Transcription
Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume. This notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training. It's a very easy and very simple way to train. Strength comes very easily and very very unexpectedly. Also, that builds muscle as well. It has a tonic effect just for anything that you can do with your brain or with your body, anything.
So, could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is? Ladies and gentlemen, grease the groove. We are talking about, uh, I attribute you with popularizing, maybe you invented it, but certainly popularizing the term like greasing the groove. This notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training. I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation, then waiting for the adaptation to occur, and then training the body part again. You know, the arguments are all over the internet: two times a week, three times a week. And then I came across this concept of greasing the groove, which, as a neuroscientist, felt so intuitively correct and turns out to be correct. You'll explain what it is, but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength, of size, hypertrophy, if one wants, and I would say, just generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program.
Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume. Oh, that is important. But you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system. And to me, it was like, uh, water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts.
So, could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is? Ladies and gentlemen, grease the groove. We are talking about, uh, let's use an analogy. Let's imagine that you are a bow hunter and you work in your garage, and then you walk out of your garage and you shoot an arrow, and you just go back to going about your business, just working in your garage. Or let's say you're a kid who practices martial arts and every on every break between classes, you just go in the corner and you practice your kata. This is the best way to practice your skill in small portions in a spaced-out manner.
What's really fascinating is, uh, traditional education and traditional strength training, it's based on the cramming model. So, remember cramming for an exam? So you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it. Okay, great. And then a couple of days later, you happily forget everything. So, in contrast, imagine that you're, let's say, you're studying a foreign language. You write words on cards, and at every opportunity, you're standing in line at the bank. So the lesser mortals are fooling around on their phones. You're just going through your deck like, "Oh, can I translate this word?" I go, "Put it back in the deck. Flip it over." Then next time you're in some other place, you do this again. So this is an example of spaced practice versus the traditional mass practice. And the evidence of the superiority of spaced practice is just overwhelming. It goes back to the 19th century, and there is at least like, more than a thousand papers published on that, and still, very few people do that, which is really sad. And, uh, strength is a skill. If we look at what's going on, it's, uh, the Hebbian mechanisms. So, pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection, synaptic connection, you know, between the neurons, that connection becomes, uh, stronger. So if you do it over and over and over. So the grease the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles. That's the groove. That's that pathway. And the more you use it, pretty much the more grease it becomes. So it's like, becomes a superconductor. So in the future, you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or you can try the same amount and you can lift harder. So we're not, we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet. We just pretty much made the motor neurons more respons, more responsive to it.
It's a very easy and very simple way to train, and, uh, strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly. To make sure that it does happen, you have to address, uh, the issue of specificity. So specificity pretty much means, without getting too, uh, too, too much into the weeds, to get stronger, first of all, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough. And, uh, if you're looking about percentages of one rep max, we're looking at like 75 to 85 typically. If you go too light, you don't make the impression on your nervous system, and it's just not specific enough. If you go too heavy, very quickly, you're just going to burn yourself out. And, uh, so pretty much like, it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not to fear. And the second of all, and this is very surprising, is you only do about half or fewer reps that you possibly could do. So, for example, let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max, and let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it. That's your, that we're just fairly, fairly common. Well, you're only going to do about three, uh, three to four reps per set, and that's it. And the gym bros at this point go crazy like, "Where's the intensity?" Well, intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is. It has nothing to do with the effort. And it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself. There are times for that. There are absolutely times for that. But if the weight is heavy enough and if you do half the repetitions that you possibly could do, you're going to get stronger. It's very safe, and you're not going to burn out psychologically, and it's also very easy on your body. So, also that builds muscle as well, purely because you're able to do a very high volume of work.
To summarize the grease the groove, you're trying to train moderately heavy as often as possible while staying as staying as fresh as possible. And, uh, if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes. It sounds really bizarre, like, why, why would you, would you rest for so long? This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation. There's so much is still unknown. So we do know the grease group works great, but we speculate that some of it has to do with some of the same phenomena related to, uh, to learning in other fields. So if you're doing something over and over, like, like you're saying, 2 + 2 is 4, 2 + 2 is 4, you're just using your short-term memory. You're not memorizing anything. But if you say 2 + 2 is 4, you go get a coffee, you come back, and you try 2 + 2 is 4. So there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there, and you have to process that instead of just go through the groove that, uh, that apparently helps, helps adaptation. So rest for at least 10 minutes. Do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do. And, you know, listen to your body. Typically train two, three days in a row, and then take a day off, but listen to your body.
Are you doing anything in the, um, rest periods between these 10 minutes? So is it, uh, let's say, uh, bench press, uh, wait 10 minutes till you bench press again, but in the meantime, you're doing zer squat? Five minutes after the first bench press are that's one of the ways to do that. You can do up to three exercise, three exercises at the same time. So let's say I like zer squat and the bench press and maybe a third thing, but I'd say those two are enough. And, uh, another option is you can do that, you can incorporate this into, if you do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice. So, for example, in, uh, let's say you're teaching a track, uh, track, uh, practice or martial arts class, and every 10 minutes on the clock, you just have the class do drop and do three hard, let's say, three one-arm push-ups, okay? And then get back to the class. So, there's no interference whatsoever. In fact, it's better than no interference. So if you do strength work that's non-exhausting in nature and that's not novel to you, it has a tonic effect, uh, just for anything that you can do with your brain or with your body, anything. So what you have is by having this short, a very small dose, like a nano practice of strength, you rejuvenate yourself, and your productivity increases so much. I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate grease the groove into your entire day. That's ideal. Yes. And obviously, it's difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could use the heavy-duty grippers. You could do, uh, one-arm push-ups. You could, uh, uh, you could keep a kettlebell under your desk and do press it at at every opportunity. And again, the idea is really just practice. You just try to hit it perfect.
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