Strength is a skill (Part 2): Practical methods for skill acquisition

As I discussed in the previous blog: efficient motor patterns are crucial for strength expression and determine how much of our potential we actually use. The efficiency of our motor patterns determines our “skill”. The process of acquiring and improving our motor patterns is called skill acquisition and helps us to get closer to our full potential.

This is most evident in people who are new to (strength) training. During their first weeks or months of strength training, they often tend to make huge strength gains without a corresponding increase in muscle mass to account for the extra force. This is often referred to as “beginner-gains” and is a result of them becoming more skilled in coordinating the movement, they trained their brain more than their muscles!

Even though these gains are often most visible in beginners, neuromuscular improvements can still be achieved by experienced athletes. A good example of this is looking at weightlifters that compete within the same weightclass for years but keep improving their lifts. These athletes obviously don’t rely on additional muscle mass to push their performance, so their performance increase relies on technical or neurological improvements.

So how does this work? Simply speaking, we know that our movement is directed by the central nervous system and information is distributed through a wide network of neurons and their pathways. Research has shown us that we can strengthen or reinforce these pathways by improving neural activation and the transmission of information through those pathways leading to improved neuromuscular coordination, or simply skill. With regards to training, I will discuss three mechanisms through which those connections can be strengthened: Specificity, association, and persistency.

Volume

The first mechanism of reinforcement is specificity: by using a neural pathway we strengthen it and improve its ability to generate and transmit signals. The more often we use a pathway, the stronger and more efficient the pathway becomes.

Therefore, the first technique to improve a certain pattern is to obtain volume in that specific movement: Doing lots and lots of repetitions. Because we naturally tend to use the strongest pathways, the more often a pattern is executed, the more dominant it becomes and the more likely your body is to default to that pattern. The brain will default to its strongest sequence. So, the stronger we can make a pathway, the more likely it is to be used.

Perfect practice

It is important to realize that specific reinforcement happens every time any pathway is used, not just when we actively try to improve. This has important implications for the way in which we practice because our brain does not discriminate “good” from “bad” movements. This means that when we poorly execute a movement, that “bad” pattern will be reinforced too and becomes more likely to be used. Therefore it is important that practice is deliberate and as perfect as possible. So, the second technique for improving and stimulating proper motor patterns is perfect practice. This has important implications with regard to learning new skills under fatigue.

Practice fresh

When learning or perfecting a skill we aim to make the proper execution of that skill the dominant, strongest, motor pattern. We want to get to a point where the perfect movement becomes our default. When we are in the early stage of skill acquisition, we need active mental engagement and focus to learn and execute a movement. At this stage, the new motor pattern is relatively weak and inconsistent. And as discussed previously, to create a strong consistent motor pattern you need a lot of stimulation, while the old or incorrect patterns should get as little reinforcement as possible.

However, when we fatigue, we often become less aware, focussed, and coordinated and often fail to move correctly. We tend to start using and reinforcing our old or improper motor patterns. Apart from increasing injury risk, this is problematic when it comes to learning new skills because this creates a negative spiral. We stimulate the wrong movement patterns thereby making the proper movement pattern because less dominant, which in turn leads to a higher likelihood of using the wrong pattern again. This is why skill acquisition is the most effective in a non-fatigued state. Surely, most sports require you to execute while fatigued and there is definitely a time for training those qualities. However, you should be aware of the risks and impact on movement quality and reinforcement. I often advise minimizing this kind of training until you have sufficient mastery of the skill.

Grease the groove

A very interesting method that makes use of the idea that strength is a skill and uses the principles of volume and perfect practices to acquire the skill is called “Greasing the Groove”. The method was introduced by Pavel Tsatsouline in his book Power to the People. In this method a certain skill, say Pull-ups, is practised multiple times per week or even per day for a limited number of reps and sets, often 1 or 2 sets of 5 reps or less. The idea is that every time a correct Pull-up is done, the neural pathways involved are positively reinforced. This means you become better at coordinating the muscles involved, leading to increased strength and mastery!

By doing only a very limited amount of reps muscular fatigue and damage are minimized which allows both for a higher training volume and reduces enforcement of wrong pathways. Additionally, because the method minimizes fatigue (a.k.a. recovery time) and mass gains it has very interesting implications for, for instance, in-season athletes or those competing in sports with weight classes.

Movement variation

Next, let’s look at the mechanism associativity: Skills acquired in one movement carry over into related movements. This means that competencies obtained in, for instance, a squat, will to a certain extent improve one’s movement quality in a different but related movement, say a jump.

This principle is extensively used in the conjugate training system for powerlifting. In this system, every 2-3 weeks a different variation of a squat, deadlift and bench press is used as the main training exercises. Like doing a box squat instead of a back squat, or a sumo deadlift instead of conventional. This has two major advantages, first, the novelty of the exercises creates a new stimulus for adaptation, and second because the angles of force and thus muscle engagement changes there is less chance of over-use injuries. Yet more important for this discussion, is that because of the similarity, the additional gains transfer over to the competition lifts to a large degree.

Isometrics

Lastly, there is the mechanism of persistency: long-lasting or continuous stimulation of a pathway strengthens its connections. This mechanism can be easily explained in the context of isometrics.

An isometric contraction is one in which you are creating tension/force in a muscle or group of muscles without the angle of the involved joints changing. The term isometric is also often used for exercises in which an Isometric contraction is maintained in a specific position for a certain amount of time, for instance, a wall sit.

The argument for doing isometrics to acquire skill is twofold. The first is based on the persistency mechanism. To explain this, let’s take a squat as an example and say we want to improve the bottom position of the squat. Improvement through persistency would mean that we’d have to spend a lot of time in that position. If we just squat for reps: up and down, we’re only in that bottom position for a fraction of a second every time, needing hundreds or thousands of reps to accumulate substantial time under tension. To work around this and accumulate a lot of time in this position we can just hold the bottom of the squat and stay in that position for an extended period. This way we accumulate lots of time in that specific position and through the persistency mechanism, strengthen the neural pathways involved in its coordination.

This is often done in sports like sprinting, where extreme isometrics lunges are used to strengthen positions. But also in the sport of Olympic weightlifting where it is common to stop and hold at certain key positions to acquire time under tension in those positions and develop mastery over the optimal trajectory of the barbell.

Now the second argument is based on the hypothesis that once you master the key positions of an exercise or movement, the body will figure out the steps in between. This idea comes from the fact that movement is represented by movement intention or “end-goal” in our brain. Meaning that there is, for instance, a specific area in the brain that is responsible for bringing the hand to the mouth, and that stimulation of that area always brings the hand to the mouth regardless of where the hand is when the area was stimulated. This makes good a case for using (positional) isometrics to develop motor patterns by developing competency at key points of a movement at an extended period of time. Thereby improving our ability at that movement overall.

Wrapping it all up, there are a number of to improve motor patterns and become more “skilled” at a certain movement. The first is to practice often to engrain the motor pattern in your brain, but practice perfect to make sure that the right patterns are engrained. To make sure the right patterns are used, it is important to practice fresh. Additionally, practising similar movements can help to become better at a movement while being less injury-prone and widening your movement base. And lastly, it is increasing the time under tension at key positions, either through stopping at different parts of a lift or through isometrics at key positions is a great way to improve skill.

If you’re interested in applying these techniques to your own training. Click on this link, to find out how I can help you!