AussieMarc

stuff is called "strive"... anyone heard of it?

http://www.strivefit.com/

seems very cool.. something interesting and different to mix the training up.. im gonna give it a go for 2 months doing a full body routine a few times a week.

basically the breakdown of it is it changes the belt on the machine to work different areas of the muscles.. for example on the preacher curl bench...
set 1 starts off working the main muscle belly by using the default machine settings.. so its just like a normal preacher bench for set 1..
set 2 hits the insertion point of the muscle more so then the belly making you fatigue that particular area..
set 3 hits the origin..

then you can do 2 more sets on an inbetween setting which set 4 hits between the insertion and the belly and set 5 in between the origin and the belly...

something new and different to try as i said.. i think it can be a load of rubbish but the science behind it sort of matches up and my muscles feel sore after a session again which tends to fade after a couple of months of doing a normal routine day in day out.

so anyone else heard of this stuff? check it out and give me your opinions on it.


the leg press smashed me!!

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ah24

Looks quite cool, my only concern would be;

The aim of the bloody thing! Hitting on an origin or insertion point no thanks. IMO your just asking for a tendon pull, I would maybe give it a go going light weight higher reps but would never get a beginner on it I've heard of beginners managing to pull/snap tendons just from regular curls where their muscles get a lot stronger much more quickly than their tendons and connective tissues (which is natural) so having a machine that focuses on them areas for me seems dangerous.

But thats probably just me looking into it too much - the idea behind it is very clever, i just dont think it's very safe.

EDIT: Could be handy for hitting the chest with different angles though?

Con

Looks like utter crap to me.

ah24

Ahhhh don't ya just love the way irish selects his words:love:

AussieMarc

the leg press feels really good however.. as with standard LP i usually feel it in the quads the most even after activating my hams and glutes coming down for a nice deep motion..

however with this thing i feel it work them depending on the sets.. no feeling that im hitting the wrong spot at all.

as for the tendon issue.. by that i dont mean the actual origin and insertion points, i mean it still hits the muscle belly but more on one particular side than the other... like doing incline/decline presses.

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Nine Pack

Firm but fair. I'm sorry but this looks like more kiddology to sucker in the gullible. If you knew how a muscle fibre contracts on a cellular level, you'd understand that we are not capable of just utilising one portion of a muscle, that's simply not how the body works, and even if it were, this would be extremely unsafe. The MTJ (musculo tendon joint) is where the muscle fibres start to become tendons at the ends of the muscle & this is the place most likely to tear when we do suffer a muscle strain. I for one, would not want to be specifically targetting this area.

I doubt anyone will suffer any injuries though, as the machine, like I say, simply is not capable of making the body fire off specific sections of a muscle, but I invite the company to show me some irrefutable proof from a proper scientific study to prove me wrong. The salesman was very good at his/her job though, maybe works on QVC at weekends!

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''I reject your reality and substitute my own''
Adam Savage.

Magic Torch

I love it when you talk dirty Paul

Not gonna be getting this stuff for your gym then mate ?

I'm all for going forwards but did the guy market research this product? I cant say I've heard many people in a gym say....you know what the chest press works well but does it really get the inserstion point going? Lol

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Nine Pack

No, but every time I see some amazing new exercise machine on telly (granted this one is not on the same 'kiddology' scale & is at least going to work the muscles albeit perhaps not in the way it's claimed) it makes me want to market one of my own.
I had thought of selling a nicely packaged brick & have an infomercial showing someone smashing the brick into thier head & procaiming it a new workout. Well, it could be, you use a heck of a lot of muscles & you could vary the angle in which you insert the brick into your skull to get that 'full body workout'

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''I reject your reality and substitute my own''
Adam Savage.

Magic Torch

lmfao

When I was growning up my stepdad was just like that, used to eat crap every day and smoke 40 cigs. When he watched QVC and saw the latest and greatest ab machine he would call up......two weeks later it would come, like the ab toner that uses electric impulses.....he would strap the fooker on and proceed to shake his fat belly with it for an hour.......:crazy:

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AussieMarc

nine pack, the idea of these machines in my opinion is not to specifically focus on basing your workout solely on these exercises but to incorporate them into your normal routine for a slight difference.. it may be enough change that it gets some people off plateauing. now i do agree with you there completely, as if you break a muscle down to a cellular level, you can only activate the whole muscle, not just parts of it. so scientifically it is not correct but also scientifically these machines make a bit of sense, might be small but it contains a little tiny bit of sense.

its like the incline/decline or flat bench argument.. many people here will argue that bench press is bench press. it all works your pecs the same way.. however there will be just as many people here arguing that decline builds up lower, incline builds up upper and flat works it in general. (disregarding the shoulder injury risk argument).

these machines work in a very similar way. ill explain how it actually works. and no im not trying to sell you something here, im just going by what i have tried on my session tonight and the areas in which i felt it..

there is a oval shaped cog that a rubber tape connect to (like any weight machines - the bit the cable wraps around in order to increase the tension.) all you do is rotate this cog around so the first set the weight is evenly distributed throughout the whole rep. the 2nd set you adjust the cog so the weight is lighter for the first half of the rep however kicks in at the middle of the rep. then 3rd set is the opposite, it kicks in at the start of the rep than half way through gets lighter..

this basically changing each rep in sets 2&3 into half reps focusing on that particular part of the movement.

in my opinion the best way to compare it is you are doing 21's on every exercise. (21's = 7 full reps, 7 half bottom, 7 half top, 7 full)...

its something to add difference anyway.. im just gonna give it a shot for 2 months and than go back to chucking an exercise in here and there. i cant see it as a sustainable thing long term.

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ah24

So many other, safer ways to do that...

You could change the exercise itself (i.e alt. d'bell curls to barbell spider curls), change rep speed, frequency of how many times they work that muscle, how hard they train, either cut down or add some more time on to how long they train that particular muscle, change the concept of their training (i.e. HIT to volume?) etc etc

Look at BBers and average gym goers thus far; do we really need to be working different parts of each muscle through a machine when the humble dumbell and barbell have done well so far?

Nine Pack

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the machines are useless by any means. They are probably ok, but the theory they are based on is IMO a bit iffy & I suspect they will just end up acting very much like a standard cam machine, only having cost a darn sight more.

If your gym has already got them what the heck, use them. Any change to your regime will elicit an adaptive response of some kind, so provided you get what you want from your workouts then it's fine.

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''I reject your reality and substitute my own''
Adam Savage.

Nine Pack

Noticed this before & forgot to mention, it's not strictly true Marc by the way. The body will only utilise as many fibres as it needs to perform the required action & generally this will be less than 20-30% of the available fibres for daily activity, even strenuous activity. What the muscle cannot do though is fire off fibres just at one end of the muscle, it will fire off a bundle of fibres running the length of the muscle belly, but not necessarily the whole muscle.

What you may have meant to say is that individual muscle fibres can only contract fully, or not at all. It's an all or nothing thing on a cellular level, i.e. a fibre can't lightly contract, it can only fully contract.

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''I reject your reality and substitute my own''
Adam Savage.

Aftershock

I have read many times that you cannot work a specific part of an individual muscle and I have no reason to doubt it.

However can someone explain to me why you get a seem to get more of a pump and lactic in a certain areas of the muscle when doing specific movements?

For example the the lower biceps when doing preacher curls. Its easy to see why people believe you can target specific areas of the muscle when you can actually feel it more in that particular area.

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Aftershock