In yesterday’s newsletter I explained how higher-rep sets to failure may do somewhat less muscle-fiber damage than heavy sets to failure…
Less damage can be better for hypertrophy because you allow more muscle-protein synthesis to go toward growth rather than repair; however…
High reps cause more fatigue, which also inflicts damage. Back to researcher Chris Beardsley…
Any sustained muscular contraction that involves fatigue can increase the levels of calcium ions, which disrupt the muscle fiber membrane through protease activation.
That damage from high fatigue appears to be less direct than heavy-load contractions, but there’s still damage that your body must repair.
And studies show that it’s imperative to hit failure on high-rep sets to get growth stimulation, which is not the case with heavy sets.
So if we want the majority of muscle-protein synthesis to go toward unbridled hypertrophy for more extreme muscle size, we need to reduce muscle trauma to a minimum…
While reducing the number of sets, or volume, makes sense, you need some volume to grow. Studies repeatedly show that two sets are better than one, and three sets are better than two. But from there hypertrophy benefits begin to level off…
Four to five sets per muscle per workout seems to be the limit for most drug-free trainees—perhaps fewer if you’re older. So how do we minimize the damage from our three or four sets?
If those sets are heavy, you should stop short of failure. If you’re using higher reps, you can go to failure on the first set—but perhaps it’s not necessary on the ones after. You’ve achieved slow-twitch exhaustion on that high-rep set and shifted to fast-twitch engagement, so failure may not be necessary…
In the workouts in Old Man Young Muscle, I recommended going to failure on all three or four sets for each target muscle.
Would I have made better gains by going to failure on only the very first high-rep set? Or perhaps only the first two, with the remaining ones sub-failure?
Due to my 20-second rests between sets, sub-failure on a few sets would have reduced fatigue and therefore mitigated some damage—at least in theory.
If you’re using the workouts in OMYM and want to experiment, you could try alternating a session with all sets to failure and the second with only the first set to failure.
I say “experiment” because you may have noticed that many of the statements in the past few newsletters have had the words “it appears” or “may.” That’s because while a lot of this is based on studies, it’s still conjecture and theories.
By hashing all of this out, I’m trying to determine why my gains were so good with 35-minute workouts three days a week while emphasizing the ideal exercises with three sets and 20-second rest between—all sets to failure. And at age 62…
My gains are never good enough, so I attempt to figure out how to make them better. And it gets more difficult the older I get. Still fun though.
Tomorrow, I’ll have an update on 2019 Mr. Universe Doug Brignole’s training. His latest workout tweaks fit right in with this discussion, as you’ll see.
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.
And you still get The Muscle-On, Belly-Gone “Diet” ebook FREE for a limited time when you add Old Man, Young Muscle to your mass-building library. Go HERE.
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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