A whole effort exercise to me means that we’re targeting every muscle in the body. We’re targeting it in completion, in its entirety.

We want that muscle fatigue, that eccentric activation, and that glycogen depletion. Look for that in your workout in order to achieve the most possible benefit from it. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios.

My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we are continuing our series on principles of exercise design. In this series, we’ve covered in -roading, we’ve covered warm -ups, we’ve covered muscle fiber recruitment, we’ve covered sequencing and how to select exercises that produce the biggest bang for your buck. Today we’re talking about pillars of a whole exercise, a whole effort exercise session.

If you walk into an exercise coach studio, we are focused on giving people workouts that consist of three major components. Muscle fatigue, eccentric activation, and glycogen depletion. Spoiler alert, these things are not available in just any workout. There’s a certain type of way you need to work out and exercise in order to achieve these things. So in this episode, we’re going to learn what these things mean and why they are important so that you can understand the benefits of engaging in a whole effort exercise session that delivers these things to you. So Dr. Fisher is with me today.

So Dr. Fisher, here’s a little bit about you. for you. You know, what comes to mind when you think of the phrase whole effort exercise? What does that mean contrasted with just exercise in general? What does whole effort exercise mean to you?

Yeah. So a whole effort exercise to me means that we’re targeting every muscle in the body. We’re targeting it in completion in its entirety to fatigue and that we are doing everything that we can from a metabolic perspective to enhance calorie expenditure and promote good health after that workout.

Yeah.

If you think about it, I mean, there’s a lot of exercise you could do that doesn’t take all of your effort. So like a walk, right? Or perhaps yoga or there’s a lot we could do for movement or for recreation or just that that falls under the umbrella of exercise that is partial effort exercise but not whole effort. So we’re going to talk about why whole effort is important and how we get there because that really is the type of exercise that will deliver the biggest bang for our buck. So okay, Dr. Fisher, we just mentioned at the top of the episode, there are three things we’re really going for in every whole effort exercise session. Muscle fatigue, eccentric activation, and glycogen depletion.

So let’s start with muscle fatigue. Tell us what is muscle fatigue, what does that mean, and why it’s important.

Okay, so when we talk about muscle fatigue, we need to remember that there are two different types of muscle fibers. We’ve got our type one, our slow twitch, and our type two, our fast twitch muscle fibers. So as we age, it’s our type two muscle fibers that we typically lose more off and more quickly. But also, it’s our type two muscle fibers that are that are more responsive to get stronger and get bigger. So if our goal is to retain strength as we age, we want to keep our type two muscle fibers.

If we want to get bigger muscles, no matter what age we are, it’s our type two muscle fibers we want to recruit. They’re also key in our functionality, our functional performance in older adults as well. So they’re really the main muscle fiber that we want to keep. Now, when we talk about muscle fatigue, one of the one of the big problems is many people will think, well, I go for a run or I go for a swim or I do a lot of cycling and it’s really hard. I work really hard. And that’s great.

I would never discourage anybody from doing those exercise activities, but by their very nature, their cardiovascular exercise, so that prolonged they’re more than 60 to 90 seconds. They’re typically 20 minutes upwards. And because of that, it means that we’re only ever really recruiting and re -recruiting our lower threshold type one oxidative motor units. We’re never really recruiting those fast twitch. type 2 muscle fibers which are the ones that we need to recruit to be able to keep and we need to recruit to get stronger and get bigger. So Cardiovascular exercise is fantastic, but it just doesn’t have the same effect as strength training.

So when we engage in strength training, of course, what we’re talking about is a set of exercise where we’re recruiting muscle fibers with a high enough level of effort that we have to go through that sequence of muscle fibers to get to those type two fast twitch muscle fibers to recruit them And that is muscle fatigue. It’s whole muscle fatigue. It’s recruiting every muscle fiber. We’ve talked previously on the show about the size principle and about all or nothing and about recruitment of type one and type two muscle fibers. And this is absolutely key to get to muscle fatigue. It’s the point where we simply can’t produce any more force or our force production drops below a certain level because we’ve recruited all of our muscle fibers.

And it’s really only strength training and only strength training a certain way. And we’ll get into that, um, where we can, where we can achieve that.

