This just came in via Email from Alwyin Cosgrove's newsletter..If your not making the gains you want or are pressed for time and want an effective workout that doesn't require alot of days and hours in the gym...Think about giviing this a shot..It worked for me...And I'm spread pretty thin with two businesses and 2 kids!!
INSIDE THE MUSCLE LABORATORIES–Adam Campbell
“HAVE YOU HAD LUNCH YET?” the rocket scientist asks, as he straps me into the Space Cycle. I nod yes, but it’s not an invitation; he wants to be well informed. You see, I’m about to be spun at 3Gs in a hypergravity exercise gym, a prototype designed for a Mars space station. For a visual, picture doing squats in a weight room power rack with one potentially catastrophic difference: The rack—and you—are swung horizontally around a steel pole at more than 60 revolutions per minute. Sort of like a human tetherball.
“You’ll be fine,” he says. “But whatever you do, don’t look sideways.” I don’t need to ask why.
Vincent Caiozzo isn’t a mad scientist. He’s a professor of orthopedic medicine at the University of California-Irvine who’s been studying muscle for more than 30 years. The NASA-funded Space Cycle represents the pinnacle of his lifelong research. And, I think, a great investment opportunity. “Exercising in the Space Cycle is like hanging a barbell on every atom of your body,” he tells me. Clearly, it’s infomercial gold.
Only Caiozzo isn’t concerned with helping men build bigger biceps; his research interest is far less marketable. Like that of almost all muscle scientists, it’s purpose is to find better ways to prevent the muscle loss that occurs with aging, cancer, spinal injuries, and, in the case of the Space Cycle, interplanetary travel.
But the lessons these researchers learn can still benefit those of us who want to look more buff at the beach. In fact, by using their findings to better understand the biology of muscle, you can build your body faster and more simply than ever. The trick, however, is in knowing how to apply the hard science to your primary goal: building hard muscle.
ALWYN COSGROVE DOESN’T CLAIM to be a muscle scientist. But in a sense, he’s become one by default. Since Cosgrove opened Results Fitness in 2000, he’s kept a detailed account of every single session that’s been conducted. An effort that was at first economically motivated: “Clients pay for the fastest results,” he says. “So to compete with the gym down the street, I had to find out what works the best.” And that meant collecting workout data on a large number of average men who were using a variety of different training methods.
Unlike commercial health clubs, Cosgrove’s facility—located in Santa Clarita, California—offers only semi-private training, meaning each workout is designed, monitored, and recorded by a member of the staff. Consider that in a typical week, it hosts 400 workouts, providing feedback on 20,800 sessions a year. To equal those numbers, a regular guy would have to work out every single day for 57 years. In effect, that makes Cosgrove’s gym a bona-fide research laboratory. And his gym-rat clients, it seems, human lab rats. All of which underscores the real-world relevance of Cosgrove’s findings.
To explain these observations, he’s tried to bridge the academic research of men like Caiozzo with the practical application of exercises, sets, and repetitions. “A 19th Century English biologist named Thomas Huxley once said that ‘science is nothing but organized common sense,’” explains Cosgrove. “Which is what training should be.”
The end result of Cosgrove’s human experiment is a muscle-building plan that’s not just gym-proven, it’s supported by science. And because it shatters nearly 40 years of bodybuilding dogma, it will likely surprise you.
THE BIOLOGY OF MUSCLE isn’t, in fact, rocket science, as Dr. Caiozzo would be the first to point out. At its most basic level is the SAID Principle, an acronym for the “specific adaptation to imposed demand.” Think of this as the use-it-or-lose-it law. “When a muscle fiber is exposed to a regular challenge, it makes structural adaptations in order to reduce stress on the body,” says Caiozzo. In other words, it might grow bigger and stronger, or become more resistant to fatigue. Which is why you can perform everyday functions—like walking up the stairs or picking up a light object—with little effort.
Now let’s apply the SAID principle to your workout. When you lift weights, you cause tiny tears in your muscle fibers known as microtrauma. This accelerates a process called muscle protein synthesis, which uses amino acids to repair and reinforce the fibers, making them resistant to damage in the future. And although this happens at a microscopic level, the effect becomes visibly evident over time—in the form of bigger arms, broader shoulders, and a thicker chest. Consider it human adaptation at its finest.
