notice
that there are at least two different ways of executing this movement: one
with the bar starting from a static position below the knees and the other
from a ballistic, prestretched starting position in which the bar starts
above the knees and is ‘bounced’ below the knees to provide strong
’stretch-shortening’ activation.

If we compare the slowly executed conventional prone reverse hypers with the
variant used by Louie Simmons (the load is swung back and forth using
powerful ballistic action), we will appreciate that is comparing apples and
oranges. The ballistic form is more like sprint running and the
conventional slower form is more like strolling. If you wish to develop
explosive capabilities in the squat, clean pulls and snatch (and in
sprinting), then guess which form is more appropriate?

There are many more applications of this information on Slow-Fast Transitions
(such as the very simplistic bodybuilding concepts of temp counting and
training), but the above should suffice to enable you to apply this
information elsewhere for yourselves.

Dr Mel C Siff

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