Athletic Principle #2 Tension Training OVER Strength Training
A tension-centered approach to athletic training that prioritizes connective tissue over muscle strength. The presenter explains how load, speed, and length create tissue adaptations, using examples like Nordics and sissy squats, and critiques conventional strength programming in favor of progressive tension engineering.
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Athletic range. Today we're talking about tension. Okay. So it's really important to understand this concept of tension. It kind of puts to bed, it puts to rest. The idea of static stretching being different to loaded stretching, it also challenges the idea of strength training itself versus human activity. Everything is, in fact tension training, strength training. And any position where the muscle is lengthened could be considered tension training. It can be considered stretching. The really arbitrary differentiations between short and long duration stretches and how the load is created. So this understanding will help you again, to be able to program more effectively and just understand what we're doing with strength training. I believe we have been in the dark ages strength training, and we need to fall in line with human engineering and natural law to get better results. Okay, so why is tension important? We should be looking at the tension of the exercise as well as the muscle contribution, the muscle position in producing force. And can we quantify the tension that is being created to have extremely high tension exercises and extremely low tension exercises extremely know when and how to apply those different movements. Okay, so we know that if we strike this sword, then there's going to be an extreme amount of force, you know, exerted into the metal. If we drop the light bulb from the height of the shoulder, then we would expect it to break where if it's dropped from 1 millimeter, we wouldn't expect it to break. So this is how we should also look at what our strength training is doing and consider the role of speed as being a key factor and probably more important than load when we're considering the adaptations of connective tissue. All right, so you have to lower a piano slowly because the load has a lot of potential. If it's dropped from a height, if you hit a rock, then it's going to break, whereas if you squeeze a rock, nothing is going to happen to it. So using impact and high force is going to create much bigger tissue adaptations. Connective tissue adaptations. Right. So humans are naturally connective tissue. Dominant tendons and ligaments are stronger than our muscles. And our strength training should. It should continue to develop that quality. We don't want to undo that quality by training muscular dominance. We're wired to preserve our structural integrity. So tendons and ligaments will always be a limitation on the amount of force that our body will deal with. And we'll be naturally down regulating force production or reception based on the tension that our tendons and ligaments are happy to deal with. So quality of tension makes matters most. Connective tissues, like muscles, are highly trainable and adaptable so we need to be thinking about the adaptations that are going to be caused in the connective tissue as well as in the muscles. We've had a massively muscle centric model of strength, and that's just not how the body is designed, it's not how it works. So we have to look at the qualities of the tension and that's going to determine the adaptations that we're going to get. So strength training must build connective tissue dominance to be in harmony with natural law and human engineering, animal engineering. You can easily see that connective tissues are stronger and they have to be dominant to the muscles. Okay, so progressive tension engineering. This is why the ATG system is getting results that other systems can't get. Because we're able to strength train without creating a lot of tension, and then we're able to strength train with a lot of tension. Right. So moving along that continuum is really the special source, the secret of the ATG system where it breaks away from conventional strength training by progressing range of motion, starting with concentric dominant movements, moving into high tension. Shorter movements, longer range, longer range, and then that actually prepares us to be able to run a jump. Oftentimes just by regaining circulation and strength. In parts one and two, people already notice that they can return to explosive exercises based on those changes, and low intensity tensioning exercises. Whether you call it stretching, whether you call it strength training, it doesn't really matter what you're calling it. But if the tissues are under tension in those end positions, then we cause adaptations that can also help to regain this ability to move. So quality of tension matters. Connective tissue tension versus muscular tension. Connective tissue tension is going to be really high in this and this guy's going to bench press, so his muscular tension is going to be really high. This is not going to cause a lot of muscle hypertrophy. This is going to cause more muscle hypertrophy. Therefore, muscular tension is going to create muscle size. Connective tissue tension is going to create connective tissue dominance. So the more an exercise