In yesterday’s newsletter, we looked at a new interpretation of hypertrophy research that suggests going to all-out muscular failure may do more harm than good with heavier loads.
Researcher Chris Beardsley says that heavier sets to failure do most of the damage on the last two reps; therefore you should stop two reps short to achieve most of the hypertrophy stimulation while avoiding that severe damage.
But what about higher-rep, more-fatiguing sets of say 20—where you really feel the burn?
Beardsley says, “training with lighter loads to failure causes fibers to shorten at a slower speed because of accumulated metabolic stress.”
Could that lessen the damage toward the end of the set and speed hypertrophy? More from Beardsley on lighter-load training to failure…
As the set progresses, and new, higher-threshold motor units are recruited, their muscle fibers contract slowly. The slow-contraction velocity allows a larger number of simultaneous actin-myosin cross bridges to be attached at any one time, which produces a high level of muscle-fiber force. This force is detected as mechanical tension by mechanoreceptors on the muscle cell membrane, triggering molecular signaling cascades, increasing muscle-protein-synthesis rates, and producing increases in muscle-fiber size.
Whew. That’s a lot to unpack. Basically, fatigue accumulation toward the end of a high-rep set shuts down slow-twitch firing and creates a “slow-contraction velocity” that activates an excess of fast-twitch fibers.
It also appears that fatigue-product pooling on higher-rep sets stops you short—going to failure isn’t actually going to “true failure.” Even though you can’t get another rep, you’re forced to terminate the set due to fatigue…
That can be a good thing. While fatigue also does damage, it appears to do somewhat less than heavy training to failure, which should allow more hypertrophy to occur.
In the case of my workouts in Old Man Young Muscle, I started with a 20-rep set to failure. I then rested only 20 seconds before doing another set to failure. So fatigue remained high throughout my three or four sets for that target muscle, forcing my training poundages to be moderate as the rep count dropped—20, 12, 8…
I believe that’s one reason I made such good progress—while I still got plenty of fast-twitch activation, I avoided severe damage from overly heavy loads on the fibers. That helped reduce post-workout repair and allowed more muscle-protein synthesis to go toward hypertrophy.…
I’m wondering if a new mantra should be: Don’t get sore to grow more.
Speaking of growing more, I was still getting damage from fatigue. Beardsley suggests that it’s from “the buildup of intracellular calcium and inflammatory neutrophils.”
So the question becomes: Could I have produced even better gains somehow?
I’ll discuss mitigating high-rep-set damage in the next newsletter for the potential of even faster hypertrophy.
New: Get the ideal exercise for each muscle, the best add-on moves for ultimate mass, complete 35-minute workouts, exercise start/finish photos, and details on building muscle fast and efficiently in Old Man, Young Muscle.
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Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
Steve Holman
Former Editor in Chief, Iron Man Magazine
www.X-Rep.com
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