RUBBER BAND PHYSIOLOGY

I heard this term in a podcast recently and it was really eye opening having this notion expressed so succinctly.  So, of course, I’m going to spend time taking something that says all it needs to say in 2 words and blow it up into 1000, because if 2 is good, 1000 is gooder!  The notion being presented here is similar to the “bodyweight/bodyfat set point” theory, wherein the body, desiring to remain in a state of homeostasis, will naturally gravitate toward a specific fixed destination as it relates to bodyfat/bodyweight.  Typically, this amount is “set” via our lifestyle during adolescence, and impacted by genetic and environmental factors, but eventually we reach a point where our body is comfortable, and when we attempt to push it BEYOND that comfort level, it may adjust temporarily, but ultimately it will fight its way back to its original starting point.  We’ve seen this with individuals that have undergone significant amounts of weight loss, losing 200+lbs of bodyweight only to put it all back on (and more) withing a few years, and we also see it with the perpetual hardgainer who fights so hard for that 20lb weight gain only to lose it all in a few weeks of poor eating.  The “rubber band” element here is the metaphor of us stretching the rubber band of our physiology only for it to snap right back to baseline on us…but let’s explore this a little more and see what lessons we can take from a rubber band.

Like don't believe everything you see from 2010s Elitefts...

 

Rubber bands, comically enough, have had a unique presence in the world of physical transformation, such that we can easily observe the lessons from them and apply them to our own biology.  Westside Barbell made their use incredibly popular, attaching them to barbells and employing them with the “Dynamic Effort” method.  This was taking the principle of accommodating resistance and applying it: the idea of making a lift HARDER the further along the range of motion that we travel.  The idea here was to teach the body how to accelerate through the hardest part of the lift, because the best way to overcome the resistance of the rubber band was to move against it as fast as possible.  If a lifter were to attempt to slowly overcome the resistance of the rubber band, they would get stapled in the lift.  If they moved quickly, they had a chance to survive, and then, when the bands came OFF the bar, the lifter would be accustomed to blowing through the lift as fast as possible.

 

However, what we ALSO observed through the use of resistance bands was something Louie Simmons deemed “overspeed eccentrics”, wherein, by employing the resistance band in the ECCENTRIC phase of the lift, the trainee was able to improve their CONCENTRIC force, in a manner similar to how plyometric training achieves outcomes.  Rather than discuss the specifics of this training, let’s observe the fact that, in order to achieve a maximal return on the eccentric phase of the lift, the resistance band needed to be started in a maximally stretched position.  If there was slack in the band, there was no overspeed eccentric achieved, whereas a tensed band would snap hard back into place.

Squats against bands are also less prone to these sorts of issues

Why does this matter?  Because, as we understand the set point as it relates to the notion of “rubber band physiology”, we are appreciating the reality that hard, strong, fast charges against our physiology stretches out our rubber band, resulting in an equally strong counter reaction of the band snapping back into place.  Effectively: the harder we push for change, the harder the body pushes BACK to revert and maintain homeostasis.  This is why crash diets create results that don’t last: the trainee loses the 10lbs in a week, and then the next week they’re up 12lbs.  Or they ran Smolov, added 50lbs to their squat at the end of the cycle, and 2 weeks later their squat has reverted to BELOW their previous max.  Or even in bodybuilding show prep, we see folks achieve ridiculous levels of leanness only to “rebound” and put back on 20-30lbs in a month.  They stretched the rubber band too fast and got snapped back on.

 

But what else can rubber bands do?  They can SNAP.  We decide to just keep on stretching and stretching until we’ve reached the end of their structural integrity and now we have a broken rubber band.  And if you’re the one STRETCHING that band, you know the end result in some pain when it snaps back and hits your flesh.  The body, once again, is no different.  If we decide to take these extreme measures beyond their “reasonable” periods of implementation (these quick fixes tend to at least have sanity in their prescribed durations), we end up with a BROKEN physiology.  In the training world, this is entering a state of being “overtrained”, in the nutritional world, it’s being “overdieted”, but in both cases, you have a BROKEN trainee now, and it’s going to take several months, if not YEARS to put humpty dumpty back together again.  We now need to rebuild the metabolism after months of running a 1500 calorie diet trying to FINALLY get abs, or we need to reduce our training volume and intensity down to bare bones to be able to FINALLY recover from fatigue enough to actually be ABLE to train.

 

So what option do we have?  Well, once again, for those of you that bought a set of original jump stretch bands, you may have noticed that, over time, they seems to LOSE some of that elasticity.  When we try to race against the band, it snaps right back, but when we just sort of gradually expand it, slowly, intentionally, we get the rubber band to accommodate to the new shape we’ve imposed upon it.  The rubber band is able to relax its contraction and stretch less and, eventually, it’s wider than we originally intended.  And if we were to take this rubber band to its logical extreme through this practice, on the day it DOES snap, it will not snap with a whiplike retraction and smack us back on our flesh, but instead more just sort of fizzle and dissolve.

 

This is one of those inconvenient truths about physical transformation: it simply can’t be rushed.  But not in the sense that “if you try to rush it, you won’t get results any faster”, but more “you won’t get results any faster AND you’ll end up worse than when you started”.  There are CONSEQUENCES for rushing.  In the case of crash dieters, due to bodyfat set point, after they end up crash dieting and losing a lot of weight through a combination of fatty AND lean mass, the body will try to rush itself BACK to its original bodyweight, and it's agnostic about how it gets there.  It wants ANY sort of mass, and this is why yo-yo dieters struggle so much.  They come back from the crash diet with more fat and less lean tissue, and then they try to crash diet again.  And since they have less lean tissue, they need to eat even FEWER calories than before to get the same results, so they’re MEGA starving, only to shave off what little lean mass they have, just to put back on even MORE fat and repeat the cycle until it can’t be sustained and now they’re in the worse possible place they can be.  The dude that just keeps chasing the intensity dragon, running peaking program after peaking program, just fries out their central nervous system and loses what little muscle they had due to a total lack of accumulation phases in their training, and eventually they find themselves trying to peak to a 1rm that is lower than their warm-ups when they first started training.  The consequences of trying to rush are that they make us go BACKWARDS.

 

Instead, a gradual and sustainable approach needs to make up the majority of our time in the world of physical transformation.  Which, upon review, I basically took a long time to come to Dan John’s “Park bench/bus bench” concept, but it’s a good concept.  The majority of our time, in pursuit of physical transformation, we need to be just slowly stretching this rubber band of ours so we can sneak up on our biology and not even let it know that we’re transforming.  We make the process gradual and gentle so that the body gives way to the changes and finds it an acceptable state of homeostasis.  When we undertake those BRIEF moments of intense rubber band stretching (think Super Squats with a gallon of milk a day or a 28 day Velocity Diet run), we take that runway we gained against the rubber band and resume the GENTLE stretching of it, fully understanding that the body is going to try to snap that rubber band back at us, and the “gains” we made during that time AREN’T going to last.  But, perhaps, they’ll be a slight head start that we can work from, so long as we give the rubber band a moment to adjust.