The recent storms reminded of something I read a little while back… That when a human is struck by lightning the electrical impulse causes all their muscles to contract at 100%, shattering bones and snapping connective tissue…
A quick search returned this from wikipedia: “explosions of flesh and bone”... Cheery… Very cheery...
While not everyone’s cup of tea, you can take some incredibly cool s*** away from this incredibly cheery subject:
1. You need to be exceptionally unlucky to get hit by lightning in the first place, and even then you’d probably just get a bit of a burnt face or something…
2. Most normal people can only voluntarily contract their muscles at a small percentage of their maximum...
3. The reason for this small percentage - why we don’t shatter bones when we lift stuff - is because our nervous system acts like a handbrake... It’s primary role is to keep you alive and to stop you from hurting yourself.
4. Obviously we don’t want our bones to explode, but we also don’t want to be feeble as s*** either… We want the middle ground... To get stronger you’ll need to focus on enhancing the ability of the nervous system to send a strong signal to the muscles.
5. We can enhance the nervous system’s ability by lifting fairly heavy while still staying fairly fresh... You hear me? Training to failure will not help you at all, neuromuscularly… You want repeated success in your training to convince your nervous system that the situation is safe enough so that next time it can ease off on the handbrake a little more...
6. To answer the question: How Strong Are We Really? We are strong enough to “explode flesh and bone”, but thankfully that strength has a handbrake... You will never take the handbrake fully off, but you can ease it off a bit with some smart training… Preferably at Blackbrook…