How chains with lightweight get you results: Dynamic Effort | Team Behind the Block

We're back with a sick intensification block: Dynamic Effort. This type of block will crush your nervous system, but in a cool way!

Dynamic effort is a strategy to teach ‘intent’ with lifting. Intent is our focus during the movement. In our tempo scheme, we rarely talk about the third number: concentric. Concentric is overcoming a portion of a lift such as standing out of the hole during a squat. Whenever you see the letter X, that denotes explosive. The idea is to push as hard as you can during the concentric portion of the lift. But there is a problem with explosive concentric, we eventually have to slow it down. 

When we have a slow movement down to control the movement that means we are not giving maximal concentric output. Since we have to slow the movement down, we are lowering our intent with the movement. If we are focused on the rep by giving maximal effort during each rep, we get more in return. This is where accommodating resistance comes in. 

We like to use chains with dynamic effort because it negates the natural ‘slowing’ down during the concentric portion. Chains increase in weight as you stand. This increases concentric effort. With the weight increasing, we have to keep momentum going. Where we naturally slow down without accommodating resistance, now we can accelerate. Greater acceleration means greater intent. Each portion of the movement is now met with greater effort. Longer, greater effort gets us more from each rep. But that is where the cost comes from towards our CNS.

That continuous high-effort rep leads to greater stress per rep. What happens when you scale that individual rep intensity over multiple reps, sets, training sessions and training weeks? You can accrue a high amount of fatigue. That fatigue builds and leads into low wellness and high RPE. Plus, this block, we have plyometric exercises and more challenging movements which also increases fatigue.

I say this because eventually you are going to hit a wall and not sure why.

This block will not create as much muscle soreness as previous blocks. It will feel weird early in a training block because the weight is very light, but fatigue will creep up. You will notice that light weight will become very challenging. Wellness will go down, bar speed will slow down, and RPEs will go up. This will feel odd due to not having a ton of soreness but that is the exact power of intent. You get more from what appears to be less. 

Learning to lift with intent is the real value of this block. Are we getting as much as possible from each rep during a workout? If we can learn to use more intent with the movement we can get more from that movement. Lifting with intent is a cheat code with training. The trick to learning intent is forcing you to have it to understand. That is where dynamic effort comes into play. Which is why this block is so sick.