It’s not about the speed of movement but the sequential recruitment of the muscle fibers.
They’ll probably get to the same strength but one of them will require more time and take on more injury risk.
Most bodybuilders complain about shoulder pain. They almost all have strained a shoulder and it just lingers in pain.
Your mind is always a limiting factor even with explosive reps. The number you choose is influenced by your unconscious mind.
One example that comes to mind is Dorian Yates. He’s one of the best bodybuilders and he did high intensity training. But he did the reps too fast. He tore his bicep because of it.
But Oly lifters don't continually complain about injuries. Kettlebell people often say it fixed lingering issues from other training styles. Both lift at a concentric speed that makes the fastest bodybuilder look like a crawl.
A better explanation is that the volume to get into fatigue to get to effective reps causes those issues. Traditional bodybuilders do even more pre fatigue volume than HIT style.
I'll also add that those "nagging" injuries are usually connective tissue not muscle. Steroids grow the muscles but not connective tissue which causes it to fall behind and out of balance with muscle increasing the risk of injury. That is going to skew the odds of those types of injury in bodybuilders.
A friend of mine trains “traditionally” and has torn his acl and at least partially torn his shoulder. But he’s not on steroids. I actually don’t know anyone on steroids but most of the people I know who train have nagging shoulder and neck pain. I’ve heard conversations between people that train who talk about a time when they strained their neck/shoulder and how it’s never been the same since. I remember having that same pain myself when I used to train “traditionally” about 10 years ago. There are tons of memes about it. It’s not a thing that only people on steroids experience.
The point is, you can train explosively and get good results. Just understand that you are at increased risk for injury.
Regarding recovery, it’s based on genetics, nutrition, and rest. If you are getting the exact same amount of rest, and eating the same diet when training both ways, but still feel like you have more energy and strength during your BJJ sessions after training explosively, then the most rational explanation I can think of is that you still have some muscle fibers which haven’t been fatigued. That’s why I wonder if you are doing it correctly. Do you track reps and time under load?
Traditional body building or power lifting isn't what I'm talking about. Did stronglifts as a n00b too. Terrible pain all the time within just a couple months and no performance benefit outside of the weight room. Doubled my deadlift but stairs weren't any easier.
Weight and reps tracked. TUT not tracked, looking at it more from the effective reps angle. If I'm failing to train some of the fibers why am I seeing gains on the mats rolling and in the mirror in just a couple weeks despite having been training for months and stalled before?
I think TUT is most important to track but they're all important and help you form a big picture of your progress. I look at my reps and TUT from the previous week and try to improve both. Sometimes I fail with fewer reps but more TUT. This usually indicates that I was moving too fast the week before. Sometimes both improve which is as close to an objective indicator of growth that I can find without spending tons of money measuring muscle volume. Other times both are weaker which forces me to reevaluate what is going on. Did I get enough sleep? Did my body fully recover? Am I distracted? Am I being lazy? It's useful data that can be easily tracked with a stopwatch. You can buy one and keep it around your neck. Start it and then begin your exercise. Stop it after you finish. Write down the weight, time, and reps. Monitor your progress over time. If you just base your progress on how you feel and look, it can be misleading. Some people look more muscular after they lean out but actually have less strength when they are bulky. It could be that you were getting stronger but you didn't get enough rest to fully experience that strength. I sometimes give myself 2 weeks rest just to be sure. You can experiment this yourself. Take two weeks off from training and just see if you feel stronger doing BJJ. If you do feel stronger, and you weren't training, what would be the rational explanation? We don't really have a signaling mechanism in our bodies that tell us when we have fully recovered.
Morning resting heart rate and heart rate variability right after waking up for cardio system.
Grip strength for central nervous system.
Bar velocity at a fixed weight for muscles.
Those 3 systems are capable of separate independent stress and recovery cycles and need to be individually monitored.
You say more breaks but I'm training more now because I'm doing a kettlebell day in addition to my barbell day. It doesn't take long but it is hard as hell.
Do you know what can help your nervous system recover?
