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We all know our minds affects performance. Strength is not exempt. With all the research I do, I find myself always returning to the question, "How the hell can I remove the strength barriers set on my muscles?
Hysterical strength is a poorly understood mechanism. It's a response to life-or-death situations where our "limiters" for strength output are removed, allowing us to be stronger than normal.
Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a biomechanic specialist, hypothesized us trained weightlifters use about 80% of our absolute strength in the gym. Absolute strength is the maximum limit of strength we have; maximal strength (strength used consciously like in the gym) is 66.66% of absolute strength.
If you have an absolute strength of 900lbs in raw bench press, your maximal strength is 600lbs. If you train up to using 80% maximal strength of 900 in the gym, then you're benching 720lbs. There's only a few possible ways to make you use absolute strength in the gym:
You make lifting life-or-death in the gym, you manipulate your adrenaline and catecholamines, or you use CRISPR to delete strength-limiting genes when we fully understood how it's done.
The bad? Well..using absolute strength will cause your tendons, ligaments, and muscle to tear/rupture and/or bones will break under the tremendous forces you produce.
TL;DR: Mimic hysterical strength by ****ing around with adrenaline, catecholamines, and pain awareness and you'll lift way heavier weight, thus getting way more progress. Avoid chasing use of 100% absolute strength or you'll internally become mush (but you won't ever get to close to 100% absolute strength anyway)
Hysterical strength is a poorly understood mechanism. It's a response to life-or-death situations where our "limiters" for strength output are removed, allowing us to be stronger than normal.
Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a biomechanic specialist, hypothesized us trained weightlifters use about 80% of our absolute strength in the gym. Absolute strength is the maximum limit of strength we have; maximal strength (strength used consciously like in the gym) is 66.66% of absolute strength.
If you have an absolute strength of 900lbs in raw bench press, your maximal strength is 600lbs. If you train up to using 80% maximal strength of 900 in the gym, then you're benching 720lbs. There's only a few possible ways to make you use absolute strength in the gym:
You make lifting life-or-death in the gym, you manipulate your adrenaline and catecholamines, or you use CRISPR to delete strength-limiting genes when we fully understood how it's done.
The bad? Well..using absolute strength will cause your tendons, ligaments, and muscle to tear/rupture and/or bones will break under the tremendous forces you produce.
TL;DR: Mimic hysterical strength by ****ing around with adrenaline, catecholamines, and pain awareness and you'll lift way heavier weight, thus getting way more progress. Avoid chasing use of 100% absolute strength or you'll internally become mush (but you won't ever get to close to 100% absolute strength anyway)
