Seductive Simplicity

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EricK
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Seductive Simplicity

#1

Post by EricK » Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:07 am

1. Efficacy is King


Training should be effective. That is, it should get trainees what they want out of it, provided they put in the work. Figuring out how to do that depends on their goals, and where the lifter is coming from. Usually, these constraints make things a little more complicated than we'd like, but success is not merely a consequence of willpower alone.



But how do we know if a program is effective? Early in a trainee’s experience, weight on the bar is a simple way to measure, even enforce, progress. This might seduce us into thinking that displaying our strength through a feat like a new rep-max (RM) is the same thing as developing strength, but we would mistake the thing we want for the way to get it. A display of strength relies on a collection of physiological adaptations that are subject to their own limits and respond differently to the same stimulus. For a novice, most lifting will have a positive effect on all of these adaptations, but as the trainee advances, the differences are amplified. Learning how these adaptations work and respond to training is essential if we want to be effective. Applying these lessons will necessarily complicate things a little.


2. Training Framework

2.1 Anatomy of Strength
For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to lump the physiological aspects of strength into neurological and muscular attributes. Every physiological adaptation has a “performance ceiling.” That is, there is some maximum potential we’ll never actually reach, but that influences our performance nonetheless. The rate of adaptation for each aspect is proportional to its proximity to that limit, while the “cost” of maintaining an adaptation is inversely proportional to its proximity. In other words, the closer we get to our limits, the harder and slower it is to get even closer, and the costlier it is just to stay where we are.


2.1.1 Neurological Aspects
The neurological aspects of strength include coordination and recruitment. By coordination, I mean our ability to convert force into productive movement. Gross motor movements require a collaborative effort from different muscles and joints to move our bodies and external objects in the desired direction. We improve coordination through observing, visualizing, performing, and coaching cues. The time and effort to learn a new movement pattern varies, but, once learned, the movement pattern does not change much over time. Learning productive movement is immensely valuable to a novice, but if we view a perfectly coordinated movement as a nearly vertical line, further advancements in coordination cannot yield an improvement in the display of strength. Maintaining good coordination is important for effective training but it quickly ceases to be a specific adaptive focus.



Recruitment is to the ability to effectively engage motor units within a muscle, causing it to contract. Motor units can be classified as “low threshold,” meaning they are easily recruited to perform low-force movements, and “high threshold” units which require greater exertion to activate. Each motor unit contains its own complement of contractile tissue, so increasing the number of motor units involved in a movement can dramatically increase the force potential of that movement. The big physiological adaptation here involves “learning” how to effectively recruit “unfamiliar” motor units. Essentially, a novice with little exposure to loaded movement will have inconsistent innervation of the higher threshold motor units, but this connection improves with training. An individual has a fixed number of motor units, however, and that does not change with training.


2.1.2 Muscular Aspects
Finally, muscles are the engines for contractile force. The maximum contractile potential of a muscle is ultimately limited by its cross-sectional area (CSA). The CSA is where the contractile elements of the muscle interact, and more CSA means more interactions and more potential force. Relative to the other aspects of strength, muscular CSA has, by far, the highest “ceiling.” Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue, and each motor unit can be considered somewhat in isolation. The high-threshold motor units tend to be the least resistant to fatigue, but the hardest to recruit. And low-threshold units are very fatigue-resistant. The magnitude of fatigue each motor unit experiences is related to the number of times it contracts. Manipulating intensity influences this process asymmetrically. Generally, low-intensity movements (e.g. walking) will not engage high-threshold motor units, even with many repetitions, and few total repetitions, even at a high intensity, will not fatigue motor units enough to elicit hypertrophy. But “moderate” intensity movements performed for many repetitions has the potential to recruit and fatigue the greatest number of motor units sufficiently to elicit hypertrophy.


2.1.3 Strength as a Display of Cumulative Adaptations
Simplistically, we can think of strength as being determined by the above components. CSA determines maximum possible force, recruitment determines what proportion of that force is expressed, and coordination determines how productively the lifter translates force to movement. A low to mid-range RM effort demands high motor unit recruitment but, at best, only fatigues the least fatigue-resistant motor units. The high motor unit recruitment heavily stresses the neurological aspects of strength without stimulating hypertrophy in most of the involved motor units. It also inhibits performance of additional repetitions due to the neurological fatigue. It causes subsequent reps to be “sloppy.” This may confuse the firing pattern of the movement, reducing coordination. Moderate intensity reps can be performed with better, more consistent form, while allowing sufficient cumulative repetitions to fatigue the most motor units.



