petesisco-review.com

(exert from Pete Sisco’s “TRAIN SMART!” e-book.)

During the development of Static Contraction Training, John and I picked a couple of exercises to focus on as measurements of how far we could develop.

Because of the equipment available at a local gym where we trained, we picked the Hammer Strength High Row machine and the Shrug machine. These were more or less random choices that were only due to equipment availability.

Over the next four months we performed these two exercises about once every two weeks. We’d do a ten second static hold in the strongest range. That’s it. Ten seconds, then back to the treadmills or the racquetball court.

At the end of four months, I performed a 900-pound High Row and a 1,000-pound shrug! That’s a lot. That draws a crowd in a gym. Partly because after you fully load the machine, you have to place an Olympic barbell across it and add another four or five hundred pounds of plates to the barbell so you end up with quite a menacing contraption.

After those two lifts (on the same day) we started thinking about how high the weight could go. 1,200? 1,500? Then it hit me. What for? How strong do I need my trapezius muscles to be? And, by the way, it hurts like hell to hold that 1,000 pounds. It drives your feet into the ground and grinds your spinal vertebrae together. And in the grand scheme of things, what percentage of people on this earth can shrug more than 1,000 pounds? 0.0001 percent maybe? (That would be 6,000 of us.) And in what other category of life am I at 0.0001 percent. Intellect?