Understanding this provides you with a logical rationale for how often you should train your muscles. In multiple studies over the last decade, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have reported that muscle protein synthesis is elevated for up to 48 hours after a resistance training session. So if you work out on Monday at 7 p.m., your body is in muscle-growth mode until Wednesday at 7. p.m. After 48 hours, though, the biological stimulus for your body to build new muscle returns to normal.
On paper, this supports Cosgrove’s first assertion: “Performing total-body workouts, three times a week, is the most effective way gain muscle.” Unfortunately, that advice in direct contradiction with what most guys actually do. That’s because almost everyone subscribes to a leftover from the Stay Hungry days of weightlifting: what Cosgrove calls “bodypart training.”
The idea is to divide the body into specific muscle groups, or bodyparts, and then dedicate an entire day to working each separately. For example, you might perform exercises for your chest on Monday, your back on Tuesday, your shoulders on Wednesday, and so on. The result is a workout regimen that typically requires five to six days a week. But even though you’re training daily, each muscle group is only targeted once a week. So in essence, those muscles grow for just two days out every seven. With total-body workouts, though, you can work each muscle more often. “By training a muscle three times a week, it spends more total time growing,” says Cosgrove.
Science agrees. Anatomically speaking, you can’t isolate muscle groups in the first place. Which is Cosgrove’s other beef with bodypart training. Imagine for a moment, if you could strip the skin away from your muscles, exposing them for clear view. You’d clearly see that they’re interconnected, surrounding the body like a unified web. This is because all of your muscles are enclosed in a tough connective tissue called fascia. And since fascia attaches to bone and other muscles, it creates “functional” relationships between seemingly separate muscle groups.
“Even a small movement of your upper arm triggers a complicated network of muscles from your shoulder down to your hip,” says Bill Hartman, P.T., C.S.C.S., a physical therapist in Indianapolis, Indiana. Here’s why: Your latissimus dorsi (or “lats”), the largest muscle of your back, attaches to your upper arm bone, your shoulder blade, your spine, and your thoracolumbar fascia—a layer of deep tissue that connects to your spine and pelvis. Your glute, or rear hip muscle, attaches to your pelvis. See the connections?
This point isn’t debatable; it’s a scientific fact. “It’s impossible to isolate a muscle with any exercise; you can’t even pick up a pencil with just one muscle,” says Cosgrove. He uses the example of a popular exercise known as the bent-over row. If you subscribe to bodypart training, it’s a “back” exercise. But because of the interconnection between the muscles and connective tissues of the hips and back, your hamstrings and glutes are contracted for the entire exercise. So you’re not only working your back, you’re challenging your legs as well. And don’t forget the involvement of your forearms and biceps in pulling the bar to your chest. “You can separate your workouts by muscle groups, but based on science, it’s illogical,” says Cosgrove. “You’re not actually separating anything.” Which is another reason that total-body training just makes good sense.
Of course, semantics aside, everyone acknowledges that you can emphasize a muscle group by choosing the appropriate exercises. However, since bodypart training is generally performed intensely on consecutive days, it impedes the recovery process. “The nutrients your body needs to repair muscle damage from the previous day are allocated toward providing energy for your workout instead,” says Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., an exercise and nutrition researcher at the University of Connecticut. “Your muscles grow best when your body is resting, not working.” This isn’t an issue with Cosgrove’s total-body recommendation, since there’s a built-in recovery day between each session.
THERE IS A PRACTICAL ARGUMENT against total-body training.
If a typical chest workout takes 30 minutes or more to complete, you’d have to spend hours in the gym to work your entire body. “That’s based on the assumption that a chest workout needs to take 30 minutes,” says Cosgrove. He goes on to explain that a typical chest day might consist of three sets of four exercises, for a total of 12 sets. Keep in mind that’s a seven-day total. But Cosgrove says you could perform that same amount of work—12 total sets—in the same time period by doing four sets, three days a week. “I’ve found that training works like a prescription,” says Cosgrove. “You wouldn’t take an entire bottle of Advil on Monday to relieve pain all week; you’d take smaller doses at more regular intervals.”
And a recent study at the University of Alabama supports this notion. The researchers had one group of men train each muscle group once a week for three months; another group performed the same number of total sets weekly, but split them up equally between three total-body workouts. The result? The men who lifted more frequently gained nine pounds of muscle—five more than those who only trained each muscle only once a week.
But to save even more time, Cosgrove employs another strategy: Alternating sets. When possible, he pairs exercises that work opposite muscle groups, and cuts the rest between sets in half.