Intensity drives neurological adaptations and muscular hypertrophy responds to repetition. Simply adding weight to the bar every time works for someone who still has a lot of neurological adaptations to develop, but manipulating intensity alone fails to adequately stress muscular hypertrophy.


2.2 The Novice Effect


Personal Records (PRs) come regularly for novices. But that shouldn’t be surprising, because they’re rapidly gaining both muscular and neurological adaptations. Our tendency to fixate on this aspect of novice training stems more from the subjective importance it carries than from its actual utility in training. Regular PRs help trainees push themselves, and might keep some of them motivated. But this can become addictive, and give us the idea that consistent PRs are the most important attribute of a training program, when in reality, they are just the fruits of our labor.



Any novice program that emphasizes low rep work at a low volume will disproportionately stress the neurological aspects of strength. That’s not a bad thing. It essentially means that the lifter quickly learns coordination, develops better recruitment, and gets accustomed to hard training. It also means that the trainee learns how to better display the strength developed during training. We want trainees to lift with proper form and learn how to produce force. However, the nature of this approach has the potential to end badly. Our post-novice trainee is disproportionately closer to the ceiling for neurological adaptations than he is for muscular hypertrophy, he’s measured progress solely through the manipulation of intensity, and he’s potentially addicted to PRs. Every RM PR effort for this more efficient lifter represents a disproportionate strain on the neurological (and peripheral tissue) components of strength, with insufficient stimulus for hypertrophy. At this stage, hypertrophy is the one attribute that has the most untapped potential, best recovery resources, and the biggest impact on performance. In order to get stronger, our lifter needs to shift training focus.


2.3 The Targeted Specialist
Approaching an adaptive limit basically means that tolerances narrow, and thresholds get higher: The range between too much stress (overtrained) and not enough (no improvement) narrows. The body becomes more resistant to stress, requiring more to stimulate further adaptation: The threshold to elevate muscle protein synthesis (MPS) increases, and that elevation diminishes both in peak and duration. De-training happens more quickly, and recovery takes longer. Confusingly, the need for both specificity and variety increase. And the cost for maintaining these physiological adaptations increases.



For post-novice trainees, maintaining a very high proficiency in any aspect of strength becomes extremely costly, and it can detract from effective training. A high neurological proficiency is the ability to maximally use the available muscle. Muscular hypertrophy is the way to increase what’s potentially available. If a lifter maintains proportionally equal utility (coordination and recruitment) of his CSA while increasing the total CSA, he will get stronger. Some degree of overall proficiency is necessary to train effectively, but the only time we need all of them at their peak is when we want to display the strength we’ve developed through training. But if a trainee is already highly proficient at recruiting muscle, getting better at recruiting it will only provide a marginal increase, at a prohibitive cost. Performing a RM is a very neurologically taxing event that does little to stimulate hypertrophy. And to produce more CSA, a lifter must stress the contractile capacity of a muscle.



Diversified approaches to training, that use different rep ranges and greater volume, apply these ideas to build more muscle and then hone neurological adaptations to better utilize that additional muscle, either in competition or in support of more training. It’s not complexity for its own sake, but a recognition of competing demands and an intelligent approach to address natural limitations in a way the best culminates in improved performance.



Specialization deals with how narrowly aligned the different neuromuscular adaptations need to be to perform a given task. Squatting 200 pounds for most healthy males under the age of 40 is not all that specialized, even though it may be uncommon. The coordination, recruitment and muscle mass demands of such a feat are trivial and most young men with limited lifting experience could perform it without special preparation; and they would be able to repeat it immediately. Squatting 600 pounds, on the other hand, represents a high degree of specialization for most people. Even among those who have done it, repeating it would require careful preparation. This is why world-class athletes carefully plan their training to support their competition schedule, and highly specialized competitions, like powerlifting, see the highest performance among competitors who rarely lift maximal loads. Novices have not specialized to the degree that maintaining new adaptations represents much physiological cost, and performing PRs does not require very precise alignment of physiological adaptations. At higher levels of performance, lifters must decompose strength into its constituent parts and apply appropriate stress to maximize their contributions in competition. More advanced lifters need to plan their training to develop the disparate physiological adaptations in a way that effectively culminates in improved performance. In this way, successful competitive lifters become targeted specialists.


