Squat Every Day, page 10
Eysenck’s ideas on extraversion and neuroticism hint at this. Brains can come wired with dispositions for more impulsive, more energetic personalities, and people built that way will demonstrate this by having less of what we’d call “self-control”.
The most compelling research I’ve found to support the idea of brain-influenced dispositions comes from Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan. In a series of experiments in infants and, several years later, follow-ups with those same children as toddlers, Kagan found exactly this.43
Kagan first ran an experiment with 460 four-month-old infants to assess their responses to environmental stimulation. The children were placed in a stressful environment, and their the responses, measured by crying and “motor activity” (squirming), were recorded. The infants who had the strongest responses were categorized as “high reactive”, while those with mild responses were labeled “low reactive”.
Follow-ups at 14 and 21 months used similar methods, testing sensitivity to lemon juice on the tongue and reactions to unfamiliar people and recording the distress or fear reaction (if any). Finally, a sample of 193 toddlers were tested again at four and a half years, based on their reactions and verbal replies to an unfamiliar tester as well as their willingness to play with other children the same age.
What Kagan discovered was two distinctive behavioral styles based on responses to the unfamiliar. Inhibited behavior is what we’d otherwise call shy or avoidant. Inhibited children, as Kagan discovered, react to the novel and uncertain with avoidance or distress. These are the quiet people who will go out of their way to avoid conflict and novel or uncertain situations. Uninhibited behavior, in contrast, is defined by sociable and out-going behavior, including a draw towards the unfamiliar.
Where it gets interesting is in the connection between reactivity and temperament. The high reactors, who make up about 20% of sampled European American populations, are said by Kagan to “possess a low threshold of activation in the amygdala to sensory stimulation”. Low reactive infants, around 40% of the samples, are considered to have high thresholds.
In other words, the behavioral styles of these children as infants was a strong predictor of how they’d behave as they grew up. By all appearances, this is not learned behavior. That these responses happen in young infants suggests that it’s the innate sensitivity of the brain that leads to these behavioral dispositions.
You can imagine your brain as something like the receiver in a radio. It’s always soaking up signals from the environment: sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures. All of that sensation is information, a background noise to the brain through which it constantly sorts, looking for anything interesting.
A quiet room with dim lights and soft music playing will be a low-stimulus environment. Front row at a rock concert, overflowing with sights and sounds and the raw energy of an excited crowd, will be high-stimulus. The brain has more to handle, more to sort, and more to work to do.
Reactivity can be thought of as how sensitive or numb you are to this environmental noise. Someone with low reactivity will be virtually immune. They will be literal stimulus-seekers for whom lots of bustle and excitement feels normal.
With their gain turned way up, however, high reactors find that kind of sensory input overwhelming, and this turns up as introverted behavior. Mental stimulus of any sort leaves them exhausted, so they turtle up and hide away in quiet places away from crowds and excitement.
Now, you might think, so what? So I don’t like being in a loud night club. So I don’t like sitting in a quiet room reading all day. What does that have to do with strength training or recovery? Well, it turns out that reactivity affects more than your feelings and behaviors. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky details how reactivity and your temperament are also strong predictors of how stressed-out you are likely to be.
Our sensitive high reactor can be compared to a neurotic “Type A” personality. Any little thing sets them off, and once they’re going it can be hours before they settle back down. It’s easy for a high reactor to stay soaked in stress hormones for hours on end, set off by an ever-compounding series of morning traffic, meetings, bosses, co-workers, and traffic on the way home. These people set themselves off, yes, but it’s in their nature to do so.
Being effectively numb to the same pressures, low-reactors can handle much more without flinching. The low reactor isn’t a psychopath, as they experience emotions and react to life-events as anyone would, but the effects of stress aren’t pronounced. It takes an extraordinary event to provoke a response, and they’re much better at turning all the coping systems off after the fact.
You’d be absolutely right if you guessed that these neural and psychological differences translate to different physical outcomes. Stress is stress. Your brain is the master controller, and it doesn’t care if the threat is a third-degree burn or you clenching your teeth for 16 straight hours because you don’t know how to relax. To the high reactor, intense exercise becomes just another log on the bonfire, whereas a low reactor may not even notice.
The Activity Set-Point
Back in the 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner at McGill University got the idea to hook electrodes into the brains of lab rats. This wasn’t done to make an army of cyborg rats, as was typical of mad scientists at the time. The electrodes targeted specific areas in the rat-brains, and the rats were then given access to a switch that delivered a tiny dose of electricity to the area in question. These experiments score pretty high on the creepiness scale, but they revealed a set of interesting behaviors on the part of the rats.
The rats learned to hit the lever repeatedly, up to 100 times a minute, and keep up that pace until they were too physically exhausted to move. They’d run across electric-shock grids, or ignore warnings of impending electrification, to hit the lever. If given a choice between food and self-stimulation, these rats would starve themselves to death.
Olds and Milner knew that they’d found a powerful motivator for rat behavior.
