💪 Training Valor Newsletter🦵

🔶 Sample Workout – Week 1 – Strength & Muscle Program

This is a generalized strength and muscle program featuring various gym equipment like barbells, dumbbells, and machines. It is good for beginners to advanced individuals looking for a balanced 3x/week routine to build strength (some high weight & low rep sets) and muscle (lower weight and high rep sets).

🔶 Featured Stretch

Dead Hang

The dead hang is one of the best passive stretches for relieving low back stiffness because of its distraction or pulling effect on the lumbar spine. Similarly to how an inversion table works, the weight of your lower half is pulling down on your spine while your latissimus dorsi muscles are anchoring your spine up to where you are gripping the bar. At the same time this stretch is great for lengthening those same lat muscles on your back and improving your comfort with your arms overhead. Ensure you are breathing deeply in this position as the expanding of the ribcage that comes with each breath helps to relax and further stretch the lats and other muscles surrounding the ribcage.

🔶 Strength & Conditioning Science

The Role of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) in Neuromuscular Adaptations: Implications for Strength and Power Development—A Review

Hung, C.-H., Su, C.-H., & Wang, D. (2025). The Role of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) in Neuromuscular Adaptations: Implications for Strength and Power Development—A Review. Life, 15(4), 657. https://doi.org/10.3390/life15040657

High Intensity Interval style training has become commonplace in almost all commercial gyms. Touted to boost muscle, endurance, power, strength and pretty much every other physical attribute you can think of. The claims for  this style of training are significant but is it all that people claim it to be?

Neuromuscular Adaptations

“Neuromuscular adaptations refer to the physiological and structural changes resulting from training that enhance the interaction between the nervous system and muscles, improving force production, movement efficiency, and athletic performance.” People claim that HIIT is designed to maximize cardiovascular, metabolic, and neuromuscular adaptations more efficiently than traditional endurance training. 

Strength

One disadvantage to HIIT is that the work to rest ratio is structured so that your theoretically “sprinting” for short bursts (or whichever higher intensity exercise is selected) and then completing a lower intensity exercise for a short period. And alternating between these two things for a set amount of rounds, time, sets, etc. This will indeed keep your heart rate elevated, but it won’t provide the conditions for continued maximal force output. While HIIT may be less effective for developing absolute maximal strength, it substantially improves the rate of force development (RFD), neuromuscular efficiency, and explosive force production. 

Power

Typical HIIT classes include various power-based exercises like box jumps, broad jumps, medball throws and many more. These exercises don’t just require force output but encourage maximal rate of force development which trains your fast twitch muscle fibers. However because of the structure of many classes and inadequate resting times, the performance of these exercises isn’t always conducive to developing maximal power. Because your heart rate is elevated continuously, you can’t perform a box jump with maximal intensity for minutes at a time. Traditional power training typically has one repetition done with 10-20 seconds between each bout, leaving ample time for regeneration of sufficient nervous system drive for each rep. Although traditional power training methods, such as Olympic lifting, are essential for maximizing absolute power, HIIT is an effective complement by facilitating explosive training under high-intensity conditions

Despite its effectiveness in boosting RFD and explosive power, HIIT is less efficient than traditional resistance training for maximizing absolute strength and hypertrophy due to insufficient progressive overload. Integrating resistance-based and plyometric-based HIIT protocols emerged as an effective strategy to enhance strength and power concurrently.

🔶 Featured Recipe –