3. Train, Sustain, Develop, Display
Training complexity addresses the fact that the components of strength respond differently to the same stress and are subject to different limits. Post-novice lifters benefit from understanding which components of strength they can benefit the most from, and when the display of strength actually supports or detracts from training. More advanced lifters have to balance competing demands to continue making progress. If your goal is to display your strength, remember that said display requires an effective collaboration of the components of strength. Regular RM PRs are seductive, but they’re usually not very productive. As a lifter, your training should apply stress appropriately to yield the greatest returns on investment, and that may require a little bit of complexity, planning, and a better understanding of the components of strength.
Last edited by EricK on Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

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EricK
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Re: Seductive Sinplicity

#2

Post by EricK » Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:11 am

Thought this was relevant to recent goings on. Probably a little thin on some points (re: neurological fatigue, stimulating @tersh to start his thread which @Murelli found this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5035715/

Which I haven't had a chance to read yet.

I'm not trying to start a war with StSt, but just looking to put a reasoned argument out for folks who are genuinely interested in making post-novice progress without beating themselves into th ground and maybe wondering if they're just "not trying hard enough."

Anyway, have at it.

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Re: Seductive Sinplicity

#3

Post by EricK » Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:14 am

Also, thanks to @tersh and @Hanley for help with it before posting it.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#4

Post by EricK » Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:43 am

Got feedback from @Hanley:

In 2.1.1, there's another neurological aspect beyond simple recruitment and that's rate-coding. The total MU recruitment on an 85% attempt and 95% attempt is pretty similar, but twitch frequencies will be much different (higher frequency on the 95% attempt). Optimizing rate-coding is part of training.

Also, this is nit-picky, but in 2.1.2, you write " Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue".

Sorta. As best we can tell, though, hypertrophy occurs as mechanical tension is transduced into various signaling and growth hormones within the muscle fiber/cells. Metabolic by-products might play some role in hypertrophy, but it seems to be a vastly smaller effect than simple mechanical work and tension.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#5

Post by EricK » Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:45 am

EricK wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:43 am Got feedback from Hanley:

In 2.1.1, there's another neurological aspect beyond simple recruitment and that's rate-coding. The total MU recruitment on an 85% attempt and 95% attempt is pretty similar, but twitch frequencies will be much different (higher frequency on the 95% attempt). Optimizing rate-coding is part of training.

Also, this is nit-picky, but in 2.1.2, you write " Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue".

Sorta. As best we can tell, though, hypertrophy occurs as mechanical tension is transduced into various signaling and growth hormones within the muscle fiber/cells. Metabolic by-products might play some role in hypertrophy, but it seems to be a vastly smaller effect than simple mechanical work and tension.
The original article at least attempted to discuss firing rate, but I cut it out of one of the revisions, worried about length and my own limited technical depth. I would really like to work it back in though.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#6

Post by Murelli » Wed Feb 28, 2018 9:10 am

Joints don't produce movement, they're structural like bones.

Remove all adjectives from fatigue (neurological, muscular, it's all fatigue, a multifactorial response of your complex biological system called body).

You use CSA but don't use MU to shorten things. Why?

The draft is pretty great overall and gets to the point. I would say a bit more about complexity's role in injury prevention and fatigue management.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#7

Post by tersh » Wed Feb 28, 2018 10:44 am

Hanley wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:43 am Also, this is nit-picky, but in 2.1.2, you write " Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue".

Sorta. As best we can tell, though, hypertrophy occurs as mechanical tension is transduced into various signaling and growth hormones within the muscle fiber/cells. Metabolic by-products might play some role in hypertrophy, but it seems to be a vastly smaller effect than simple mechanical work and tension.
Huh. Well, that helps explain the importance of the eccentric in driving hypertrophy, and why negative chins work better than bands.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#8

Post by Hanley » Wed Feb 28, 2018 1:32 pm

tersh wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 10:44 am
Hanley wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:43 am Also, this is nit-picky, but in 2.1.2, you write " Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue".

Sorta. As best we can tell, though, hypertrophy occurs as mechanical tension is transduced into various signaling and growth hormones within the muscle fiber/cells. Metabolic by-products might play some role in hypertrophy, but it seems to be a vastly smaller effect than simple mechanical work and tension.
Huh. Well, that helps explain the importance of the eccentric in driving hypertrophy, and why negative chins work better than bands.
"Mechanotransduction". It's fucking crazy. Do you have an Amazon Kindle account? If you want to nerd-out, I can loan you Brad Shoenfeld's book on Hypertrophy.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#9

Post by EricK » Wed Feb 28, 2018 4:30 pm

Hanley wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 1:32 pm
tersh wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 10:44 am
Hanley wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 8:43 am Also, this is nit-picky, but in 2.1.2, you write " Hypertrophy occurs in response to fatigue".