It’s a concept based on the scientific work of Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his contributions in the field of physiology and neuroscience. Sherringtons’s law of reciprocal inhibition states that “for every neural activation of a muscle, there is a corresponding inhibition of the opposing muscle.” That means when you work your chest muscles, the corresponding back muscles are forced to relax, thereby resting.
So instead of waiting two minutes between sets of a bench press, you can perform one set of the bench press, rest for just one minute, and then do a bent-over row. After you finish, you’ll rest again, and then repeat the entire process until you complete all sets of both exercises. “In an average workout, this technique saves at least 8 to 10 minutes,” says Cosgrove. “And without sacrificing performance.”
There’s another piece to this puzzle, though. In analyzing thousands of workout logs, Cosgrove developed a volume-threshold theory. “It seems that growth occurs once a muscle has been exposed to 90 to 120 seconds of total tension,” he says.
For an example, let’s say it takes five seconds to complete one repetition. That means one set of eight repetitions would place your muscles under tension for 40 seconds. So using Cosgrove’s theory, you’d only need to do three sets—a total of 120 seconds—to perform enough exercise to stimulate muscle growth. Likewise, with four sets of five repetitions, or two sets of 12 repetitions.
However, even Cosgrove insists this is more theory than fact. Call it an original hypothesis, and primarily for one reason: Human studies simply haven’t compared a wide variety of set and repetition ranges, or even controlled for the duration of muscle tension. So there’s no simply no data to draw from. At least not, until you look elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
“SOME MEN SIMPLY GAIN muscle faster, easier, and to a greater degree than others, which is why we study rats,” says Caiozzo. Rats, unlike humans, are a homogenous species; meaning, there’s little variation from one to another. And that allows scientists to more accurately study the enzymes, metabolic pathways, and genes that regulate muscle-growth.
Of course, actual lab rats aren’t gym rats by nature. So in 1992, Caiozzo and his team developed a rat-sized resistance training apparatus—a device that looks like a high-tech leg curl machine. However, since they couldn’t simply ask a group of rats to lift weights, or even know how much effort one is exerting, there was another step involved.
The researchers permanently implanted a stainless steel wire in the gastrocnemius muscle of each rat’s hind limb, and ran the wire under the skin to the skull, where two small screws had been inserted using a handheld drill. By connecting an electrode to the outside of the screws, the scientists were then able to manually stimulate the muscle with an electric current, causing it to contract with maximal force. This allowed them to mimic a human weightlifting workout, complete with sets and repetitions.
To find out if it worked, the rats were “encouraged” to perform four sets of 10 repetitions, with each repetition lasting two seconds—a total tension-time of 80 seconds. The results were disappointing: The group didn’t increase muscle size in an eight-week period. Which either meant that the machine didn’t work or that the volume of exercise was too low. So the researchers tweaked the workout. When the contractions were increased to four seconds in duration, doubling the total tension-time, the rats gained a significant amount of muscle mass—and in just four weeks, not eight.
Of course, this doesn’t authoritatively validate Cosgrove’s volume-threshold theory in humans, but it does provide a biological precedence that supports it. And it just may be that some his data is simply ahead of it’s time.
“GO HEAVY, OR GO HOME” is a common saying among bodybuilders. And while it’s crucial that you use a weight that provides a challenging load, the mantra is flawed. That’s because muscle fibers can grow in two ways. The first is when the basic contracting unit of a muscle fiber—known as a sarcomere (see “Anatomy of a Muscle Fiber” TK DIRECTION)—increases in number and density. This type of growth leads to strength gains, and can by accomplished by using heavy weights that only allow one to seven repetitions.
The second type of growth, however, occurs when your muscles are forced to contract for longer periods of time. Typically, that means using lighter loads that allow you to complete 12 to 15 repetitions. Think of it as improving the endurance of the muscle fiber. This increases the number of energy-producing structures within the muscle fiber, increasing its size. So you don’t get significantly stronger, but you do get bigger.
Using a repetition range the falls between the two, causes a combination of both types of growth, but each to a lesser degree. And that’s why Cosgrove uses all three repetition-ranges. For instance, he might prescribe five repetitions for each exercise on Monday, 10 repetitions on Wednesday, and 15 repetitions on Friday. “It not only leads to better growth, but it helps to keep from hitting plateaus,” says Cosgrove.
