By Shane Robert
The process of getting stronger and building muscle is actually quite simple and intuitive. Even a small child understands the importance of lifting heavy things to accomplish these goals. Unless someone has been influenced by fitness culture, their instinct to get stronger is to lift quite near their limit, do that a bunch of times until, eventually, it feels easy, then lift something heavier and repeat the process. Frankly, this isn’t wrong. That does work. If someone were tasked with lifting the heaviest rock in a field of rocks, they could likely accomplish that task by picking up a challenging rack for a ton of single reps and, over time, graduating to bigger rocks.
There would eventually be a limit that, no matter how hard they tried, the hypothetical stonelifter would plateau and not be able to graduate to a heavier stone. This would happen for two reasons:
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They will have developed weaknesses and imbalances that are holding back their ability to progress. As the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. At some point, the body will sense that weak link and prevent you from completing a lift for fear that it will break even if the rest of the chain is strong enough.
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The biological law of accommodation, which states that the response of an organism to a given stimulus decreases over time. The longer you repeat a movement, particularly with the same reps, the less effective it becomes.
The solution, therefore, is to strengthen the weak links and give the body a different, though still mechanically similar, stimulus that will recruit and build previously unused motor units. Both of these tasks can be accomplished with what Soviet sports scientists called specialized variety.
SPECIALIZED VARIETY
According to eminent sports scientist Vladamir Zatsiorsky, “the conflict between the need for specificity and variability is one of the main problems in elite athletic training.” Finding the balance between the two is key to ensure continued gains in strength and hypertrophy. This is where specialized variety comes in.
Specialized variety should not be confused with the outdated concept of ‘muscle confusion,’ where the thought was that the soreness caused by randomly changing exercises and/or reps confused and shocked the muscle to trick it into new growth (it doesn’t). Specialized variety movement(s) are still mechanically very close to the original movement but with slight changes.
Muscle confusion would say, “Your squat weights aren’t progressing? Do a bunch of sets of 40-rep leg extensions instead!”
Specialized variety counters, “Your squat weights aren’t progressing? Try moving your feet out 6” wider (3” each foot) for a block.”
The squat motion is still used, but there is a slight change to the stimulus. Changing the grip width on pressing movements, pulling sumo for a conventional puller and vice versa; low bar to high bar squats are perfect examples of these small changes.
This is not simply exercise rotation as one might do with a conjugate-style max effort day. This is choosing a variation and sticking with it for 4-6+ weeks to make real progress in an effort to assist your normal lifting. Ideally, choose a lift that addresses a specific weakness. If that gets stronger, there is a high likelihood that your main lift will go up once you start training it again.
As stated above, the exercises should mimic the movement pattern that you are trying to strengthen. While a leg curl might be a fine exercise to use for general hamstring hypertrophy and activation, it isn’t going to carry over to your deadlift the way a stiff-leg deadlift or snatch-grip deadlift will. Even subtle changes can feel like a completely different movement as muscles are activated in ways they normally aren’t.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR VARIETY
It would take pages and pages of exercises to list out all of the possible exercise options that can be done. It’s easier to break the options down into categories of the type of change (in no particular order of importance):
- Stance/Grip
- Pausing
- Implement (bar type)
- Range of Motion
- Accommodating Resistance
- Bar Placement
Whether used as the main movement for a cycle or as the main assistance movement within a cycle, specialized variety builds strength by providing a new stimulus while still being specific to the target movement pattern. Getting too far away from the main lift doesn’t reliably carry over, and staying with the same movement for too long starts to have diminishing returns. The answer is to find something that my Thai relatives would say is “same, same, but different.”
*NOTE: You can check out the blog series “Identifying Weak Points” for specific variation examples if you are totally at a loss*