Sorta. As best we can tell, though, hypertrophy occurs as mechanical tension is transduced into various signaling and growth hormones within the muscle fiber/cells. Metabolic by-products might play some role in hypertrophy, but it seems to be a vastly smaller effect than simple mechanical work and tension.
Huh. Well, that helps explain the importance of the eccentric in driving hypertrophy, and why negative chins work better than bands.
"Mechanotransduction". It's fucking crazy. Do you have an Amazon Kindle account? If you want to nerd-out, I can loan you Brad Shoenfeld's book on Hypertrophy.
You can lend books through kindle? Mindexplode.gif

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#10

Post by Hanley » Wed Feb 28, 2018 4:33 pm

EricK wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 4:30 pmYou can lend books through kindle? Mindexplode.gif
For 14 days, bruv.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#11

Post by tersh » Wed Feb 28, 2018 5:00 pm

Hanley wrote: Wed Feb 28, 2018 1:32 pm "Mechanotransduction". It's fucking crazy. Do you have an Amazon Kindle account? If you want to nerd-out, I can loan you Brad Shoenfeld's book on Hypertrophy.
I don't own a kindle, but I know that doesn't mean anything. I'm definitely interested, but need to wait a bit, pretty swamped at the moment.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#12

Post by tersh » Thu Mar 29, 2018 5:27 pm

Perhaps a new version of this should be posted in the Articles section?

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#13

Post by EricK » Sat Apr 07, 2018 3:15 pm

tersh wrote: Thu Mar 29, 2018 5:27 pm Perhaps a new version of this should be posted in the Articles section?
I really need to get my act together and apply the comments. I got some good feedback from @DoctorWho through PM, too. I will consolidate the feedback and start working on it tomorrow during nap time.

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Re: Seductive Simplicity

#14

Post by EricK » Sun Apr 08, 2018 1:36 pm

OK. So, I think I got through the first half pretty well. It's demoralizing to read one's own writing critically. The second half is going to take some more work. Thanks again for the constructive input.

First half:
1. Efficacy is King


Training should be effective. That is, it should get trainees what they want out of it, provided they put in the work. When considering strength training, specifically with barbells, effective means that our training increases our ability to exert productive force at will. Most trainees who want to get stronger intend to increase their baseline strength, their ability to move everyday objects more easily and perform regular activities without excessive strain. Some trainees will even want to use their strength to improve their performance in a competitive sport or activity. In each case, the nature and degree to which strength contributes to the trainee’s goal is unique, but the process for building strength is the same. There is a collection of physiological attributes that work in concert to display strength. Even though each of these attributes cumulatively contribute to strength, they are each subject to their own constraints and respond differently to the same stimulus.



For a novice, simply lifting with a barbell will positively influence all of these attributes. Early in a trainee’s experience, weight on the bar can both measure and drive progress. The simplicity of adding weight to the bar at a prescribed frequency is seductive, because for a short period, when strength development is easiest, it is incredibly effective. However, this approach relies solely intensity, or load, as the primary factor in strength development. Despite this early efficacy, intensity has an asymmetrical influence on the different attributes of strength. Using this approach beyond the brief period where is it useful is, at best, inefficient, but it is more likely to just be ineffective. Applying a better understanding of these different attributes to training is complicated, but it is a much more effective approach.


2. Training Framework
To continue developing strength in a post-novice lifter, training needs to stimulate physiological adaptations that contribute to performance. An effective training framework requires consideration of the different attributes of strength, how they work together, and what stimulus elicits the desired adaptations in each of them.
2.1 Attributes of Strength
For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to lump the physiological aspects of strength into neurological and muscular attributes. Every physiological adaptation has a finite capacity for development and performance. The rate of adaptation for each aspect is proportional to its proximity to that limit, while the “cost” of maintaining an adaptation is inversely proportional to its proximity. In other words, the closer we get to our limits, the harder and slower it is to get even closer, and the costlier it is just to stay where we are.


2.1.1 Neurological Aspects
The neurological aspects of strength include coordination, recruitment and firing rate.

By coordination, I mean our ability to convert force into productive movement. Gross motor movements require a collaborative effort from different muscles across different joints to move our bodies and external objects in the desired direction. We improve coordination through observing, visualizing, performing, and coaching cues. The time and effort to learn a new movement pattern varies, but, once learned, the movement pattern does not change much over time. Learning productive movement is immensely valuable to a novice, but the cost of continued refinement quickly out paces the benefit. Maintaining good coordination is important for effective training but it ceases to be a specific adaptive focus.

