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.
That’s right, your workout session maybe lasts for about an hour, but there’s a small fraction of time in your session that really matters and that’s something you have to know in order to achieve the best results. How you handle that seconds would mean poor, mediocre or great 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.
If a given set consists of 6 reps, then reps 1-4 are only performed in order to get to reps 5 and 6. Reps 1-4 will do very little in terms of stimulating muscular growth, but are necessary to perform in order to overload the muscles on reps 5 and 6.
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.
Then, your succes in the bodybuilding process is measured by the short moments at the end of every single set you perform in the gym.
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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