ChrisWrestling's blog

I'm going to do a video for this on my youtube channel (link in profile above the description section) but figured I'd talk about it here a bit.  I'm surprised I hadn't applied my personal training knowledge to this earlier to explain why my scissors tend to be more powerful than others but I was playing with someone last night and made a suggestion to him and the next time he tried to scissor me it was significantly more brutal.

First off muscles are strongest in the eccentric (resisting lengthening) phase of contraction, then isometric phase (holding), and the weakest is the concentric (shortening) phase.  The next principle is that our muscle fibers always contract at 100% every time, the way we regulate how much force we generate is that our nervous system sends signals to more muscle fibers.  Imagine you are playing tug of war and you start to pull by yourself and start to lose, you call out and more people join your side allowing you to overcome the resistance the other team is producing.  That being said our nervous system has other systems which try to prevent injury by down regulating tendon tension and the rate of change in muscle length in order to prevent joint injury.  All of this creates what we call the force-velocity curve.  Basically what that means is that the faster the velocity the more your nervous system inhibits the amount of force you are able to produce. Since fewer muscle fibers are doing more work they wear out incredibly fast.

So what does this mean in terms of bodyscissors?  It means that if you clamp down as hard as you can and as fast as you can your nervous system is going to inhibit how much you squeeze and you will fatigue really fast.  If I ramp up to 50% of my total power I will actually squeeze tighter than I would if I were to clamp down fast and hard and I will actually end up using more of my muscle to create that power, my energy processing will also be more efficient so I can hold it significantly longer.  I tend to down regulate my nervous system by focusing on my own breathing which often helps me hold for longer.

Ribcrusher and I talk probably once a month or so and he often theorizes that the victim is able to take more because of their ability to brace against your squeeze but those are muscles as well prone to fatigue.  This is why I try to be as lazy of a heel as I can be utilizing knee on belly, body triangles, a heavy switch base position, it's all to wear down my opponent so that by the time I am bearhugging or scissoring, their body is already fatigued and my force can cut right into them without them having the energy to resist me.  Some of that, sure, is coming from restricted breathing and reduced circulation, but that doesn't matter, the point is that I spend time doing what I can to ensure they are as disadvantaged as possible when it comes time for me to use my energy to crush the life out of them.

For those looking to be squeeze heels I highly recommend learning to be as versatile as possible.  There are techniques like how you might roll someone onto their side from north south that uses no energy from you that makes it near impossible to breathe for your opponent.  Knee on belly (aka kneeride) is another resting position for heels that is horrible for jobbers.  Oftentimes people struggle with learning how to be heavy on their partners without losing their position (a subject beyond the scope of this blog but I cover it quite a bit on the youtube channel).  

This isn't meant to be exhaustive in regards to how to construct an amazing squeeze scene without gassing out, there are still hypothesis' to try out.  I've discussed training quite a bit but I think I may review my previous advice now that I have thought about power in these terms.  Thinking about scissors like this may mean a change in the programming approach.  While I do think explosive power training is still valuable, especially when done with the intent to push your endurance, since that isn't the best way to apply force I wonder if it's the best way to train for it.  What it would certainly do is improve your muscle recruitment so your beartrap rapid applied scissors could become more powerful and training to sustain that power has value but I do believe gradual application of force will always win out when it comes to maximum force output and endurance.