is like this guy, slowly, slowly, slowly lowering away, not going through full range of motion, the more it's going to be developing the muscles and creating potential weakness around the connective tissues. Okay, so quality of tension rather than, you know, there's a bit of, you know, people talk about time under tension. Time under tension is really not a very valuable term in the absence of, okay, yeah, what weight is being used, what tempo is being used? Okay, yeah. If given a certain tempo and given a certain load, then yeah, cool. If the speed's the same, but we really need to be looking at the training effect of the tension. Okay, so the volume of tension is the time times by the quality of tension. Right. So I'm going to give you an example here. Someone doing back somersaults. If you've learned to do a back somersault, you might realize that even with extremely low time under tension, the quality of the tension is very high because you're getting to an outer range or a lengthened range in the muscle that you might not have had a lot of time in before. And producing a lot of force in that position. And therefore very low time can create an extreme volume of tension and therefore training stimulus. Another example might be a dunker. Someone who's great at dunking will jump off that one foot. They'll have a very low time under tension, but there'll be extreme high quality of tension and therefore there'd be a big training effect. So you'll hear Ben speaking about quality dunkers having extremely strong calves. There's no way around that. You know, they have to have that. And so strength training we need to look at. Okay, well, is this developing the muscle, is this developing the connective tissue? And then what else is the person doing that's going to develop those tissues? So the strength, the quality of the tension comes down to load, speed, connective tissue length. Okay, so we want to consider load. We are going to consider load, but speed is actually more of a driver in how much tension is there. Right. If we push this hammer against the sword, if the sword is the tendon and the hammer is the movement, if we push it against this, there's going to be no impact on the metal, there's going to be no change in the metal. Whereas when speed is very high, then that's going to have an impact. If the connective tissue is already under tension, then that's going to have a massive impact. If we consider the back somersault example, it's the fact of the body being in sort of a back bridge position when the knees are brought to the chest. Extremely explosive movement of the abs, total time and attention, very low muscle growth, Muscle soreness adaptation is going to be higher. And we may find that the adaptations are more towards connective tissue rather than muscles being laid down. But there'll always be a contribution of both of those, and it's probably those connective tissue adaptations. If the muscle change in response to that soreness is more connective tissue dominant, then that I think will turn out to be what we really want. And that might be the discussion around fascicle length and those sorts of things. Okay, so quality, tension, speed is the big one, right? The speed that we're receiving force with is going to be the biggest impact on the quality of the tension. So then we want to look at, in terms of quality tension, we want to look at length. Okay. So the ability to get, you'll see Ben is getting faster and faster at going into this kot squat position, the sissy squat. Being able to get into that position faster and faster shows the increasing strength and increasing tissue tolerance. So it's one thing to be able to do a very slow RDL with 100 kilos, it's another thing to be able to do a very fast RD IDL with 100 kilos. So it's the length and the speed together which shows how healthy it is. So often when people are doing their first Kat squat, they'll be going very, very slowly down into that position because one, they don't have the skill, but two, often they're getting feedback from the connective tissue. If you've tried the Smith curls, I've done the Smith curls, lying bicep curls, there's different variations to the snatch curl. You'll find that generally people will initially go very, very slowly with those move because there's so much tension in the system. They're getting some pain feedback. It's not really pain, it's just tension because it's bilateral, it's not localized. There's no swelling or soreness that comes from it after, unless it's done for really high reps. And so you're going to go very slowly with those movements to start with. Once you can go fast in those movements, then the tissues will be much higher quality, they will have adapted. So the quality of the tension is what matters most. And Charles Poliquin spoke about this. This is part of the reason why weightlifters can look like this. If you have low body fat as a weightlifter, despite mostly working in the 1 to 5 rep range now, you might find, yeah, occasionally they may be doing some higher rep stuff, but there are definitely weightlifters who've stayed in the 1 to 5 rep range and built a lot of muscle, massive legs, et cetera. All right, so the reason why is because tension is the key thing and they're receiving massive loads at speed and therefore creating huge amounts of tension. So you see the difference