Later work revealed that these wirehead rats were lighting up a particularly powerful network, a circuit made up of the ventral tegmental area (VTA for short) and its cohort the nucleus accumbens. Together these make up the mesolimbic dopamine system, which Olds and Milner labeled ― prematurely, as we’ll see ― the brain’s pleasure or reward centers.
Mammal brains are divided into specialized networks that use different neurotransmitters to communicate. The mesolimbic system runs on dopamine, which you’ll recall as serotonin’s partner in central fatigue, and is, as wirehead rats indicate, one of the most powerful motivators of behavior in the mammal brain.
Of course, there are easier ways to light up the mesolimbic system than mad science experiments, albeit with similar results. Drugs like nicotine, cocaine, and the entire amphetamine family all work on the mesolimbic system to varying degrees (and with familiar results).
Surprisingly, so does exercise.
We see this connection play out repeatedly in addiction studies, whether the addiction is cocaine, the slot machines, or cookies. Addicts are driven to go get. This loop between wanting and doing also shows up in voluntary exercise, as demonstrated in recent work by Amy Knab of Appalachian State University and Timothy Lightfoot at the University of North Carolina.44 Arguing for a strong genetic component regulating our desire to exercise (or not), Knab and Lightfoot have tested their hypothesis in two lineages of mice selectively bred for differences in exercise behavior. Mice in what they call the high activity group will run on their exercise wheels for up to 17 times longer than their less-athletic cousins, without any prompting or coaxing.
In a range of supporting research, they note a strong connection with dopamine transmission, which is genetically determined, and the behavior of the animal subjects.45
Knab and Lightfoot argue that this neurologically-motivated desire for exercise likely apply to humans just as well as mice. You may wonder how, given the many and obvious differences between humans and rodents, but it’s not that far-fetched in this instance. Sometimes rodent research is way off base, but in this case the relevant brain structures are evolutionarily old and conserved across mammalian brains. Just by paying attention we can see that even us primates have a range of dispositions for activity or laziness; what Knab and Lightfoot’s findings tell us is that there is likely to be a deep-seated biological connection.
If true (and for the sake of the argument I’m going to assume it is), then naturally-active people probably have a positive response to activity, in which exercise “normalizes” their brain chemistry (and thus makes them “feel normal”). This translates to something like a compulsion or desire to move around.
Meanwhile the couch potatoes are quite happy to stay sedentary. They lack the deep-seated drive to get up and run. For them, exercise may be another annoyance ― or, in a suggestion that will doubtless be controversial, may actually make them feel worse than their naturally-active counterparts.
Now you may be wondering exactly what this means. So some people move more and others donft. What’s the big deal? Should you use your natural proclivities as justification for training lots (or not at all)?
Responders
Over the years, I’ve noticed that athletes in general, and strength athletes in particular, fall into one of two categories. The first group trains the traditional way ― brutally hard work in the gym, and lots of rest between those workouts. For bodybuilders, this means splitting up body parts so that each muscle group only gets trashed once a week. Powerlifters and other strength-focused athletes likewise train each major lift with one workout, or one heavy and one lighter session.
Each workout challenges the mind as well as the body. The watchwords are intensity and exhaustion, whether training more HIT style or with a bodybuilder’s volume-heavy pumping and blasting. Leave it all in the gym and then rest those muscles for the next week.
The other group trains more. They do more sets and schedule more workouts. These people train hard, but with less focus on raw intensity as the goal in itself. They make up for it by doing more work. I’ve noticed this in your “anaerobic” athletes: sprinters, throwers, cyclists, middle-distance runners, martial artists, football and rugby players, triathletes. You could even include those Olympic weightlifters who train multiple days each week, or pure strength athletes like Anthony Ditillo and Bob Peoples.
Between these two groups, it seems like people respond best to one or the other (and swear that nothing else could possibly work as well for anyone). Why, I don’t know exactly. Some of it is obviously due to the needs of the sport or activity. Beyond that, even limiting ourselves to powerlifters or weightlifters or strongmen, there are certainly many potential biological candidates, some we’ve discussed, others we haven’t ― and that’s without even getting into lifestyle or social reasons.
Whatever the cause, some people genuinely do love to train “a lot”, and others don’t enjoy more than the bare minimum.
I don’t really know what to call these groups, so I’ve used the word “responder” to distinguish the two. That’s a loaded term with lots of potential to cause confusion, so I want to clarify what I mean.
First, we can look at the activity set-point. Like the well-bred mice, if you crave stimulus, you’ll want to train and train hard. If you don’t, you won’t. So people who respond well, in the sense that being active is a natural disposition, are one dimension. They respond well to activity and, in particular, mentally- or emotionally-intense activity.
We can also define responsiveness as a physical trait. Studies that measure strength gains and hypertrophy gains often note that some individuals do remarkably well, others remarkably poor, and there’s a comfortable middle ground of average gains for everyone else. A high responder in this sense is a person who sees an extraordinary gain from any single bout of exercise; a low responder sees very little return. These differences seem to lie right down at the cellular level, so they’re likely genetic in nature. Some people really are going to grow more or get stronger than others, both in absolute terms over a career as well as their response to any given workout.
