Get Strong With Cluster Training
Achieve speed, strength and greater performance by recruiting more motor units with Cluster Training.
As a strength coach, my job is to help athletes achieve high levels of relative strength. To get my clients feeling stronger and achieving higher sports performance, I teach them the importance of recruiting more motor units in their muscles, which are made up of a neuron and skeletal muscle fibres. Groups of units work together to contract a single muscle; when a motor unit is activated, all its fibres contract. Thus, the greater number of units active and the greater frequency of action in individual units, the greater the degree of contraction of the
whole muscle.
The number of muscle fibres within each motor unit varies. For instance, there may be anywhere from five to 10 fibres per unit in the eye muscles and up to 2,000 in large leg muscles. Muscles that possess more motor units are able to be controlled more accurately and efficiently.
One of the best ways to recruit more motor units is by using a method called Cluster Training, designed by Carl Miller. Many high performance athletes have adopted this method because it hypertrophies fast-twitch fibres, which improves explosiveness, speed and strength. It uses 80-95% of your 1RM (one rep max) with a rest-pause of 10-15 seconds between three to five reps. The really fast twitch-fibre athlete may need 15 seconds to rest with five or six sets. If you’re just beginning, make sure to take adequate rest breaks between sets of at least four minutes.
When doing clusters it’s best to do them for every muscle group. You know you’re doing it right if you have trouble sleeping at night due to the over-stimulation of the nervous system. As such, it’s best to only do cluster training once every three months.
What I find nowadays is a lot of strength coaches don’t take the time to get their athletes strong. The stronger you make an athlete, the better that athlete will be. So it’s important for coaches to find out how much strength an athlete needs for their given sport, then get them there as fast as possible with a well-planned training regime. At the Laylor Performance System gym in Toronto, athletes who go through a cluster training phase immediately feel the difference in their performance. Simply put, the athlete who can recruit more motor units feels more
explosive and has a winning edge over fellow competitors.