in the Olympic lifter squat versus the power lifter squat. So their tissues are much more tolerant to force, to Tension than power lifter in general, even if the total weight is less. Okay, so Charles said for the advanced lifter, doing more than five reps is a waste of time as average intensity will be too low. And I've added in tension neural drive. Right. So against the heavy weight, you can produce a lot of neural drive and the weight won't go too fast. So you still have some time and you need the load to increase to drive the tension. But Charles is speaking about for a given tempo. All right, all right, so if we consider load adaptive tissue will not remodel or be damaged by low intensity, low tension strength training. Right. So there comes a time where someone's been strength training for a while, they can do sets of 50, but there's just not enough total tension being created to cause adaptation. I think this is also why you'll see a lot of experienced bodybuilders not using eccentric tempo is because they need that tension. Right? So they're letting the weight go down faster because they're getting a higher intensity eccentric contraction, they're getting more tension. By going faster, they may not be developing the full part of the strength curve. So rather than their solution, rather than going for low reps, the solution for most competitive bodybuilders is, is to have more speed on the way down and do higher reps. So in the end they end up getting the tension that they need to cause the adaptation and the damage that they need. And this is the same with forced reps and that sort of thing as well. Okay, so metabolic stress is not enough to drive maximal hypertrophy. And this is pretty clear in the research. So the metabolic stress component, this is also the case for clustered repetitions, for dense strength, for not going to failure. We're going to talk a lot more about that. And then neural drive and the neural battery. Now there is an exception here. Okay, so if we're going to say, okay, what's going on here with five reps? Why do people end up looking like this? Does he train in the 1 to 5 rep range? Well, no. Right. Is there a lot of metabolic stress there? Yes. But is there also a lot of speed? Is there a lot of tension in these exercises? I think that you'll find that that is one, one of the reason why there's a lot of injuries in CrossFit 2, why you get maximal hypertrophy. You know, you can question some of the top athletes about, you know, whether they're natural or not. It doesn't really matter. What is true is that the everyday person Going to their local CrossFit box is probably not using performance enhancing drugs. And oftentimes they will get to a significant level of natural hypertrophy while not using much one to five rep range training. They may use a little bit of it, but you'll find the majority of crossfitters do the majority of their training not in the 1 to 5 rep range. And you do find maximal hypertrophy. I think that is because we're getting this, especially the speed component. Okay, so there's super high tension exercises despite not having the load intensity. So you can see this is like a different way of looking at strength training where we used to look at, you know, is it over 90%, is that going to cause the strength adaptations or what about using a 60% load? And considering the connective tissue adaptation, the pull on the muscle, the damage that's being done, like in a back somersault, you know, like in your kipping, pull ups, etc. Extremely high tension. There's low total time on attention, but they're extremely high tension and then doing lots of repetitions. All right, so you see this with soccer players. Calf development, they tend to have good calf development relative to the amount of strength training that players will do. They'll have big calves because the calves are not necessarily doing a lot of long slow contractions, but they have the high force contractions. Arm wrestlers will be on the other end of the spectrum or for the upper body mechanics as well, blacksmiths. It's the total volume and quality of tension that matters most. So the tension can either be driven internally by how hard the muscles are contracting. Neural trove is developed by focusing on each repetition and by the total volume of repetitions. Right. So we're going to look more at neural drive and how important this is. This is the muscle and muscle is important. But we need to understand that an athlete must remain connective tissue dominant to be healthy. A human, you know, following human engineering, our natural design is to be connective tissue dominant, for the connective tissues to be stronger than the muscles. And modern strength training has shifted that balance. And that's one of the biggest reasons why strength training isn't creating the positive adaptations and the positive improvement in human ability that it could, would, should be if we understood this concept. Okay, so yes, we want to increase internally driven tension, muscle tension. That's what strength training does. Strength training will turn a terrible athlete into a great athlete in terms of the amount of force that they can produce. But it's a double edged sword where if 10, if connective tissue adaptation is not outpacing muscle adaptation. Ligaments and tendons aren't stronger than muscles. Then we're