The next issues we must tackle are interrelated. We must standardize the way in which we administer the “dose” and we must have an accurate means of recording the response of the organism. The units of a drug dose might be milligrams; the unit of our dose is the repetition. We must standardize our unit so that we maximize the efficiency (intensity) of our dose. Just as we want to eliminate any impurities from our drug, we should eliminate any impurities from our exercise. Such impurities include anything that will allow the muscle to escape from being under continuous load such as heaving, jabbing or throwing the weight. Indeed, we want to eliminate even the smallest amount of momentum so we can know that every second of every repetition represents muscular loading. For measurement purposes our unit must be exactly reproducible. In our “drug” research a milligram is a milligram, is a milligram…all the time, every time. Remember, the law of identity can never be escaped…”A is A”. At Ultimate Exercise (my one-on-one high intensity training facility) we use SuperSlow repetitions (10 seconds positive and 10 seconds negative). This allows us to insure the purity of the exercise and the precision of our basic unit of record-keeping.

Finally, we need to know what to monitor in order to accurately quantitate our desired response produced by the organism. Ultimately, our desired response is bigger muscles and ideally this is what we would like to measure. Unfortunately, this is a fairly gross change and the units of measure (fractions of inches) are too large to allow us to make the fine adjustments of optimizing volume and frequency. Also, emperic evidence shows that muscle growth can be delayed and sporadic. What we need is a reliable marker for muscle growth. Fortunately, such a marker has been found. We know that a muscle’s strength is directly related to its cross-sectional area. In a given individual, if a muscle becomes stronger, it will also become larger; or if a muscle is noted to have become larger, we will find that it is stronger. It has also been noted that the strength gain ALWAYS precedes the size gain (this is particularly true in myself). A subject may gain strength for many consecutive workouts without any change in measurements; but then, in delayed fashion, the size gain will suddenly occur. While size gains may be sporadic and unpredictable, they are always preceded by a gain in strength. Such gains in strength can be reliably found in a workout record provided that the routine is standardized and NOT varied, and provided our units of performance recording are strictly standardized.

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