How to hack a fitness system that hasn’t changed in 50 years
The idea of our startup was born in the head of one of our founders a long time ago, when he first wanted to make his body athletic using the standard techniques used in gyms to this day. He was faced with the fact that even with sufficient motivation, it requires a huge investment of time, which he wanted to spend more interesting than endlessly lifting the glands. A deep critical analysis of existing methods and the desire to find something more effective in terms of the ratio: time for training – the result, showed that super-intense strength training is a very interesting option (HIT) [не путать с HIIT]… The average duration of such a workout can be less than 30 minutes for the whole body (5-10 minutes for each muscle group), and recovery can take up to 5-7 days, followed by supercompensated… It turns out that you can, for example, spend 30 minutes a week, the rest of the time, engage in other interesting activities for yourself and have real results in the form of a noticeable increase in the strength indicators of the whole body!
Why was such an effective training not widely used before? The answer is quite obvious – it is organizational complexity, as well as a high risk of injury. I’ll show you with a simple example. Our muscles have different strengths in different positions, so in order to realize their work to the limit at each moment in time, we would need a barbell with a variable weight. Moreover, its weight should have miraculously changed, then up, then down in the process of each repetition. In reality, it is possible only with the help of assistants to “add pancakes” after lifting the barbell and lower more weight, thereby realizing the study eccentric muscle phases. On the other hand, picking up a weight close to the limit increases the risk that the bar can be dropped and injured, so it is advisable to use belay (mechanical, or with the help of a trainer). As a result, the leading practitioners of this technique are generally medical related.
It was at this moment that the thought was born – what if we make a system that would automate the required training process and ensure the safety of training?
The answer to these questions was an adaptive load system based on brushless servo motors… What is it and how does it work?
Globally, conditions for muscle tension can be created in a very limited number of ways – by gravity, friction, inertia. The vast majority of existing simulators use the first option, but there are also separate experiments with friction and inertia. For the task of maximum safety, only friction is suitable, because it does not set an external load on its own, but only resists, i.e. there is never an effort in the system greater than the muscle itself can develop… The disadvantage is the inconvenience of working with friction in regimes bordering on statics, wear of rubbing parts and the difficulty of accurate quantitative adjustment of the amount of friction.
But what if we deceive our senses (which is what most of the technical devices around us have been doing for a long time)? Let’s say a person is pushing against a wall. Wall according to Newton’s third law, presses on the person in response exactly the same. And now we add to this a strain gauge and a servo motor operating “for transmission” (the system moves if, and only if, when a certain amount of force appears on the strain gauge; if the force is below the threshold, the movement stops). It would seem that for a person, nothing should change globally, as he pressed on the wall, he presses …
BUT ANOTHER HAPPENING! An interesting error of perception arises, as a result of which a person has a complete illusion that he is shifting the real weight (although in fact, only the servo motor creates the movement) and the biomechanics corresponding to the exercise begins to work. And if we now remember that the threshold of effort, which, as a result, motivates a person to press harder, we set programmatically, then the previously unattainable flexibility of load regulation opens up. We studied the basic patterns of muscle behavior during exercise – geometry, repetition rate, fatigue and recovery processes – and created adaptive algorithm, which we further improve with each next workout, accumulating statistical data.
As a result, we got what we wanted:
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a workout of 6 exercises once a week lasts 30-35 minutes, after which you feel tired as from 2-3 hours in the gym;
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a new level of safety, thanks to a change in the type of load – no additional insurance is required;
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completely personal geometry in each exercise;
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adaptive load allows you to work out all phases of the muscle, including the negative;
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growth of power indicators.
On the graph (strength[кг] from time [c]) above shows a typical example of performing the leg press exercise, where the red shows the expectation generated by the algorithm 50 times per second, and green – the real value of the effort that the muscles develop. Here you can see how muscle strength changes both within the framework of one repetition, and during the entire approach, during which the muscle fibers are gradually turned off (I will describe all these processes in more detail in the following articles).
When we started doing super-intense training on a regular basis, we found that this kind of training has many additional effects, such as boosting the mood the day after training or increasing the quality of sleep. Training is, of course, hard, harder than any usual training. However, the body in 2-3 workouts (for an unprepared person) fully adapts to such a regime and it becomes at least uninteresting to train differently.
All the nuances of the influence of super-intense training on the body are still in the process of studying, everyone finds in this something to their taste, so it is best to go through this experience personally and make up your own opinion!
