The margin of time that determines muscle building success or failure in the gym is a heck of a lot shorter than you might think. Just as fraction-of-a-second moments during a 100 metre dash will make or break a sprinter’s race, fraction-of-a-second moments will also make or break your body’s muscle growth response in the gym.
In fact, your entire margin of success in the gym can ultimately be reduced to just a short time span of 60 seconds. That’s correct, how you choose to handle a short 60 second time period during your workouts will translate to either poor, mediocre or significant muscle building results.
Although each entire workout will last for about an hour, only 60 seconds of that actual time will determine what kind of gains you achieve. How does it works? Well, the first reps in your set means just a little bit than nothing in terms of muscular growth. However, they play an important role.
Reps 1-4 are only performed in order to get to reps 5 and 6. But there’s more than meets the eye in that. The last reps you perform in a set actually are the ones that will determine if the results of your workout are or not the results you desire.
The important thing is to overload your muscles in the last reps. Muscles respond to stress, and there is no more stressful moment for your muscles than the moment at the end of your set.
The best way to trigger your body’s adaptive responses is training until your muscles cannot move the weight another inch. Drop the weight some seconds before the guy next to you and you will see the difference between his and your muscles after some weeks.
Let’s do some math. If you perform 10 sets per workout, and have a margin of 6 seconds between success/failure per set, then it means that the way you handle that 60 seconds could mean a significant muscular growth…or a total waste of time.
Well, if we assume that you perform 10 total all out sets per workout and have a margin of 6 seconds between success/failure per set, this gives you 60 seconds of total time per workout to either battle through with full effort or to surrender and settle for mediocre results.
The closer and closer that you can come to muscular failure, the more dramatically your body will respond. Two seconds, five seconds, maybe another one rep, or two, would actually mean a great difference.
Training your muscles to muscular failure is the way to achieve betters results. If you drop the weight before you reach it you are compromising the results.
If you can’t move the weight another inch, if your muscles ache and you feel them burning, you are going in the right direction to true muscular failure.
That’s the right moment to give your maximum effort. If you give up then, if you take a rest, then you are compromising gains. If you don’t, you’ll achieve the best possible results.
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