Okay, so then the follow -up is why is muscle fatigue important or what happens then if we do achieve that muscle fatigue? What results come from that?

So the easy analogy here is the old use it or lose it. So we have all of these muscle fibers and we go through this kind of anabolic growth stage in our early decades of life. And probably from our thirties onwards, we go into a catabolic state where our body basically says, okay, what don’t we need anymore? We don’t want to keep building up and building up because it’s too metabolically expensive. So what do we not need anymore? And we get this catabolic state.

So we start to lose muscle fibers. we start to lose bone mineral density and so forth. And it doesn’t have to be that way, we can absolutely keep everything, but if we don’t use those muscle fibers, if we don’t recruit them, then our body won’t keep them. So we really need to keep stimulating them. It’s the forceful contraction of muscle fibers, which, first of all, does a wonderful job in helping to release myokines, which we’ve talked about previously on the show. But it’s that forceful contraction that helps to make those muscle fibers grow stronger and helps to make those muscles grow bigger and help to retain our neural coordination and recruitment of those muscle fibers.

And at the end of the day, isn’t that what people are after? They want their muscle to change for the better. They want it to get stronger. They want it better able to recruit when needed. Right. So if we are trying to change, we have to

really exercise in that way, right, where we’re achieving that fatigue. We do have a whole episode on fatigue being the secret to effective exercise as well in this season. So scroll back there, it’s probably 20 episodes back, to learn a little bit more about that topic. Okay, so that’s muscle fatigue. It is really recruiting all of our muscle fibers, especially those type 2 that are responsible for our strength, and it’s important so that we can stimulate that change and that adaptation we’re looking for. Second component, eccentric activation.

What does that mean and why is that important? Okay, so there are two phases in any typical resistance exercise. There’s a concentric, which is normally the lifting of the weight, or the pressing of the weight, maybe away from our body in a chest press or a leg press. And there’s the eccentric component, which is typically the lowering of the weight, or the lengthening of the muscle, as maybe the weight plate or the movement arm comes back towards our body. So there’s the shortening of the muscle that’s concentric and there’s the lengthening of the muscle that’s eccentric. And this is really important to differentiate between the two because we’re about 40 % stronger in the eccentric phase of an exercise.

And what that means is that if you go into a typical commercial gym and you use a free weight, or you use a resistance machine, then if you set the weight stack for 100 pounds, then that might feel hard when you’re lifting the weight, when you’re doing a concentric muscle action. But when you come to lowering the weight, it means you’re only working at about 60 % of effort, at best 60 % of effort. So you’re kind of getting a big recovery in that phase. So you’re just not recruiting muscle fibers to that high degree of effort, and you’re allowing the other muscle fibers to recover. So then you begin a concentric repetition again and so forth and you kind of repeat this cycle.

Now with the exercise coach and with isokinetic technology specifically, you don’t have that problem because there’s no weight stack to move up and down. It’s computer controlled and motor driven. So the force plate will move almost regardless of how much effort you apply. So it means that when the force plate is moving away from you, you can push as hard as you want and the force plate will never move any faster. But when the force plate is coming back and you’ve got that eccentric phase, now you can press as hard as you can, which we know is 40 % stronger than in the concentric phase. and the force plate will still carry on coming back.

Now this is perfectly safe, but it just means that we can really maximize muscle fiber recruitment.

And actually, the evidence suggests that it optimizes type two muscle fiber recruitment, which is exactly what we were talking about a moment ago, the key muscle fibers that we want to keep as we age for strength and muscle size and, and functional performance. Yeah. I like to point out to people, um, so really well put, uh, on the leg press, for example, you might see a performance and a client may have a concentric average of a hundred pounds or a hundred, you know, factor of the strength index, and then their eccentric, we measure both the concentric average effort and the eccentric average effort, and their eccentric is 140, right? So 40 % more, for example. If they don’t exercise on that isokinetic, using that isokinetic technology, they may be leaving that on the table, right? They’re stuck at about 100 pounds.

