MONTANA HEACOCK

The Origin of the Abundant Athletics System

GROWING up, I wanted to become the strongest person ever.

I thought to get there, all I had to do was train like a madman everyday, outwork everyone else.

So that's exactly what I did.

I would train in the mornings before school, school, in all of my classes, when I got home from wrestling practice, and in the summers when I didn't have school, I would get up and train from around 5am before sunup, to around 6pm, 6 days a week, with only a lunch break, and a nap or two during the day. I used to run around my town with 10% of my bodyweight strapped to each ankle.

Then after seeing my dad get shocked by a live wire, and him explaining to me that it contracts muscles.
I began prospecting the idea of using electrical stimulation to become stronger.

Long story short, my oldest brother, who is an engineer in several disciplines, dropped off some electrical engineering books he picked out for me.

I shunned all of my schoolwork, training, and sleep for almost 4 months.

I focused entirely on building this device.

Eventually I designed and built my own pocket-sized electrical muscle stimulator (FEMS).

After painfully experimenting with it, I began working on an even more ambitious idea:
A magnetic muscle stimulator.  

After almost killing myself a few times---messing with the high amp transformers I wound from old microwaves I found next to dumpsters around my town, I did a bit more reading only to learn too late that having something else stimulate and contract my muscles for me wouldn't make me much stronger, but would only cause some adaptations in the muscle tissue itself.

After spending the next 2 years training like a mad man and studying new training techniques, I stumbled across a man named Adam Sinicki        The Bioneer.

I found him incredible, and he mentioned something called

                                  "S P E C I F I C   A D A P T A T I O N S   T O   I M P O S E D   D E M A N D S"

From that principle. I was curious. "If I align myself --- what I'm doing --- according to this principle, will I become the strongest?"

Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands
I first had to find out what adaptation(s) I needed to impose optimal demands on in order to elicit maximal adaptation to make me the strongest.

What individual mechanisms in the body cause strength and power?

The search down that rabbit hole lead me to the answer. Which was.. budumdum...

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NEURAL DRIVE & Neural PRESENCE(the innervated awareness of the muscles and the capacity at which it can operate and communicate with the fibers(the nervous system's ability to sense muscle tissue, allowing for the neural drive to control and powerfully contract it)). It is created by the nervous system.

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SO, I had to find a way to maximize neural drive & presence in order to become the strongest!

So now I had to find out what mechanisms being active and how in order to do this.

To answer that I started digging through studies comparing different types of strength training searching for patterns.
Across many studies, three themes kept showing up.

FIRST - training performed with higher voluntary effort and neural output produced greater strength gains
SECOND - training muscles at longer lengths produced greater muscle growth and stronger connective tissue adaptation

THIRD - eccentric contractions consistently produced greater strength and hypertrophy compared to concentric or isometric training alone.

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All three had one thing in common.
mechanical tension

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High neural drive creates tension in the muscle fibers

Training at long muscle lengths increases the tension placed on those fibers and on the surrounding connective tissue.

And eccentric contractions allow the body to produce even greater tension than concentric contractions, because the muscle structure itself is resisting being stretched.

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Two of those three point out that RAW passive mechanical tension is one of the key factors, and one pointed out that amount of neural drive is the other. (neural drive creates active tension)

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So I had to go on and study and infer the relationship between neural drive and mechanical tension, as well as the neural feedback from the mechanical tension. From doing this I resolved that I must MAXIMIZE MECHANICAL TENSION in an exercise to be the strongest. I also understood the reciprocal relationship between the two.

conceptually you can think of it like this feedback loop...

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ehem..

THE MORE THE NEURAL DRIVE,

THE MORE MOTOR UNITS RECRUITED AND THE MORE RAPIDLY THE MOTOR NEURONS FIRE,

THE MORE MOTOR UNITS RECRUITED AND THE MORE RAPIDLY THE MOTOR NEURONS FIRE,

THE MORE MUSCLE FIBERS ARE ACTIVATED AND GENERATE FORCE,

THE MORE MUSCLE FIBERS THAT GENERATE FORCE,

THE MORE THE MECHANICAL TENSION,

THE MORE THE MECHANICAL TENSION,

THE MORE PROPRIOCEPTIVE FEEDBACK(this drives adaptive tuning of motor output) THE NERVOUS SYSTEM RECEIVES,

THE MORE PROPRIOCEPTIVE FEEDBACK THE NERVOUS SYSTEM RECEIVES,

THE MORE EFFICIENTLY IT CAN ADJUST MOTOR OUTPUT,

THE MORE EFFICIENTLY IT CAN ADJUST MOTOR OUTPUT,

THE GREATER THE POTENTIAL FOR REFINED RECRUITMENT AND HIGHER RATE CODING,

THE MORE THE REFINED RECRUITMENT AND HIGHER THE RATE CODING,

THE MORE EFFECTIVE THE NEURAL DRIVE,

THE MORE EFFECTIVE THE NEURAL DRIVE,

THE GREATER THE MECHANICAL TENSION,

AND SO ON

...That is the relationship between the two(neural drive & mechanical tension)

So this put the answer right in front of me.
MAXIMIZE MECHANICAL TENSION & NEURAL DRIVE SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Which, practically, meant to start in or around the optimal muscle-tendon joint angle of every muscle along a kinetic/fascial chain(fascial chains share and distribute tension throughout, from one muscle to another, allowing for more total tension capacity and more tension per fiber). From this relatively optimal force-producing joint angle series throughout the chain, contract all of the muscles in the chain as explosively as possible while being stretched out to the chain's deepest, most stretched position.

Essentially speaking, it's just voluntary tetanus through a kinetic/fascial chain, while the whole chain is taken from the just roughly at/before optimal length-tension of each joint angle down into the whole chain's deepest, most stretched position, and then releasing the load(performed by changing body position—usually a very subtle shift of non-worked limb placement and/or non-worked limb assistance) and exploding rapidly at or past the starting position of the rep.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

BUT I DID IT

I FOUND OUT HOW TO ALLOW THIS PARADOX TO WORK AND REPEATABLE FOR REPS, AND THEN UPGRADED IT BY ADDING IN EXPLOSIVE CONCENTRIC RETURN IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING HE DEEPEST, MOST STRETCHED POSITION TO(or beyond) THE STARTING POINT OF THE MOVEMENT, WITH THE OPTION TO ROLL IMMEDIATELY BACK INTO THE NEXT REP.

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AND I'M REALLY GOOD LOOKING AND INCREDIBLY HUMBLE

Anyways..

I developed that at 19, and named that OVERLOADED ECCENTRIC STRETCH & SNAP

(on this website I refer to it as OEST( OES Training)

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Then I took it a step further, and aligned myself with the S A I D principle for reaction speed and quickness, and developed the FLASH REACTION training soon after I turned 20
There's a reason the 't' from training isn't apart of the name, don't turn that into an acronym.

These two laid the foundation for Abundant Athletics, and now I have done similar for recovery and power expression and adaptation.
With the Enhanced Recovery and Power Expression(Grass Patch Power),using protocols I developed, instead of exercises.