關於 contractile ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

Me in my happy place 🤗
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A few years ago, spending 4 months bouncing around between gyms would have frustrated me 😤 It’s almost impossible to progressively overload exercises when you’re constantly changing machines. Even if the “weight” is the same, there’s a myriad of different factors that will affect the load placed on the target muscles at different contractile lengths.
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These days I’m just a different type of geek 🤓 I’m obsessed with admiring machines that are designed well, and the challenge of using ones that aren’t 🧩 I embrace the puzzle of optimising a piece of equipment and how the more experience I build doing so, the better rehearsed I am to help answer questions from coaches because I’ve done the thinking in advance 🤔
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I’ve also learnt that you rarely come up with a great idea first time round. Provided you’re able to keep a mindset of what you currently think not being “the best” and there always being a slightly better solution, the more times you’ve been around the block, questioned your previous thoughts and adjusted the accordingly, the more refined your current thought processes will be 🧐
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I train to force strong contractions, and I’m pretty sure that if I push myself hard enough I’m not going to get much weaker just because I’m not being a slave to my logbook 📋 Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for tracking and continued improvement in the pursuit of measured progress, and it has its time and place.
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For me though, to sustain a passion for being in the gym for a lifetime, you have to follow what currently makes being in that environment as stimulating and fulfilling as possible 😃 In the past it’s been overcoming injuries, optimising for sports performance or just chasing numbers. Currently it’s growing my experience and challenging my critical thinking 🔣
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Kinda cool how fun a place even the most alien and poorly equipped gym can become, once you’re equipped with the knowledge to take getting “creative” in the gym away from coming up with what is essentially resisted choreography 🕺🏻 and towards playing with The Exercise Continuum & The Exercise Equation (two RTS trademarks) ™️

Instagram is full of celebrity trainers working with athletes, posting videos of them doing all these wonderfully creative movements involving weights that look like snippets from whatever sport it is they do. They get loads of views and traction because they look explosive and relevant... but are they effective? 🤔
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In sport we’re required to produce contractions against resistance in various directions, but the increased load of an implement is always downwards ⬇️ apart from inertial forces and unless it’s a cable or band. Even then, purely from a direction of resistance, I look at most of these sports-emulating movements and wonder about their applicability.
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Then there’s the matter of my previous tweet. Stronger muscles produce better contractions 💪🏽 More stable conditions allow muscles to get better at practicing producing more force. All of these wildly dynamic, complicated movements have limitations on the amount of force that can be produced because of the stifling instability and distractions in play 🤹🏻‍♂️
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There’s this strange thought process perpetuated on the internet that training individual movements somehow makes you worse at coordinated or “integrated” movements, but personally I find that quite insulting 😢 Someone is genuinely going to tell me that by getting better at executing individual components my brain is so stupid that it will get worse at putting them all together? 🥴 yeah... nah.
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It’s often justified by the “functionality” of explosivity 💥 ok, but muscles produce contractile force. Force = mass x acceleration. If you train moving a lot of mass slowly, how does that not have a carry-over? And when working with someone whose joints take an absolute hammering with all of their ACTUAL sports-specific training, is dealing with the shear loading, unpredictability and deceleration components of sports-resembling training what they really need? 🧐
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It doesn’t add up to me, but it makes for an interesting conversation so have at it in the comments below 🤷🏻‍♂️
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P.S. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. Just because a trainer works with someone talented, doesn’t mean it’s their methods that are causing their success 👀

A phrase thrown around so frequently, but to understand its relevance, you need an understanding of what is happening internally.
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Our body is made up of a system of pivots and levers. These are pulled and stabilised by various muscles in order to move us and various mass forms against the draws of gravity.
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Where the centre of the mass sits relative to the application of force (and vector of it) and the pivots being levered drastically affects the force required by the muscles internally in order to create movement.
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Muscles produce force.
Muscles grow to produce more force as an adaptation to the stimulus of being taken near their limits of being able to produce force.
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If the goal of your exercise is to move as much of a certain mass as possible through a set of rules then yes, you’re a powerlifter or crossfitter etc, and I guess progressive overload to you is all external. There’s nothing wrong with that, I salute and stand in awe of those capable of doing so with staggering amounts of weight through their hard work, consistency and beautiful segmental proportions + muscle insertions. Focus on external loads is sport though.
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If the goal is progressively increased internal force requirement from a muscle group, then we need progressively increased torque requirement at a joint. This MAY come from more mass, or, depending on how the increased mass affects the movement and resulting moment arm, it may not. Equally, the torque requirement can be manipulated, increased (and often improved, if we consider the accompanying joint strain) just by changing the influence of other joints or better aligning the intended muscle fibres... or THE RANGE moved through.
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Range is so much more than just range of external motion or even moment arms. It’s range of contractile lengths available to a muscle, that will almost always face increasing mechanical disadvantage past a certain point (think bone angle) - often drastically increasing the torque due to a reduced relevance of the internal force vector to the momentary direction of movement.
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Yes, it’s semantics. A ramble. Is it a relevant one? I don’t know - do you get paid to think about exercise at the highest level?