Based on these two ideas, let’s do a little thought experiment. Say you have someone who is a remarkable responder to exercise, but also scores as high reactive. This person won’t do well with high levels of stimulus, and like the low-activity mice in Knab and Lightfoot’s experiments, probably won’t care to do a lot of training.
What you’re going to have is a person who gets brutally strong on almost any kind of workout plan, and who may feel unusually bad after any intensive, exhaustive mental effort.
Take the opposite case, someone with poor physical responsiveness but low reactivity. This person will be outgoing, energetic, probably moving all the time, but will find it difficult to get stronger or add muscle.
These two polar opposites are probably not real people. They fit certain stereotypes, yes ― one is a Typical Meathead, the other a Typical Runner. The strict categories aren’t the point here. What I’m suggesting is that responsiveness has more than one dimension. The results you get from exercising are distinct from your actual “recovery” ability.
I’m going to make a connection that might seem tenuous, but hear me out. Reactivity determines how sensitive you are to the environment, and that shapes your desire to exercise. Another way of saying this is that the naturally-active low-reactive person is more resistant to fatigue and to stress.
At the other end of the continuum, the natural couch potato is disposed to watch TV, read books, and play on the computer all day. There’s no deeper motivation driving them to exercise or gamble or engage in risky criminal behavior to normalize themselves, so their default state is to sit down.
It’s not just that, though. It takes conscious effort, an act of will we might say, in order to get up and exercise and, when encountering fatigue, to push through it.
We could say that, just as the uninhibited type is resistant to fatigue, a more introspective high-reactor will be more susceptible to it. Their minds simply aren’t constituted to push through exhaustion. Intense exercise depletes them, making said activity feel harder than it should. The next day, with a combo of physical stress and mental depletion, they’re going to “feel” a greater hit to perceived recovery.
The high-reactor has the ultimate double-whammy, less able to handle intense effort and feeling more beat-up for their trouble. It’s no wonder so many people have convinced themselves they have “poor recovery”. Some people may just be built that way.
These are your alleged “hardgainers” with the worst of all worlds. Not only do they not enjoy intense, exhausting exercise thanks to high reactivity, but they also see relatively poor results for any amount of training they do. For these unfortunates, intense strength training won’t be fun, won’t be very productive, and they’ll feel beat to hell after the fact.
Top lifters are natural intensity responders. Low-volume, low-frequency programs work for these people not because they can’t handle more but because they don’t need more in order to reach world-class levels of strength. This unique responsiveness to training, the fact that they can get so strong on minimal training, defines them as outliers and “genetic freaks”.
Take a person like this and add in the fatigue resistance of a low-reactor and you’ve got a monster of an athlete in the making ― someone who not only wants to train all the time but who also has the body to make the most of it.
The poor responder ― I’d rather use this than “hardgainer” ― gets confused because typical training recommendations don’t separate recovery ability from muscle and strength gains.
True, these people see smaller gains in return for each workout, and exhausting workouts beat them up too much to repeat often. Poor recovery, as we see now, has a mental dimension, one which partly stems from neurological factors.
It sounds like a dead end, but I think there’s a way out.
Poor responders aren’t necessarily unsuited for hard training (as if all kinds of hard training are the same). They are, however, unsuited to single doses of high neurological intensity. Being sensitive to fatigue, these people may actually be “volume responders”.
If you follow along from my basic premise ― that the biological machinery of nerves and muscles responds to repetition as well as effort ― then you can see that, by doing less, the poor responder reduces an already small stimulus. These folks need more stimulus to make up for the shortfall, not less.
The trick is to stimulate without exhaustion. Spread the work around, racking up higher volumes of work while avoiding emotional exhaustion. That’s the prescription for the poor responder. More accumulated volume by way of higher frequency. More quality practice. More work at a lower dose of intensity.
Plenty of spectacularly strong people got there by squatting once a week, but this says nothing about the fate of people who didn’t. Variation in responsiveness, in stress reactivity, in extrovert-introvert tendencies, and who even knows what else, all means that there are no universals.
If you don’t respond to brief, intense, and infrequent, then maybe you need to think practice. Practice builds proficiency with lots of repetition at the edge of our limits. Forget about hammering your poor body into submission. Coax it and nurture it through consistency and repetition. Aim to do as much quality work as possible.
This is what daily lifting is all about. The more often you practice training, and training heavy, the better you become at it.
Can’t Do That
Those seemingly gifted athletes who train like madmen with workouts you “could never do”? I think there’s more to their results than just genes. There’s an obvious connection between motivation to train, the training that gets done, and the results over a career.
This isn’t a strongly supportable claim unfortunately, but there are hints that the overall result, insofar as what you gain from time spent training, can scale according to the work you put in. That is, a “low responder” doing a high responder’s low-volume workout may see poor results ― but that same person doing a more volume-heavy workout may suddenly transform into an average or high responder.
