Range Training Extras (Understand Strength)

Muscle Club is a way of applying these principles for muscle gain.

We use short range along with a high volume of tension to maximise muscle demands and therefore muscle mass.

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Stretch strength focusses on the Long Range movements that open up new range.

Stretch strength increases tissue tolerance to total training volume and to elastic tension.

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Meta Skills are about increasing the dexterity and awareness to apply strength. Getting your limbs to the right place at the right time and on balance is essential to being able to apply strength effectively.

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Looking at all this 3x10 on a few bodybuilding or 5x5 on powerlifting movements starts to look ridiculous.

It’s possible to get mass and strength gains on simplistic programming but if injury prevention and athleticism is a priority then more knowledge is required.

Anyone can build sandcastles at the beach.

Only the great engineers could manage the great stone aqueducts of past empires.

It will take time, thought and creativity to apply these principles but in time you will become a coach of rare and possibly unmatched abilities.

Athletic Essentials is an introduction to the master keys of athletic performance.

Think of a wire on a crane beginning to fray because of excessive loading.

Manual therapies can bring the resources to rebuild. Heat and redness is more blood being sent to the tissue. Manual therapies also apply stress to the tissues that can cause remodelling. The type of remodelling will be driven by the dominant movement stress.

Manual therapies don’t load the tissues with the specific loads required to meet movement demands.

Manual therapies can be useful to increase the supply of resources and remove blockages & damaged cells/tissues.

The remodelling aspect of manual therapy in movement is most similar to the stretch strength stimulus particularly under heavy loading. Stretch strength will cause the most remodelling of muscle and at the same time stimulate muscle tendon junction and tendon adaptation. Plyometric work causes tendon dominant stimulus, less change in the muscle.

The heating and circulatory effects of manual therapy is most similar to short range training and low load, high repetition training.

Bottom Line: Manual Therapies can help the process of healing but understanding and applying movement will create superior adaptations. The type of impact of manual therapies can be replicated by understanding and applying athletic principles.

I would agree with that for sure. It’s funny when I first graduated I had my little tool box of exercises then proceeded to get literally all of the manual therapy certifications( tens of thousands of $) to now just use it as an adjunct and back to primarily exercises. If I knew about ATG back then I would’ve been much farther ahead. It’s great that coaches and clinicians can learn this first!

As someone who has spent over 2 decades practicing manual therapy I couldn’t agree more with this ! Unfortunately manual therapy gets way over complicated with many unsubstantiated claims. Many practitioners still use old narratives that have been disproven. Understanding and movement principles will always be far superior to any kind of passive modality. Unfortunately what I see in the rehab space is that every one wants to over complicate things and the propose to “ fix” it with their intervention - with out even understanding basic strength and conditioning principles- which have superior outcomes in pretty much any clinical guideline for any condition. More importantly is that we give our clients/ patients an internal locus of control for their own health which is done by teaching them the principles to fix themselves. Great summary 💪❤️

All written training programs are sub-optimal for improving tissue quality.

Great coaches will change the on-paper session to fit the athletes state and performance that day.

They will change the weights, the sets, the repetitions

The athlete themselves can adjust even more intelligently rep to rep based on what they are feeling.

This can’t be mapped on paper but it can be logically used to reach previously unreachable results.

What if you didn’t have to depend on someone else to optimise your training.

When you understand the principles of tissues & tension progression you break the shackles of what’s on paper and develop your body better faster.

Writing programs for weightlifting or powerlifting training is simple enough because you have a simple single goal of getting a bar from point a to point B.

When training to improve tissue quality and tension capacity of tissues more nuance is needed.

The discs and nerves in the spine mean that often the short to long range principles and progressing tension don’t work.

If alignment of the structures not the health of the tissues is the problem then blood flow and tension won’t be as helpful.

Optimal discs, joint function can restored by movement.

Movement without creating irritation is generally the answer.

Learning to stay stagnant or stable is only helpful until life comes along and requires something else from you.

This is stereotypical story of the powerlifter with the 300kg deadlift doing his back picking up his child or getting out of the car does happen but can be avoided by strategic movement.

Charles Poliquin, Ido Portal, Pavel Tsatsouline, Louis Simmons, Chinese Weightlifting, Gymnastics & CrossFit.

One thing they have in common is that use small variations and a large range of positions.

CrossFit could be argued as the exception but with so many movements and strongman events included it does achieve micro-variation.

Charles advocated for almost infinite variety in grips, joint angles, machines and free weights.

Ido’s push sessions sometimes don’t use the same movement for even 2 reps.

Louis Simmons often used 3 different grips on his speed work and used a big variety of movements in his programming.

Chinese Weightlifting isn’t one method but it uses a much broader base than the Bulgarian method.

Gymnastics requires force at all angles from the shoulders and produces joints capable of dealing with more forces.