going to have injury, we're going to have positions that we're not strong in and that we're going to get damage done by that. So how much muscles, muscle signal, how much signal can you send to a muscle is really the key thing here. So as we get stronger, we get better at sending signal to the muscle and then the muscle itself is able to do more as it grows. So focus on each repetition and then the total number of repetitions. That's what's going to increase neural drive, same as learning. These are principles of learning. If you're able to really concentrate when you're playing the piano, then you're going to learn faster than if you're just getting a lot of repetitions done. But repetition is also required. Doesn't matter how well you concentrate, it's going to take a certain number of repetitions before you're great at playing the guitar. All right, so externally driven tension is going to be more connective tissue dominant. Okay. So if we let gravity play a bigger role, then the amount of tension is going to be determined by the size of the load, the height and acceleration, and the tissue length. Okay, so these drop catch rdls that you saw Ben doing last year, if you're a hardcore ATG fan, you know what I'm talking about. Depth, jumps, parkour, all these sorts of things. Whenever we drop and catch the weight, you'll see now the way guys are going at their Nordic curls, you'll see that there's more of a drop catch action happening. Ben's able to get to the bottom position faster, stop and come back up. So that create, creates a lot more tension which will create more, you know, fresh adaptation, adaptive stimulus. All right, so powerlifting, connective tissue tension. For power lifting, the weight rests on the bones, the muscle and the fascia, ligaments, cartilage, etc. So the amount of load that the bones and the fascia and the tendons and ligaments and the cartilage can handle also impact the lift together with the muscles. So it's all one system. The type of training that we do will bias towards whether it's more bone, tissue, more muscles, or more fascia, ligament, tendon that's going to be laid down bone and, well, bone is going to be more of that compressive load. So you can actually train for bone density by supporting super heavy loads in a way that doesn't cause much muscle or Fascia, tendon, ligament, cartilage adaptation. But yeah, it's all one system. So the shorter the tissue is, the better. And that's basically what the bench suit shows us, is it's like putting more fascia and making that fascia really, really tight. Right. So it's yet to be seen. You know, we can see Steffi Cohen as the most successful female powerlifter. She's able to do cissy squats, so she is demonstrating connective tissue length and the ability to deal with forces in those positions. And she's still crazy, crazy strong. I'm interested to see whether that can happen with power lifters, whether we can see, you know, human range in the shoulders, knees and hips as well as those massive numbers. I don't think it will happen, but it would be really interesting to see. I think that there is a role to play of this suit. Obviously we know the suits work, so guys are basically wearing their suits. So yeah, it's an interesting one. At some point though, there's a pain feedback mechanism that's going to decrease strength and muscle activation and all those sorts of things. So maybe Steffi Cohen has the secret to keeping her connective tissues healthy and staying pain free to be able to tolerate more volume, which gives her the advantage despite not wearing as much of a squatsuit, potentially in terms of tension in the system. Interesting questions to ponder, but yeah, as we get towards the end here, human engineering is based on connective tissue dominance and it's based on the ability to produce speed and power. Why then do we do strength training? We do strength training so that we have more of that winch muscular mechanism so that we're able to create more acceleration. The concentric component of the movement is concerned, is acceleration. This guy, to do these massive long jumps, he wants strength and force output in his quads. Now he's bouncing into it. But if he had to go from a standing position, bigger quads are going to help for that. So the more strength component there is in a sport, the more we need to have size. And size does have its part to play. Even if you look at Stefan Holm, you know, potentially the highest jumper in history compared to his height, compared to he has relatively big calves especially and decent sized quads. So all the protein has gone down there, limited protein in the upper body so that he doesn't have to lift as much up to throw it over the bar. But you still find that the tissues, those key force producing tissues and force receiving tissues are hypertrophied by the load. All right, so when we're choosing our exercises, we, we need to consider the tissue adaptations that are going to come with it. So length and speed progression needs to be considered along with mass progression. And this is really the secret source of atg. And what Ben has done, Ben Patrick has brought to the world is progressing length and not just focusing on mass progression. And that is the, you know, the huge thing, the biggest thing for connective tissue dominance and to cause connective tissue adaptation. All