Please explain these 3 points to me and "squat’s stretch-shortening cycle"
I am reading Rippetoe, and I came across the following statements. I am learning how to squat, but I don't understand what is meant by the following:
The squat’s stretch-shortening cycle is important for three reasons:
The stretch reflex stores energy in the viscoelastic components of the muscles and fascia, and this
energy gets used at the turnaround out of the bottom.
The stretch tells the neuromuscular system that a contraction is about to follow. This signal results
in more contractile units firing more efficiently, enabling you to generate more force than would be
possible without the stretch reflex.
Because this particular loaded stretch is provided by the lowering phase of the squat (which uses
all of the muscles of the posterior chain over their full range of motion), the subsequent contraction
recruits many more motor units than would be recruited in a different exercise.
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I'll try saying the same thing using slightly-different words:
Some parts of the body work like a literal spring -- they store energy when they get stretched out, and provide a force to return to their usual state. Like an elastic band. This happens at the bottom of a squat and makes it easier to get started going back up. If you were morbid enough to make a fresh corpse do a squat, this effect would still happen, because it's a mechanical property of the materials.
Beyond purely-mechanical effects, there's also some very complicated things happening with your nervous system. Some part of your brain is noticing that you're in a squat and is telling the muscles to get ready to stand back up again.
I'm not really sure what he's saying here actually. I think maybe it's something like if you could imagine some other way to get into a squat position, like curling up into a ball on your back and then rolling over onto your feet somehow, well then that would use fewer muscles, and less effectively, than just squatting. But I'm mostly guessing on that one.
On a practical level, the easiest way to feel what's going on with this is to try some squats where you're "bouncing" out of the hole at the bottom, and then some other squats where you pause motionless at the bottom for a few seconds before ascending again. Unless you're trying to get certified as a coach, being able to feel the difference inside your own body between those two movements is going to be the most useful part of this for you (in my opinion.)
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