There are many things that can only be learned through practical application. Continued education through reading and by attending seminars is a must in my industry, but nothing comes close to real world “in the trenches” time spent in the weight room. To me, this is a science lab and I am a scientist. We have the luxury at USI of testing every training method and every assumption to make sure the training effect actually produces real results, or just pseudo results on paper. That’s something that a book or seminar will never teach you. We also take this same approach with recovery methods and nutrition. We formulated our own post workout shake to produce as close to immediate recovery as we could get. The product worked so good we were actually accused of foul play. We were told by one of our guys that nothing should work that good.

In the last post I mentioned some observations found in the lab and timing sets as opposed to counting reps. Here is an actual workout performed by brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Purple Belt Vince Fosco. Several exercises were timed sets instead of traditional set/rep schemes. This training session was designed to improve work capacity by training the anaerobic power system. Sets lasted roughly 30-seconds and the rest was only 15 seconds between exercises within the circuits. That’s a 2:1 work to rest ratio.

Check out the video below to see what we did.

One additional conclusion was that the faster someone could move the weights (barbells, cables, etc) the more neural efficient they are, especially the transition from the eccentric to the concentric phase. This is great to know because it tells us what needs to be improved.

In future articles to come we will be addressing the best ways to improve relative strength, grip strength, structural balance, as well as strength endurance. Many more videos to come.