right, so here is the sequence. And this is what, when I saw this, I thought, yes, this guy has actually solved this. He's taken it a step further than Charles. I think Charles understood this with growing massive biceps that you needed to do spider curls, standing curls, and 45 degree curls for him. Ben took the range further and he took it to the lower body, which is what the world needed to see, especially for the knee. And now we're doing it also for the hamstring. We're doing it also for the quads, for the tibialis. Every muscle needs to be developed from this perspective, especially if there's an injury. Yes, you can avoid, you can ignore the human engineering and you can just say, I'm just going to strength train and I'm going to run and everything's going to be okay. But when it's not okay, you need the best. And the best is this. This is the new technology, the best way of understanding how tension can be used to create much more resilient humans. Right. So the sleds are concentric, only partial range movements. And then we progress to extremely high connective tissue tension, which will often create pain when where the connective tissue inserts to the bone for people who aren't adapted to it or if you do too much of it. And so obviously, as we're doing more of that and there's no pain anymore, then the tissues are able to go into those positions. The tissues have more ability to deal with force. You'll find that kids are able to handle these forces much better than adults. Okay. So we need this cascade of adaptation that we're getting from one to four, which we're seeing that it's increasing the ability for people to land and jump and receive high explosive tension forces. Okay. So able to deal with those strikes which are the highest impact. So we're going from short to long, short, concentric, only short with the eccentric mid long. And then eventually being able to deal with, at some stage in that equation, you're going to be able to deal with the faster loaded movements. Now we also Want to train that explosive loading, faster stuff as well, once or twice a week. They're super high tension exercises, but really it's all part of the same system. And if you deal with the super high tension positions, like landing, for example, landing in the kot position is going to be much more aggressive than landing in a quarter squat. Right. Because there's already that connective tissue tension. Now you can see that Ben is actually progressing towards that. He's able to land more and more in that kot squat type position or get to that position faster, which is basically progressing towards being able to do like a depth jump in that position. Yes. And you'll see that with like Georgian dancers and those sorts of people as well. Like their ability to be extremely explosive in those lengthened positions shows very well adapted connective tissues parkour as well. Right, so then if we take this to the hamstrings, we would go from like a lying or a standing hamstring curl, concentric only hamstring curl is basically well accomplished with the band because you can just let go and you don't have to slow it down. And so that would be like our concentric only hamstring inner range exercise would be like banded lying hamstring curl, which Ben has demonstrated recently. And we were talking about the need to add this into the system, the standing hamstring curl. Then with the monkey foot is another alternative, or with the machine, or you can just bias the inner range in your lying hamstring curl, etc. Using a lightweight or using partial range of motion, the Nordic curl. Then you'll see that most of the force, there's the initial whacker force in the bottom, which does bring into play that. That question of like, that's the highest force stuff is when there's like that impact force to get out of the bottom. And that's why a lot of people have had tenant issues with going too hard on the Nordics, because they're going strong eccentric into a somewhat lengthened position and then hitting out of the bottom. So in the longest position of the Nordic, producing an impact type force. And that's what causes tissues that aren't prepared to be strained. But you'll see that generally the sticking point in the Nordic you'll see is the hips are already, you know, there's 30 degrees or 45 degrees of tension, you know, of knee bend, then the RDL, you know, you're getting more and more tension as you go lower seated. Good morning. Can fit in there as well. It's a bit of a different position and depends on the tightness of the individual getting towards the slant board, rdl, the slant board Jefferson, again, depends on where you're tight. Exactly. With the Jefferson, whether the hamstrings are really getting hit by that or whether it's more so in the lower back. But as we progress outwards with these, we are going to be more tolerant to forces in sprinting. Exactly the same way as people become more tolerant to jumping and landing with this development on the quads, the same thing is going to be there for top speed with the hamstrings. It's the same mechanisms and it works in the same way and we should rehabilitate in the same direction. Okay. So because sprinting is so high force, you will find elite sprinters will generally be able to do nordics and high, you know, super high tension idls without having trained those movements. Because