Positive Neural Response (PNR) Principle : Every Rep Sends a Signal
Triphasic Training Method 43
Where This Started
Every exercise you give an athlete sends a signal to the nervous system. That signal is either positive or negative. I call it the Positive Neural Response, or PNR.
This goes back about 16 years (2010), to when I learned the foundations of muscle testing. That was a pivotal moment in my career. For the first time, I had a way to see whether I was actually making a difference.
If I tried a new exercise, a new method, massage therapy, Reflexive Performance Reset (RPR), or anything else, I could test the athlete before and after. Was I creating a positive neural response and pushing the needle? Or was I making things worse without knowing it?
Making Sure It Was Real
Muscle testing told me a lot, but I wanted to quantify it other ways. So I started pairing it with balance testing on force plates.
What I found was striking. When an exercise produced a negative neural response, the athlete’s balance on the force plate dropped by as much as 10 to 20%. And that drop lined up with the muscle test. Whether I retested the specific muscle involved or a different muscle I’d pre-tested, if balance got worse, the muscle test got worse too.
The catch is that force plate balance testing is complicated and time-consuming. So the real goal was to see if the two correlated. If they did, coaches could use quick muscle testing in place of the force plate.
If you run the force plate test, it has to be done carefully:
- Take vision out. The athlete’s eyes are closed or covered.
- Take sound out. Test in a quiet room, or use full earmuffs or noise-canceling headphones, so auditory input doesn’t skew the balance data.
You can add other checks too, like a vertical jump test. Use whatever you like to see whether you’re getting a positive or negative response.
After a few hundred tests, plus other coaches running the same protocols, we came to the same conclusion. The measures were highly correlated. A negative neural response showed up as worse balance on the force plate and a weaker muscle test.
What the Testing Revealed
Once I trusted the testing, I started running exercises through it, including the ones I thought were the best. Quite often, I got negative responses.
Those negatives kept showing up in the classic lifts: the typical RDL, the typical back squat. Then I’d test a single-leg squat right after a negative response from a double-leg back squat, and get a much more positive response.
I didn’t go in assuming or guessing what the results would be. I just kept noticing that the closer an exercise got to a certain concept, the better the neural response.
The Squat Experiment
So I ran an experiment. An athlete did a vertical jump test, then 10 sets of 5 on back squat with very little weight. Right after the 10th set, we retested the vertical jump. The result was a large decrease, somewhere in the range of 7 to 18%.
A couple of days later, we did the same thing with single-leg work at a similar load. Both legs were trained, so the total work was much higher. Yet the vertical jump didn’t decrease, and the athletes ran faster.
You can see this with sprinting too. Video an athlete sprinting before 10 sets of 3 on back squat, then video them again right after. Look at how bad the running form gets. I didn’t see that with the single-leg exercises.
The Common Thread: Gait
There’s a common theme here, and it ties back to one of my methods, Neuro-Gate Optimization. The more an exercise resembles the gait cycle, the more positive the neural response.
The human body was made to move through the gait cycle. Walking, running, and sprinting are built on one leg loading while the other leg and the opposite arm move in rhythm. When training respects that pattern, the nervous system responds well. When it doesn’t, the system often pushes back.
I’ve said it many times on podcasts: I don’t want my Olympic gold medal athletes walking like a world-class powerlifter. That’s simply not how that athlete should move.
Every Rep Adds Up
Then it dawned on me. Picture a workout with 500 to 600 total repetitions. If each of those reps creates a negative neural response, that’s 500 to 600 negative signals in one session. Now picture the same volume built from reps that each create a positive response.
Which athlete do you think adapts better? I believe the second one builds a greater level of adaptation and athleticism.
Stretch that across a training cycle or a full year, and it’s thousands of signals in one direction or the other:
- Thousands of positive responses tend to build a more athletic athlete with fewer injuries.
- Thousands of negative responses tend to cost mobility. Muscle tone keeps climbing set after set, a process I call Tonus Creep (Muscle Tonus Escalation).
I’ve written several articles on Tonus Creep and how we solved it with the RPR Interset method. But the first line of defense is choosing exercises that produce a positive response in the first place. That makes PNR a key factor in exercise selection throughout the entire year.
What We’ve Seen
We’ve now implemented this approach for seven years, with a large number of success stories. The biggest one surprised even me.
In my high-volume programs, we’ll run 75 to 110 sets in a 40 to 50 minute workout. Because nearly every rep produces a positive neural response, athletes don’t break down as the session goes on. In fact, around set 60 to 80, I’ve had athletes hit summer or lifetime PRs in the vertical jump and sprint.
Think about that. Sixty to 80 sets in, and they’re jumping higher and running faster than ever. That told me what we were doing was highly effective.
When I tried the same structure with bilateral exercises, even with lighter loads, sprinting and vertical jump deteriorated. Other coaches who have tried this have gotten the same results.
Final Thought
The magic behind all of this is simple: the human body was made to move through the gait cycle. Train in a way that respects that, and every rep becomes a positive signal instead of a negative one.
So before you program your next session, ask one question about every exercise on the sheet. Is this creating a positive neural response?
The methods in this course are built around that question:
