Posts Tagged ‘Muscle Building’
How To Train To Muscle Failure
The gym is a place where we can revert to our cave man days and grunt and yell with no fuss from anyone. This usually happens when your muscles are crying failure.
In this article today, I’m going to be explaining the importance of muscle failure and how to achieve it.
Pushing your muscles to the limit is the biggest reason we go to the gym.
I was lifting 85 lbs dumb bells yesterday on the incline bench when I reached failure on the down stroke. If it weren’t for my spotter, I would’ve been in serious trouble.
I knew I was done with chest for the day, and unlike so many other trainees, I moved on to another exercise after that.
If you train to muscle failure, you’ve recruited just about every fiber of muscle you have and they’ve all failed. When your muscles oxidize (do work) they produce lactic acid. When that acid builds up, they don’t move anymore.
This is important because you’ve now effectively torn that majority of the muscle. Giving you the maximum chance of recovery.
It’s like this. If you only damage 60% of your muscle, only 60% of it will repair itself. But if you damage 95% of your muscle, 95% will repair itself and you will see growth a lot faster. It may take longer to recover, but generally, you’ll see greater growth because you have greater repair going on.
Keep your tempo steady throughout the lift while keeping your technique as good as possible. Make sure it’s your muscles failing and not your joints. Keep a positive attitude and push through the pain until you can’t perform the movement anymore.
With that being said, it’s a good idea to have a spotter with you when you do this. Either your training partner, or someone else. This can be dangerous as I’ve pointed out above, but if you want to see greater growth, this is a great strategy.
You need to communicate with your spotter as to when you’re about to fail and they should be vigilant to look for signs of failure.
The cliche no pain, no gain, isn’t always correct, so until next time, train hard, and train smart.
Want to find out more about how to build muscle, then visit Mitch Graves’s site for the best muscle building advice on the web.