Recruitment refers to the ability to stimulate motor units within a muscle to contribute tension to a movement. Motor units can be classified as “low threshold,” meaning they are easily recruited to perform low-force movements, and “high threshold” units which require greater exertion to activate. Each motor unit contains its own complement of contractile tissue, so increasing the number of motor units involved in a movement can dramatically increase the force potential of that movement. The big physiological adaptation here involves “learning” how to effectively recruit “unfamiliar” motor units. Essentially, a novice with little exposure to loaded movement will have inconsistent innervation of the higher threshold motor units, but this connection improves with training. An individual has a fixed number of motor units that does not change with training. One cannot continue to increase recruitment beyond the number of available motor units, although the quality of recruitment, related to the coordination and firing rate, can continue to contribute marginal improvements in force production.

Firing rate can be thought of as the frequency of bio-electrical impulses sent from the motor-neuron to the muscle. When innervated, a series of chemical bonds between contractile elements within the motor unit build tension. When the impulse ceases, the number of bonds decays rapidly, but not instantaneously. Both the increase and decay of this tension takes a finite time to occur. Firing rate works by sending another contractile signal before the elements have fully relaxed, and the series of signals have a cumulative effect, resulting in greater overall tension. However, the “on” portion of this pulse must persist long enough to increase tension in the downstream contractile elements, and the “off” portion of this pulse must persist long enough for the neurons to cumulate sufficient ions to make the next pulse. Therefore, the useful range of this physiological attribute, as it contributes to strength development and display, is fixed and rather narrow, and its trainability is questionable.

Each of these aspects are primarily limited by intensity. Low intensity movements do not demand careful coordination, high recruitment or a high firing rate. However, there is considerable evidence that moderate intensity movements can improve a lifter’s ability to recruit high threshold motor units when performed explosively, or when performing higher rep sets near failure. Simply recruiting these less-frequently used motor units, improves their coordination and firing rate in much the same way that performing unfamiliar movements elicits adaptations in a novice trainee’s motor units.
2.1.2 Muscular Aspects
Finally, muscles are the engines for contractile force. The maximum contractile potential of a muscle is ultimately limited by its cross-sectional area (CSA). The CSA is where the contractile elements of the muscle interact, and more CSA means more interactions and more potential force. Relative to the other aspects of strength, muscular CSA has, by far, the highest “ceiling.” Hypertrophy is still poorly understood but has been shown to be most closely responsive to tension and repetition. There seems to be some loosely understood, lower threshold to the magnitude of tension necessary to stimulate the desired response (muscle growth), but it is the volume, or total number of reps, at or above this threshold that determines the magnitude of the response. In this regard, each motor unit can be considered somewhat in isolation, i.e. each motor unit will hypertrophy in response only to the volume in which it contributed tension to the movement.

Fatigue plays an interesting role in this relationship. As mentioned above, there is some minimal degree of tension necessary to stimulate hypertrophy, but higher tension, experienced through greater intensity, demands more motor unit recruitment than lower intensity. The high-threshold motor units tend to fatigue quickly but are the hardest to recruit. And low-threshold units are very fatigue-resistant, yet they are recruited in nearly every movement. Generally, low-intensity movements (e.g. walking) will not engage high-threshold motor units, even with many repetitions, and few total repetitions, even at a high intensity, will not recruit motor units enough to elicit hypertrophy. But higher intensity movements can fatigue motor units, resulting in poor coordination as well as reduction in recruitment and firing rate. Repetitions performed under those circumstances can negatively impact the refined movement patterns, potentially compromising performance at high intensity. Building the majority of one’s training volume with a “moderate” intensity near the “tension threshold” has the potential to recruit the greatest number of motor units sufficiently to elicit hypertrophy.


2.1.3 Strength as a Display of Cumulative Adaptations
Simplistically, we can think of strength as being determined by the above components. CSA determines maximum possible force, recruitment determines what proportion of that CSA contributes to a movement, firing rate determines the magnitude of force expressed in each motor unit, and coordination determines how productively the lifter translates force to movement. A low to mid-range rep-max effort demands high motor unit recruitment but, severely limits the total work performed by any of them. High intensity efforts are exceptionally well-suited to refining and developing the neurological aspects of strength but are poor at stimulating hypertrophy. They also inhibit performance of additional repetitions due to the disproportionately high fatigue that they impart on the lifter. A rep-max effort in a trained lifter will cause subsequent reps to be performed either below the threshold of useful intensity, or with a compromised movement pattern. A greater number of moderate intensity reps can be performed with better, more consistent form, maintaining the refined coordination required of a successful lifter while allowing sufficient cumulative repetitions to elicit hypertrophy.



Intensity drives neurological adaptations and muscular hypertrophy responds to repetition. Simply adding weight to the bar every time works for someone who still has a lot of neurological adaptations to develop, but manipulating intensity alone fails to adequately stress muscular hypertrophy.

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