And indeed, in a 2003 study, Arizona State University researchers discovered that men who alternated their repetition ranges in each of three weekly training sessions gained twice as much strength as men who performed the same number of repetitions every workout. To Cosgrove, it’s just another of case of a logical approach generating a logical result.
THE SPACE CYCLE is a strange experience. Although my body is nearly parallel to the floor as I exercise, it feels like I’m upright, and there’s no sensation of spinning. Provided, of course, that I don’t violate the “sideways” rule. (Doing so, by the way, really sucks. Well, actually, it leads to the opposite of sucking.) Dr. Caiozzo explains that the laws of physics prevent me from falling off, much the same as if I were in a rollercoaster. Which explains why I feel a little wobbly when my ride ends.
Caiozzo invented the Space Cycle to help remedy one of NASA’s biggest headaches. “Due to the lack of gravity, an astronaut’s muscles waste away quickly,” he says.
As a veteran of four space flights, it’s a reality that Commander Bill MacArthur knows firsthand. When I spoke to him by phone in early February, he was living on the International Space Station, a six-month tour-of-duty 120 miles above the Earth’s surface. To stress the physical impact of space-travel, he shared this memory from his first mission: “When we landed, I bent over to give my wife a hug, and she had to catch me because the bending wasn’t going to stop,” he says. “That was after just 14 days.” So in his current detail, MacArthur exercises nearly two hours a day—using a specially designed resistance training machine called the IRED—just to try to maintain his muscle. Hardly a time-efficient solution.
Enter the Space Cycle. Because of its ingenious design, the rotating exercise gym creates artificial gravity, up to seven times the normal amount on Earth. Caiozzo believes this will not only prevent muscle loss in space, but that it will stimulate growth—without the need for weights. And in just a few minutes a day, not hours. “There’s no magic,” he says. “It just capitalizes on what we already know about muscle growth.”
Granted, most of us aren’t worried about bulking up on Mars just yet. But the Space Cycle illustrates an important point: The most effective workout isn’t necessarily the longest or the hardest; it’s simply the smartest. And the several hours a day every guy spends sitting on his kiester while commuting, driving the desk, settling into the couch, and hitting the sack isn’t a bad approximation of weightlessness. So you may have more in common with Commander MacArthur than you think.
“Building muscle takes sweat, guts, and determination,” relates Cosgrove, who’s always ready with an antidote. “So why make it harder than it needs to be?"
INSIDE THE MUSCLE LABORATORIES–Adam Campbell
“HAVE YOU HAD LUNCH YET?” the rocket scientist asks, as he straps me into the Space Cycle. I nod yes, but it’s not an invitation; he wants to be well informed. You see, I’m about to be spun at 3Gs in a hypergravity exercise gym, a prototype designed for a Mars space station. For a visual, picture doing squats in a weight room power rack with one potentially catastrophic difference: The rack—and you—are swung horizontally around a steel pole at more than 60 revolutions per minute. Sort of like a human tetherball.
“You’ll be fine,” he says. “But whatever you do, don’t look sideways.” I don’t need to ask why.
Vincent Caiozzo isn’t a mad scientist. He’s a professor of orthopedic medicine at the University of California-Irvine who’s been studying muscle for more than 30 years. The NASA-funded Space Cycle represents the pinnacle of his lifelong research. And, I think, a great investment opportunity. “Exercising in the Space Cycle is like hanging a barbell on every atom of your body,” he tells me. Clearly, it’s infomercial gold.
Only Caiozzo isn’t concerned with helping men build bigger biceps; his research interest is far less marketable. Like that of almost all muscle scientists, it’s purpose is to find better ways to prevent the muscle loss that occurs with aging, cancer, spinal injuries, and, in the case of the Space Cycle, interplanetary travel.
But the lessons these researchers learn can still benefit those of us who want to look more buff at the beach. In fact, by using their findings to better understand the biology of muscle, you can build your body faster and more simply than ever. The trick, however, is in knowing how to apply the hard science to your primary goal: building hard muscle.
ALWYN COSGROVE DOESN’T CLAIM to be a muscle scientist. But in a sense, he’s become one by default. Since Cosgrove opened Results Fitness in 2000, he’s kept a detailed account of every single session that’s been conducted. An effort that was at first economically motivated: “Clients pay for the fastest results,” he says. “So to compete with the gym down the street, I had to find out what works the best.” And that meant collecting workout data on a large number of average men who were using a variety of different training methods.