it's just force. It's just tension. Right. People say, I don't strength train. It doesn't, it doesn't matter. It's tension. What tension has been in the system. If you don't need more muscle output, if you don't need more of that, you know, winch type strength, then the ratcheting strength, then you don't necessarily need a lot more muscle training. But pretty much everyone wants more of that. Right. So then if we look at knee range going from the resting spot position. So the position that from. Yeah, from a deep squat. Okay. Then we can put more tension into the system by going into this kneeling squat. It's also going to bring in the tibialis anterior. But you can see there's going to be even more tension on the quads in the kneeling squat position that Ben is in here. And then human knee extension, you can see I'm almost into that position. And you can, you know, a lot of people are playing around with human knee extension at the moment. You can really see what's going on with the hips, the versus lower back. You can see where the curves are, where the tension is. We can progress the tension from even higher tension than the human knee extension to being a single leg bottom position of the knee extension. And then if we create bounces there, then that's gonna be higher tension again and that's gonna create more tissue adaptation and help us to be able to deal with more force in those outer range positions. And okay, so spending time and increasing tension in those end positions is what's going to create the adaptation that we want. All right, so yeah, you will. Success leaves clues. Right. Dunkers calves, doesn't matter whether they strength train or not. They're used to dealing with extreme tension and therefore they're able to. The time when they need strength training is when there's an issue there, when there's an injury there. We need to be able to regress back and that's exactly what I'm showing you with these. We can regress back to a movement that can be done and progress it up to being able to return to these extremely high tension movements. Sprinters, hamstrings. This is the video you can see on my Instagram, Trey Williams doing basically the cheetah reps and he did lots of them. He's run 10, 10. He's a short guy, so he's got the short levers. He's also extremely fast, so massive amounts of force. Probably the most force dominant sprinter, he may well be the fastest person in the world for his height. Running 10, 10, I think he's 5, 6, so very force dominant. They call him quadzilla. He's got huge quads. I would say because sprinting causes so much tension, they're generally not going to need much training before they're actually able to do this sort of movement. Gymnasts with their abdominals, same sort of thing from all the somersaults, backflips, etc. All the positions that they're using, they're going to have extremely strong abdominals without necessarily weight training them. And you might say, well, like an L sit is weight training. Well, is it? Or is it just movement the same as the other stuff? It's just movement. So breaking down that differentiation between strength and tension I think is valuable. If there's tension there, then there's going to be adaptation. We just need to quantify and analyze the tension and we'll understand what is coming next on the other side of that. So tension dominant training upgrades the muscles, right? So these positions that you see, Ben, in here, you will get muscular adaptations from the heavy slant board, Jefferson from the Ql. That's massive range on the Ql there. You are going to get muscle upgrades together with the connective tissue upgrades. Where in the muscle dominant training, it doesn't necessarily produce much of a connective tissue upgrade. So if you only train the inner range of the Ql and of the obliques, then we won't get that same connective tissue upgrade. If we're doing the hamstring curls and we're only training the inner range, then we will get muscle adaptations, but we won't get the accompanying connective tissue adaptations, and therefore we're creating more fragile athletes. And that is basically the formula of modern day strength training. We are creating more fragile athletes because we're not considering the contribution of connective tissue. So tension drives adaptation. We need to be looking at, okay, what is the tension of this exercise? And we need to look at whether muscular or connective tissue dominance is there within the movement. Okay, so if the connective tissue is not under tension, resting tension, if we're not lengthening that tissue, then it's going to be a muscular dominant movement, which is fine. They have their place. We need to do them as we've shown in the other lectures. Ultimately, by understanding tension and focusing on tension, rather than focusing on load, we are going to create much more resilient athletes and we're going to be able to progress them through from wherever they are to wherever they want to be in a more logical, systematic sequence. This is in harmony with human engineering, it's in harmony with the natural ways of the body. You'll see these patterns show up in animals and in children. And I think that as we apply these, we're just going to get better results as coaches, which is ultimately what it's all about. Thank you for listening today and I'd love to hear your feedback.