So, I mean, Dr. Fisher, like how is, how easy is it to really achieve eccentric activation

apart from isokinetic exercises? If you have friends who are very strong, then it can be relatively easy because they can help you lift a weight that’s 40 % heavier than you can lift. And then you can lower it down. So aside from the fact that it’s logistically very difficult and you need multiple people just to do a single exercise, it’s, you know, it can be achieved, but it’s, it’s just really not practical at all. And it’s just not, not feasible. Um.

without isokinetic technology, so it just is not really achievable in a realistic way. Okay. Yeah, so that’s a very special feature and it’s an important feature because it really helps to collapse the timeline necessary for your muscles to get stronger because eccentric activation really helps you Dig into those type 2 muscle fibers to get stronger faster.

Cool. OK, so the final one here, so we’ve covered muscle fatigue, eccentric activation, and glycogen depletion. What is glycogen depletion, and why is that important? Yeah, so glycogen depletion is all about removing or using, I should say, the sugar, effectively the sugar that’s stored within our muscles. So we’ve got to remember that whenever we consume a meal, we consume an amount of sugar, and that goes straight into our bloodstream. And then we have an insulin response from our pancreas.

And the idea of that is to store that sugar so that we can use it at a later date. But our big problem is if we don’t use the sugar that we’ve already stored within our muscles, then we end up with this surplus of sugar just swimming around and we can’t store it anywhere. And ultimately this can lead to overweight and obesity and eventually insulin resistance and diabetes.

and so forth and a whole plethora of comorbidities. So when we engage in exercise, what we’re looking to do is really use the glycogen that’s stored within our muscles as energy so that we can effectively empty the sink so that we can store more when we next consume a meal, because we’re of course going to consume another meal, but we just need to have somewhere to put that sugar. So glycogen depletion is really all about emptying every last bit of sugar that we can out of our muscles with that really high effort exercise, so that we have somewhere to put the next nutritional intake. Okay, so this is important because if we don’t deplete our glycogen, the next time we consume a meal that has energy in it, it has nowhere to go. And so, the more often we deplete that glycogen in our muscle, the better we are metabolically speaking. It helps to keep our blood sugar levels regulated.

It helps prevent insulin resistance, which becomes more of a problem as people get older, especially for women during menopause and after menopause. We really, really don’t want to be insulin resistant. And so if that’s a concern for you, or no matter what it is, it’s just a healthy metabolic process to deplete that glycogen. And again, You know, there’s a lot of exercise you could do that doesn’t do that. And so it’s important to find an exercise that really helps you to deplete that glycogen.

So then how exactly is that depleted, Dr. Fisher? Just spell that out for us one more time. I mean, how do we achieve that then physically through the workout? Yeah. Okay. So when we contract a muscle, we are, we are, we’re producing energy.

So we have to be able to produce energy. So we have our type one muscle fibers are what’s called oxidative, which means they use oxygen to be able to produce energy. But our type two muscle fibers are glycolytic. So they use sugar. So now if you go for a walk, then you’re using the type 1 muscle fibers that we’ve talked about. And as you’re breathing, you’re working aerobically.

So you’re breathing at a normal rate, your air is coming into your lungs, it’s going through your system, and you’re using that oxygen to create energy. So you’re never depleting your glycogen stores.

It’s only when you work at a high enough effort that you’re switching to those type 2 muscle fibers and you’re working glycolytically, you’re recruiting muscle fibers that require sugar effectively as energy that you’re going to deplete that glycogen store within the muscle. So it’s about working hard enough, not working long enough. So it doesn’t have to be an hour run. It just has to be, you know, a 20 minute workout. That’s great. So really, if you’re listening to this today, and your goal through exercise is to get stronger, to improve your metabolism, to prevent obesity, right, or lose body fat, to prevent insulin resistance, to get stronger, to reverse the aging process, you must find a workout that is a whole -effort, exercise -focused workout.

We want that muscle fatigue, that eccentric activation, and that glycogen depletion.

Look for that in your workout in order to achieve the most possible benefit from it. Thank you for breaking all this down for us, Dr. Fisher. Do you have any final thoughts on this topic? No, I think we’ve covered everything. All right. Sounds great.

Well, if you are an exercise coach client, go get that workout in, go achieve those benefits through that muscle fatigue, eccentric activation and glycogen depletion. We will see you next week within the series to wrap it up on the principles of exercise design. Until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything .

com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.