Unlike commercial health clubs, Cosgrove’s facility—located in Santa Clarita, California—offers only semi-private training, meaning each workout is designed, monitored, and recorded by a member of the staff. Consider that in a typical week, it hosts 400 workouts, providing feedback on 20,800 sessions a year. To equal those numbers, a regular guy would have to work out every single day for 57 years. In effect, that makes Cosgrove’s gym a bona-fide research laboratory. And his gym-rat clients, it seems, human lab rats. All of which underscores the real-world relevance of Cosgrove’s findings.
To explain these observations, he’s tried to bridge the academic research of men like Caiozzo with the practical application of exercises, sets, and repetitions. “A 19th Century English biologist named Thomas Huxley once said that ‘science is nothing but organized common sense,’” explains Cosgrove. “Which is what training should be.”
The end result of Cosgrove’s human experiment is a muscle-building plan that’s not just gym-proven, it’s supported by science. And because it shatters nearly 40 years of bodybuilding dogma, it will likely surprise you.
THE BIOLOGY OF MUSCLE isn’t, in fact, rocket science, as Dr. Caiozzo would be the first to point out. At its most basic level is the SAID Principle, an acronym for the “specific adaptation to imposed demand.” Think of this as the use-it-or-lose-it law. “When a muscle fiber is exposed to a regular challenge, it makes structural adaptations in order to reduce stress on the body,” says Caiozzo. In other words, it might grow bigger and stronger, or become more resistant to fatigue. Which is why you can perform everyday functions—like walking up the stairs or picking up a light object—with little effort.
Now let’s apply the SAID principle to your workout. When you lift weights, you cause tiny tears in your muscle fibers known as microtrauma. This accelerates a process called muscle protein synthesis, which uses amino acids to repair and reinforce the fibers, making them resistant to damage in the future. And although this happens at a microscopic level, the effect becomes visibly evident over time—in the form of bigger arms, broader shoulders, and a thicker chest. Consider it human adaptation at its finest.
Understanding this provides you with a logical rationale for how often you should train your muscles. In multiple studies over the last decade, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have reported that muscle protein synthesis is elevated for up to 48 hours after a resistance training session. So if you work out on Monday at 7 p.m., your body is in muscle-growth mode until Wednesday at 7. p.m. After 48 hours, though, the biological stimulus for your body to build new muscle returns to normal.
On paper, this supports Cosgrove’s first assertion: “Performing total-body workouts, three times a week, is the most effective way gain muscle.” Unfortunately, that advice in direct contradiction with what most guys actually do. That’s because almost everyone subscribes to a leftover from the Stay Hungry days of weightlifting: what Cosgrove calls “bodypart training.”
The idea is to divide the body into specific muscle groups, or bodyparts, and then dedicate an entire day to working each separately. For example, you might perform exercises for your chest on Monday, your back on Tuesday, your shoulders on Wednesday, and so on. The result is a workout regimen that typically requires five to six days a week. But even though you’re training daily, each muscle group is only targeted once a week. So in essence, those muscles grow for just two days out every seven. With total-body workouts, though, you can work each muscle more often. “By training a muscle three times a week, it spends more total time growing,” says Cosgrove.
Science agrees. Anatomically speaking, you can’t isolate muscle groups in the first place. Which is Cosgrove’s other beef with bodypart training. Imagine for a moment, if you could strip the skin away from your muscles, exposing them for clear view. You’d clearly see that they’re interconnected, surrounding the body like a unified web. This is because all of your muscles are enclosed in a tough connective tissue called fascia. And since fascia attaches to bone and other muscles, it creates “functional” relationships between seemingly separate muscle groups.
“Even a small movement of your upper arm triggers a complicated network of muscles from your shoulder down to your hip,” says Bill Hartman, P.T., C.S.C.S., a physical therapist in Indianapolis, Indiana. Here’s why: Your latissimus dorsi (or “lats”), the largest muscle of your back, attaches to your upper arm bone, your shoulder blade, your spine, and your thoracolumbar fascia—a layer of deep tissue that connects to your spine and pelvis. Your glute, or rear hip muscle, attaches to your pelvis. See the connections?