All I've found is sleep and other "remove all stress of any kind for a while" approaches. I like to lay on an accupressure mat listening to relaxing or healing binaural beats on my noise cancelling headphones and do mindful progressive muscle relaxation.
Idk what oly lifters are. Regarding kettlebell exercises, I imagine these don’t get as heavy as other exercises like squats and bench press exercises.
I don’t think it’s something you can just isolate to one variable. More weight requires less volume. Less weight requires more volume. You can curl a 5 pound dumbbell with a ton of volume without hurting yourself.
Olympic lifters. Injuries there predominantly come from mistakes not those nagging style injuries.
Disagree on the 5lb dumbell thing. Carpal tunnel is a repetitive stress injury from even less weight than that.
Weight vs Volume is kind of the entire thing I'm disputing. These aren't the only variables effecting muscle force, there is also velocity. By turning up velocity you can get the same force on your muscles safely away from 1rm risks without the volume repetitive stress injury risks on the other side.
Go check out Phil Daru. Jacked dude who has trained a laundry list of champion athletes. He usually programs what he calls 30x0 rep timing meaning 3 eccentric 0 pause explosive concentric 0 pause. Usually 2-3 sets of 3-8 reps. At those numbers form breakdowns leading to injuries are far less of a risk than a 20 rep set to failure.
What kind of mistakes?
I have struggled with tendinitis in my hands for over 6 years now and the one thing that helped me reduce the pain was actually doing wrist curls to failure. I can’t explain how that makes sense but it was the same thing with my lower back pain. I had it for years. Pinched a nerve in my spine about 10 years ago and my lower back would randomly flare up. I tried stretching and all kinds of things. It wasn’t until I started doing deadlifts that the pain went away. My best guess as to why is that repetitive movements like mouse clicking fatigue your muscles but don’t demand an increase in strength. But wrist curls demand an increase in strength so doing the mouse clicking becomes easier. That would also explain why the pain didn’t completely go away after just one exercise. The pain subsided over time as my strength improved.
What is more likely to injure you? 1000 slow curls of a 5 pound dumbbell or 1000 explosive curls of a 5 pound dumbbell?
I think there’s a balance. That’s why I aim to fail between 10 and 18 reps and between 1 to 2 minutes. If I’m able to do 30 reps then my slow twitch muscle fibers will likely recover before I begin to recruit the fast twitch muscle fibers. Slow twitch muscle fibers recover pretty fast because they’re the muscles needed to help you function at a basic level. Think of how people are still able to walk after training their calves but running is difficult. We evolved into high endurance animals. Gorillas have a much higher proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers. That’s why they’re so powerful and have incredible explosive strength but they fatigue quickly. As a result, they spend most of their time lounging around and resting. High intensity training is kind of a hack because we’re trying to fatigue everything. But if you just jump into explosive training, the fast twitch muscle fibers will fatigue and fail before the slow. So like I said before, my best guess is that you’re able to perform better in BJJ because you still have some energy left to use with the slow twitch muscle fibers and probably some of the intermediate ones too. And if that works for you it’s probably fine assuming you’re aware of the injury risk. The fast twitch muscle fibers are the largest so you’ll grow and your baseline explosive strength will get stronger too.
I looked up Daru but there are a lot of videos. Anything specific you want me to see? He seems to be a useful resource for what your goals are so I’d say it’s still worth trying out his methods. But just keep in mind the nature of our muscle fibers. We tend to underestimate how much time we need to recover.
Mistakes meaning technique failures because they are doing highly technical lifts.
Perfect example with walking after training. If I'm not hitting both fiber types why do I dread stairs after training? My wife last barbell day "why are you walking like that?"
As a young man I once sat in my car for 30 minutes after a workout because I couldn't work the clutch and needed that time to recover my control of my legs.
Most things I read say muscle protein synthesis is back to baseline in 48 to 72 hours. What is still recovering if you aren't putting above baseline levels of protein into your muscles?
I'd argue 1000 of anything done any way is asking for an injury. That's kind of my central point. Stop using fatigue to get near failure for effective reps and use intensity instead. That way rep 1 is effective as a growth stimulus. No more junk reps piling on stress and wear and tear you need to recover from in addition to the growth in muscle.
