#37: A technique for increasing strength without increasing resistance

In this episode, I'll talk about how using your nervous system to recruit more fibers can improve your results, even if you aren't adding more resistance. 

For the general fitness community - and what I recommend to my clients - is to set a goal of hypertrophy in their workouts.

This means your muscles are increasing in size, which helps improve all sorts of health measures like insulin sensitivity, cardiovascular health, and body composition. 

I always encourage people to get to a certain muscle size by selecting the most effective exercises for each muscle group and progressively overloading that muscle by adding more resistance and/or volume as the resistance gets easier.  

Then you can maintain that muscle size by using the same resistance and volume.

Now, the first concern I hear, especially from women, is that they don't want to get bulky. 

Getting bulky is actually super difficult for most people. And since we are losing muscle mass as we age, we really need to resistance train to offset that and hopefully add more muscle. 

One of the reasons Evlo is not only 1. More effective at creating stronger muscles but 2. Usually more joint-friendly and will often make your joints feel better is because we understand anatomy, neurology, and physics. 

Muscle cells are sensitive to force - and exercise is mechanical force being applied to a muscle over and over. 

But they are sensitive to the angle, dose, and intensity of that force. The more precise and intentional that angle, dose, and intensity, the better that muscle will grow and the better your joints will feel. 

We've talked a ton about dose - and how more is not better. 

But today, we are going to talk a bit more about intensity and angle, and I'm going to give you a great tool for increasing the effectiveness of your workouts without adding more resistance or volume.

1:24  Muscle Hypertrophy

2:12  The concern with getting bulky

4:49  Why Shannon likes moderate to light load to your muscles 

7:40  Examples of load to the glute muscles 

10:14  How to decelerate muscle hypertrophy with perceived effort 

12:43  What is mechanotransduction?  

16:50  Mechanoreceptor Feedback 

19:14  Why exercise selection is key 

20:36  Example of angles of force 

Study #1 referenced: https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2014/10000/effects_of_different_volume_equated_resistance.27.aspx
Study #2 referenced: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27329807/

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