Max Effort Method: Why Should General Population Folks Use It?

By: Sarah Buckley 

Many folks are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable utilizing the Max Effort Method.  It can be viewed as dangerous for “regular” people because the examples typically seen are associated with high level athletic training or strength sports. 

However, the Max Effort Method is appropriate for any human to use because it provides a valuable stimulus needed for regular human function and that stimulus cannot be replicated elsewhere: absolute strength training.  

What is absolute strength and why do we need it? 

We use the Max Effort Method to:

1.  improve muscular coordination

2. Improve stress threshold of the central nervous system.  

Muscle coordination is what allows us to get around easily. What allows us to sit up out of a chair, simultaneously walk up steps while carrying all the groceries, play catch with our dog.  Run a mile, hike a mountain, sit up out of bed and bend over to tie your shoe. We also express this by intelligently training certain movement patterns with strenuous effort, such as the hinge:

All of these movements are a combination of a million things happening inside your body to produce one, (potentially) fluid movement or series of movements. Your brain’s ability to access and “instruct" your muscle fibers to produce force at the drop of a hat in order to move this way is called neural drive and is a function of your central nervous system.

Good neural drive means that the exact amount of muscle fibers needed to complete a physical task can all come online quickly and simultaneously to produce the movement that you need, at the time you need it. 

As we age, we begin to lose our neural drive. It decreases and slows.  This feels like movements slowing down or happening in a step-wise fashion instead of all at once.  A person may express that they lack coordination and their bodies feel unorganized.  This can also happen after an injury or prolonged periods of being sedentary. 

Utilizing the Max Effort Method trains the body to use neural drive (our brain telling our body to recruit muscle fibers in the body simultaneously and at a certain output  to complete a physical task).  This will, at minimum, maintain muscular coordination and, trained consistently and correctly, potentially improve it.

Anecdotally, after working for almost 10 years in the fitness industry, I find most folks when they first begin training (many of my clients are first time exercisers or coming-back-after-a-long-hiatus exercisers) are highly unaware of their own bodies. They literally cannot tell when a muscle is contracted/squeezing.  They can feel tightness a lot of the time, but they sometimes don’t even feel effort.  And that’s ok! Even folks that are new to this type of training can benefit from it— they aren’t athletes, they don’t have performance goals: they simply want to feel better in their own bodies. Not on day 1, but gradually introducing them to maximal intensity efforts helps them start to organize their bodies: they can produce force in a more organized way and are quicker to respond to their environments. 

Ultimately, we want our clients to be able to feel like they are in control of themselves in most physical circumstances.   Done properly, the Max Effort is a method from which everyone can benefit.