Q: You’ve said forced and negatives reps at the end of a set can kill muscle growth. But didn’t that work for [Mike] Mentzer to make his short workouts better, and isn’t your [end-of-set] X-Reps similar?
A: For the uninitiated, legendary bodybuilder Mike Mentzer, pictured above (John Balik photo), trained to failure on most sets and then had a partner help him force out a few more slow positive/negative reps. But he wasn’t done…
Following the forced reps, his partner would lift the weight for him, and then Mentzer would lower slowly to a count of five—negative-only reps—until he could no longer control the descent….
Did that help him gain more mass on his short Heavy Duty workouts, which consisted of about three to four sets per muscle? Possibly—because of 3 factors:
1) He was a genetic anomaly, a classic thick mesomorph made for bodybuilding
2) He was an advanced bodybuilder who could better cope with extended-set training
3) He was on anabolic steroids
For the average bodybuilder, extending sets to that extent is overkill. It will crush the nervous system and derail recovery and growth.
As I discuss in Old Man, Young Muscle 2, after Mentzer retired, he found that using forced and negatives with the clients he trained did just that—smothered their gains…
He stopped using them, but he continued to have his clients push to total failure on every work set…
The latest research suggests that for most trainees, even going to failure on multiple sets can be a gain killer for the same CNS-crushing reason. Here’s hypertrophy researcher Chris Beardsley…
Muscular failure during strength training sets always occurs because of a lack of central motor command and not because of a lack of muscle force-producing capacity.
With every set to failure, you stack up damage and nervous-system stress. In fact, Beardsley’s colleague, Paul Carter, said that studies show you need five additional sets to equal the hypertrophy effect of set #1. Back to Beardsley…
Higher volumes cause more post-workout fatigue since more calcium ion accumulation occurs in each additional set.
What that tells us is that perhaps one set to failure for each target muscle is enough, stopping the rest a rep or two short. And it doesn’t take a lot of sets to fully stimulate hypertrophy.
More tomorrow, such as how many total sets is best, and how end-of-set X-Rep partials boost muscle growth rather than derail it like forced and negative reps.
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