In order for us to exercise or move our bodies at all, there are three separate systems of the human body that must work together. I’ve mentioned these three systems before. They are the Nervous, Skeletal, and Muscular systems. And today I’m going to go into a little more detail about how the nervous system and the muscular system work together. These two systems work together by the use of motor units. A motor unit is made up of one motor neuron and the muscle fibers that it activates. Who knew that you could learn so much from reading a workout article.
Every motor unit is different because each one consists of a different amount of muscle fibers. However, there is only one motor neuron for every motor unit. The All or Nothing Principle means that when a motor unit is activated by an outward stimulus it will contract all of it’s muscle fibers. If the outward stimulus too much then more motor units are activated in order to overcome the obstacle. This is another reason why it is so important to include different sets and repetition ranges from time to time.
So if our goal is to activate more muscle fibers then we have to activate more motor units, and in order to do that we need the stimulus to be stronger. This is where the use of heavy weights comes in. You don’t have to have access to metal weights in order to perform a great heavy weight low rep workout. For many people, regular push-ups are a low rep exercise. If those are too easy then you can try one leg push-ups, or one arm push-ups. There are a lot of different kinds of bodyweight exercises that you can do for low rep workouts.
Another factor that you can easily control in your home workouts is tempo. Tempo refers to the speed of the exercise. Faster, more explosive exercises will require more motor units to be recruited. And when more motor units are recruited, more muscle fibers are recruited. Working all of these muscle fibers is great for someone trying to build muscle mass such as a bodybuilder. However, it is also good for athletes, and even average people. There are many repetition, sets, and tempo ranges that are beneficial for everyone. We just have to balance them out to get the results that we are each looking for.
