An excerpt from a scott abel training article.
I will say again, and you will see me say this repeatedly in articles, "Heavy is not how much is on the bar; Heavy is how much stress a muscle is under."
The former is an external queue that has no meaning in and of itself. The latter is an internal performance indicator that bears fruit short and long term. As experts and trainees we need to stop being so one dimensional in our thinking.
The second problem with this assumption is that somehow people then equate load with intensity. In other words, I get letters where people "assume" they're training hardbecause they're training with heavy loads.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. And there's also an expert bias that "strength training" is CNS training; hypertrophy training is myofibril training; and conditioning training is metabolic.
These are only categories of reference and they're not mutually exclusive. There exists this bias that high volume training is somehow lower intensity. Untrue.
Workload capacity can be improved to a point where tremendous volumes can be handled at high intensities. Once again, these need not be mutually exclusive, and to think that way is to misrepresent research and decades of real life, in-the-trenches experience.
Case in point: Eric Heiden.
I always use this example when doing seminars for people interested in Hypertrophy Training. Eric Heiden was a very special athlete. He won multiple gold medals for the US in speed skating. He also accomplished what most exercise physiologists would say is impossible. He won Gold in all the sprint events and the endurance events as well; kind of like winning a marathon and the 100-meter sprint in the same Olympics.
What he accomplished was truly spectacular. Eric's physique was also well known. At about 185 lbs he had 28-inch thighs at a time when no one even in bodybuilding could come close. The sweep on his thighs was just incredible and something any bodybuilder would kill to have. Because Eric was training for speed, power, and endurance, he developed a very unique training style that's been ignored to this day, I think merely because it's so hard, and goes against the grain of thought, that heavy is a matter of load only.
Twenty-eight inch thighs.
Eric was known for what I call ultra heavy training. Remember that I said earlier that heavy is not how much load is on the bar, but rather how much stress the muscle is under. Eric was known to do leg presses with 500lbs. No big deal. However, Eric did sets of 100s reps with 500lbs!
Now that's heavy, if you understand load, overload, and time under tension in an explosive sense, and not with this crazy tempo interpretation of such.
Eric was also known to squat 205 pounds, butt to heels...for 300 reps. His leg size, shape, density, and sweep were what every bodybuilder dreams of. Yet no one trains like this because they equate "heavy" with load, rather than stress.
The only guy that came close to adapting that kind of training for legs was Tom Platz, and I guess he didn't train heavy either, since he didn't do low rep percent max's near his absolute strength base.
I trained at home all summer and I did sets of squats with only a "Bodyblade" behind my neck for 5 sets of 100 reps, and then single leg BW lunges for 4 sets of 50 reps.
That was the beginning of my leg workout every other workout — no weights, and my legs have never been better.