This point isn’t debatable; it’s a scientific fact. “It’s impossible to isolate a muscle with any exercise; you can’t even pick up a pencil with just one muscle,” says Cosgrove. He uses the example of a popular exercise known as the bent-over row. If you subscribe to bodypart training, it’s a “back” exercise. But because of the interconnection between the muscles and connective tissues of the hips and back, your hamstrings and glutes are contracted for the entire exercise. So you’re not only working your back, you’re challenging your legs as well. And don’t forget the involvement of your forearms and biceps in pulling the bar to your chest. “You can separate your workouts by muscle groups, but based on science, it’s illogical,” says Cosgrove. “You’re not actually separating anything.” Which is another reason that total-body training just makes good sense.
Of course, semantics aside, everyone acknowledges that you can emphasize a muscle group by choosing the appropriate exercises. However, since bodypart training is generally performed intensely on consecutive days, it impedes the recovery process. “The nutrients your body needs to repair muscle damage from the previous day are allocated toward providing energy for your workout instead,” says Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., an exercise and nutrition researcher at the University of Connecticut. “Your muscles grow best when your body is resting, not working.” This isn’t an issue with Cosgrove’s total-body recommendation, since there’s a built-in recovery day between each session.
THERE IS A PRACTICAL ARGUMENT against total-body training.
If a typical chest workout takes 30 minutes or more to complete, you’d have to spend hours in the gym to work your entire body. “That’s based on the assumption that a chest workout needs to take 30 minutes,” says Cosgrove. He goes on to explain that a typical chest day might consist of three sets of four exercises, for a total of 12 sets. Keep in mind that’s a seven-day total. But Cosgrove says you could perform that same amount of work—12 total sets—in the same time period by doing four sets, three days a week. “I’ve found that training works like a prescription,” says Cosgrove. “You wouldn’t take an entire bottle of Advil on Monday to relieve pain all week; you’d take smaller doses at more regular intervals.”
And a recent study at the University of Alabama supports this notion. The researchers had one group of men train each muscle group once a week for three months; another group performed the same number of total sets weekly, but split them up equally between three total-body workouts. The result? The men who lifted more frequently gained nine pounds of muscle—five more than those who only trained each muscle only once a week.
But to save even more time, Cosgrove employs another strategy: Alternating sets. When possible, he pairs exercises that work opposite muscle groups, and cuts the rest between sets in half.
It’s a concept based on the scientific work of Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his contributions in the field of physiology and neuroscience. Sherringtons’s law of reciprocal inhibition states that “for every neural activation of a muscle, there is a corresponding inhibition of the opposing muscle.” That means when you work your chest muscles, the corresponding back muscles are forced to relax, thereby resting.
So instead of waiting two minutes between sets of a bench press, you can perform one set of the bench press, rest for just one minute, and then do a bent-over row. After you finish, you’ll rest again, and then repeat the entire process until you complete all sets of both exercises. “In an average workout, this technique saves at least 8 to 10 minutes,” says Cosgrove. “And without sacrificing performance.”
There’s another piece to this puzzle, though. In analyzing thousands of workout logs, Cosgrove developed a volume-threshold theory. “It seems that growth occurs once a muscle has been exposed to 90 to 120 seconds of total tension,” he says.
For an example, let’s say it takes five seconds to complete one repetition. That means one set of eight repetitions would place your muscles under tension for 40 seconds. So using Cosgrove’s theory, you’d only need to do three sets—a total of 120 seconds—to perform enough exercise to stimulate muscle growth. Likewise, with four sets of five repetitions, or two sets of 12 repetitions.
However, even Cosgrove insists this is more theory than fact. Call it an original hypothesis, and primarily for one reason: Human studies simply haven’t compared a wide variety of set and repetition ranges, or even controlled for the duration of muscle tension. So there’s no simply no data to draw from. At least not, until you look elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
“SOME MEN SIMPLY GAIN muscle faster, easier, and to a greater degree than others, which is why we study rats,” says Caiozzo. Rats, unlike humans, are a homogenous species; meaning, there’s little variation from one to another. And that allows scientists to more accurately study the enzymes, metabolic pathways, and genes that regulate muscle-growth.
Of course, actual lab rats aren’t gym rats by nature. So in 1992, Caiozzo and his team developed a rat-sized resistance training apparatus—a device that looks like a high-tech leg curl machine. However, since they couldn’t simply ask a group of rats to lift weights, or even know how much effort one is exerting, there was another step involved.
The researchers permanently implanted a stainless steel wire in the gastrocnemius muscle of each rat’s hind limb, and ran the wire under the skin to the skull, where two small screws had been inserted using a handheld drill. By connecting an electrode to the outside of the screws, the scientists were then able to manually stimulate the muscle with an electric current, causing it to contract with maximal force. This allowed them to mimic a human weightlifting workout, complete with sets and repetitions.
