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Originally Posted by arthur 1. You Said - Without getting into the superiority of certain bodyweight (or bw + more weight) exercises. Do you mean body ewight exercises are superior and how.

Well notice I said "certain" bodyweight exercises are superior. I don't use adjectives like certain lightly! But it’s like saying squats are superior to leg press…which they are.

It's actually a very complicated question that gets into a lot of gray areas such as closed chain kinetic vs. open chain kinetic exercises. (squats and pullups = closed chain, pulldowns and leg press = open chain). When you start getting into what is superior you have to ask the question superior for what? THAT discussion is way too big and not even exercise scientists have it all figured out so it would be silly for me to try and prove. I will say that closed chain exercises TEND to be more functional but this is not true accross the board and certainly not true for all athletic endeavors.


I can say pretty confidently that pullups (and I mean pullups or chinups) as I mentioned will give better results than pulldowns. It has a better transfer to real world activities in which the movement is relevant. Pullups improve your pulldowns much more so than pulldowns improve your pullups. A rock climber, for instance, who trains with pulldowns instead of pullups is not a very smart rock climber! And they give you better lats, a bigger, stonger back. This based on my experience, the experience of others I know, and numerous training gurus. You can't cheat on pullups. You can't get your lower back into it and use momentum.

But only if you can do one, of course. If you can't then pulldowns to start or rack pulls (rack chins) are good to start with. There is also the "assisted pullups" thing.

If you're wondering about the closed vs. open thing here is a simple def from Paul Chek but remember we're getting into all sorts of gray areas here and most of the research people cite is inappropriate since it's all about rehabilitating ACL injuries.

Here is are definitions from Paul Chek: “To simplify the terms, OPEN KINETIC CHAIN exercises are those exercises in which the force applied by the body is great enough to overcome the resistance. An example of an open chain exercise would be a bench press, or any leg press which allows the force applied to move the load away from the body.

In contrast, CLOSED KINETIC CHAIN EXERCISES are those in which the force applied is not great enough to overcome the resistance. Examples would be the push-up and squat exercises.

To clarify for the novice list reader, even though the load applied during the squat is on the body, the force generated is applied to the ground, not the bar. To move the bar, the lifter must apply a force against the earth great enough to overcome the resistance created by the load on the bar.”

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Originally Posted by arthur 2. actual structural protein, sarcoplasmic hypertrophy what do these terms mean.

Increase in muscle size is called muscle hypertophy. It can be caused by either an increase in the cross sectional area of a muscle fiber (hypertrophy) or by and increase in the numver of motor fiber (hyperplasia) although it is widely debated whether this second actually occurs to any appreciable level in humans.

So I’ll stick with the basic definitions of the former, hypertrophy.

There are two types. Sarcoplasmic hypertophy is the increase in size of the
Sarcoplasm. It’s associtated with an increase in noncontractile tissues. Think of it as the “jelly” in the cell. Cross sectional area will increase but filament density will decrease with sarcoplasmic hypertophy, with no increase in strength.

Myopfibrillar hypertophy is an enlargement of the muscle fiber when more myofibrils are formed. So filiament density increases and therefore strength.

Here is some reading:

http://www.bodybuilding.net/training...rophy-1909.htm

http://www.weighttrainersunited.com/hypertrophy.html

http://staff.washington.edu/griffin/hypertrophy.txt

http://hypertrophy-research.com/index.html

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If you act sanctimonious I will just list out your logical fallacies until you get pissed off and spew blasphemous remarks.