READER REQUEST: ON VARIETY

A question came in from Panopticon on one of my more recent posts.

“I would like to hear more on your opinion on variety, maybe an idea for a future post?”

Let's see how old my references can get 

This is actual pretty topical for me, as I’ve been having a lot of success recently by employing more variety in my training.  Specifically as it relates to pressing overhead.  Before continuing, for any of my readers that are not familiar with my training, unless I have a strongman competition in the horizon, my pressing overhead is always a strict press (meaning, a press without leg drive), so as I write about pressing or overhead pressing here, understand it’s a strict press rather than a push press.  Relating to one of my more recent posts about “playing the game the way I want to play it”, the strict press is one of the few movements I actually care about progressing these days, as, for me, it’s one of the best indicators of brute upper body pressing strength.  Sure, the bench has always been the gold standard there, but quite frankly, I don’t care about benching, while I care greatly about pressing weight over my head.  In turn, I’ve been including overhead pressing in my training since around 2006 or so, and the great majority of that has been the basic barbell press overhead from the front rack position.  Around 2015 I switched to pressing purely with the axle, but that’s about it.

I give this background to demonstrate how much I’ve applied the principle of specificity as it relates to pressing and, in truth, it worked: to a point.  I managed to get a strict press 1rm of 240lbs in 2013 or so, but I’ve also pretty much stayed around there since then.  Rep maxes remained consistent too, with being able to hit 225 for a set of 3 or 4 on multiple occasions.  Yet, last training cycle, I hit 221lbs for a set of 8, and for the first time in many years it seems like my strict pressing is moving in a very solid direction, and I attribute this to a recent inclusion of greater variety in my training.  Specifically, along with the strict axle press, I’ve included behind the neck barbell pressing, trap bar pressing, and strongman log pressing in my supplemental work.  I’ve seen improvements as well in my bench pressing with the inclusion of swiss bar incline bench and close grip benching, and I’ve been rotating between buffalo bar, safety squat bar and safety squat bar front squats in my squat training.

Chest workout completely ripped off from this delightful lunatic

What’s at play here are two complimentary yet conflicting concepts: the principle of specificity vs “strength”.  I’ve written on these topics many times before, but to sum up as it’s relevant to here: specificity gets you better, but variety is what gets you stronger.  With specificity, a trainee is basically closing the gap between where they are and what their potential is on a movement.  The first time you try a movement, your lack of coordination and ability prevents you from expressing maximal strength in a movement, so you apply maximal effort but still don’t move as much weight as you “should” be able to.  With consistent practice, you keep improving your skillset, and the gap between where you are and what you’re capable of gets smaller and smaller until you’re at the point that you’re making incredibly small improvements.  These are “beginner gains”, and how linear progression operates.  Once we’ve reached the point where the gap is small and growth is limited, a trainee needs to get stronger to create growth.

The difficulty trainees experience here is that their tendency is to just keep employing the same movement to get stronger at it, operating off the principle of specificity.  You want to get better at something, you keep doing that thing, right?  But we ALREADY got better at the thing: we’re pretty much the best we CAN be at the thing right now (within reason): now we need to get stronger instead.  And since we’ve maximized our potential on the movement, continuing to do the same movement is going to create a limited strength response, because doing the same movement over and over again is going to keep strengthening the same areas it strengthens while neglecting the same area it neglects.  A close grip bench, for example, emphasizes the triceps at the expense of the pecs and deltoids (and oh my god, if you guys with the EMG studies will just shut up for a second, I’m sure I screwed that up but you get my point).  If we keep hammering the close grip bench and never change it, our ability to bring up the pecs and deltoids is limited.  But if we start including variety in our training, we can attack those areas that were getting neglected before and now bring them up.

No

This is where variety shines as an avenue for strength building: you now improve strength for different muscles or at different angles than before.  Going back to my case, even though I’m pressing overhead in the case of the strict axle press, behind the neck press, trap bar press and log press, the angle and emphasis is different on each movement to the point that different aspects of my press are getting trained.  I’m now getting stronger from different angles than before, and muscles are called in differently than before in order to shoulder the brunt of the work.

But why does this result in improvements on the original movement?  Because, eventually, your smallest and weakest muscles are going to be what limit your strongest muscles.  In much the same way that a weak core can prevent your legs from expressing maximal strength on a squat, on any other movement, the muscles that are de-emphasized can eventually be the ones that serve as the breaking point, and using something that actually emphasizes these movements can improve your original movement as a whole.

Like that time I found out my ACL was a weakpoint...

This is why I’m able to train movement infrequently while still improving them: I’m getting STRONGER, not better.  Currently, so many trainees are absolutely CONVINCED that they MUST bench 3 times a week and squat twice a week if they have any hope of moving more weight on these movements.  They claim that, if they use a frequently at all less than that, their bench and squat fall apart.  You can see how such a rigid set of guidelines can be VERY limiting on programming options, and this in turn results in plateauing and stagnation, because not all plans work forever, and eventually one maximizes their achievable potential from the principle of specificity.  If these trainees take a step back, relegate themselves to benching and squatting once a week at MOST (meaning maybe even once every 2 weeks), they may experience an initial dip in their numbers as their skills degrade on the movement, but will ultimately experience an increased in strength overall and a greater ability to move more weight once they spend this time training a greater variety of pressing in order to get stronger from various angles.

Since this wasn’t my normal philosophical ranting and more academic stuff, let me leave you with a summary to make sure you’re following along.  Specificity is how you get better at a movement.  The better you get at a movement, the smaller the improvements you experience between training sessions, to the point that, eventually, there isn’t enough of a skill gap to be able to make meaningful progress in a movement.  The way you move more weight from there is by getting STRONGER, rather than better.  You get stronger by making muscles bigger and stronger.  If you’ve only been applying the principle of specificity, you’ve been improving some muscles at the expense of others.  With variety, you can bring up the muscles that have been neglected.  By doing so, you can overcome plateaus that result from weaker muscles limiting the potential of your stronger ones.