To find out if it worked, the rats were “encouraged” to perform four sets of 10 repetitions, with each repetition lasting two seconds—a total tension-time of 80 seconds. The results were disappointing: The group didn’t increase muscle size in an eight-week period. Which either meant that the machine didn’t work or that the volume of exercise was too low. So the researchers tweaked the workout. When the contractions were increased to four seconds in duration, doubling the total tension-time, the rats gained a significant amount of muscle mass—and in just four weeks, not eight.
Of course, this doesn’t authoritatively validate Cosgrove’s volume-threshold theory in humans, but it does provide a biological precedence that supports it. And it just may be that some his data is simply ahead of it’s time.
“GO HEAVY, OR GO HOME” is a common saying among bodybuilders. And while it’s crucial that you use a weight that provides a challenging load, the mantra is flawed. That’s because muscle fibers can grow in two ways. The first is when the basic contracting unit of a muscle fiber—known as a sarcomere (see “Anatomy of a Muscle Fiber” TK DIRECTION)—increases in number and density. This type of growth leads to strength gains, and can by accomplished by using heavy weights that only allow one to seven repetitions.
The second type of growth, however, occurs when your muscles are forced to contract for longer periods of time. Typically, that means using lighter loads that allow you to complete 12 to 15 repetitions. Think of it as improving the endurance of the muscle fiber. This increases the number of energy-producing structures within the muscle fiber, increasing its size. So you don’t get significantly stronger, but you do get bigger.
Using a repetition range the falls between the two, causes a combination of both types of growth, but each to a lesser degree. And that’s why Cosgrove uses all three repetition-ranges. For instance, he might prescribe five repetitions for each exercise on Monday, 10 repetitions on Wednesday, and 15 repetitions on Friday. “It not only leads to better growth, but it helps to keep from hitting plateaus,” says Cosgrove.
And indeed, in a 2003 study, Arizona State University researchers discovered that men who alternated their repetition ranges in each of three weekly training sessions gained twice as much strength as men who performed the same number of repetitions every workout. To Cosgrove, it’s just another of case of a logical approach generating a logical result.
THE SPACE CYCLE is a strange experience. Although my body is nearly parallel to the floor as I exercise, it feels like I’m upright, and there’s no sensation of spinning. Provided, of course, that I don’t violate the “sideways” rule. (Doing so, by the way, really sucks. Well, actually, it leads to the opposite of sucking.) Dr. Caiozzo explains that the laws of physics prevent me from falling off, much the same as if I were in a rollercoaster. Which explains why I feel a little wobbly when my ride ends.
Caiozzo invented the Space Cycle to help remedy one of NASA’s biggest headaches. “Due to the lack of gravity, an astronaut’s muscles waste away quickly,” he says.
As a veteran of four space flights, it’s a reality that Commander Bill MacArthur knows firsthand. When I spoke to him by phone in early February, he was living on the International Space Station, a six-month tour-of-duty 120 miles above the Earth’s surface. To stress the physical impact of space-travel, he shared this memory from his first mission: “When we landed, I bent over to give my wife a hug, and she had to catch me because the bending wasn’t going to stop,” he says. “That was after just 14 days.” So in his current detail, MacArthur exercises nearly two hours a day—using a specially designed resistance training machine called the IRED—just to try to maintain his muscle. Hardly a time-efficient solution.
Enter the Space Cycle. Because of its ingenious design, the rotating exercise gym creates artificial gravity, up to seven times the normal amount on Earth. Caiozzo believes this will not only prevent muscle loss in space, but that it will stimulate growth—without the need for weights. And in just a few minutes a day, not hours. “There’s no magic,” he says. “It just capitalizes on what we already know about muscle growth.”
Granted, most of us aren’t worried about bulking up on Mars just yet. But the Space Cycle illustrates an important point: The most effective workout isn’t necessarily the longest or the hardest; it’s simply the smartest. And the several hours a day every guy spends sitting on his kiester while commuting, driving the desk, settling into the couch, and hitting the sack isn’t a bad approximation of weightlessness. So you may have more in common with Commander MacArthur than you think.
“Building muscle takes sweat, guts, and determination,” relates Cosgrove, who’s always ready with an antidote. “So why make it harder than it needs to be?"
