Letting your training partner load the bar for more gains

If you train with a trustworthy person, it may be more advantageous to let him/her load the bar for you (so you don’t know the weight).  An interesting research study was published in PLOS ONE in which unknown loads were compared to known loads in the bench press throw exercise.

Here is what the researchers did:

They randomly split 28 junior handball players with a minimum of 1 year of resistance training into 3 groups: 12 known load, 11 unknown, and 5 in a control group.

Exercise protocol:  

2 sessions per week x 4 weeks: 4 sets x 6 reps of the bench press throw exercise

The training loads were 30, 50, and 70% of 1 RM

In each set, 2 reps were performed with each % RM (2 reps at 30%, 2 reps at 50%, 2 reps at 70% = total 6 reps)

Rest Intervals were 3 minutes

Unknown Group:  were unaware of the weight being dropped

Known Group: were aware of the weight being dropped

Results:  

Both groups increased bench press strength (1RM)

Both groups increased peak power at 30% RM

At 30 % RM: Both groups improved power output at time intervals of 30, 50, 100, 150 ms

At 50% RM:  only the unknown group had significant improvements in power at 30, 50, 100, 150 ms, known group had a trend in improvements

At 70%RM: UL group had large effect size in all time intervals for power (30, 50, 100, 150 ms), known group had moderate effect size at 100 and 150 ms

Throwing Velocity:  Only the unknown group showed significant improvements in standing throw and jump throw velocity.

Final Thoughts:   Definitely an interesting topic, I think it shows the potential psychological aspect of training.   When an athlete  knows the weight is lighter he may subconsciously display sub-maximal effort, resulting in less than optimal results.  If the athlete is unaware of the weight, he will prepare to display maximal effort on each rep because the weight may or may not be heavy.  Overall it might be a good idea to let your [responsible] training partner load the bar up for you without telling you the weight (within reason! Not loading up weight you can’t handle).  Put it in the training bag of tricks to break out every once in awhile to provide additional training stimulus.

1.  SabidoR,Hernández-DavóJL,BotellaJ, MoyaM(2016)Effectsof4-WeekTraining InterventionwithUnknownLoadsonPowerOutput PerformanceandThrowingVelocityinJuniorTeam HandballPlayers.PLoSONE11(6):e0157648. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157648  full link:  http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0157648