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I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might
by armcat 9mo ago
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
- xnx 9mo agoWell understood, but not widely known. The myths and superstitions around anything health related are frustratingly durable.
- elevaet 9mo agoWhat about the old gym adage "training to failure is failing to train" - is there any physiological basis for this, or is it mental, or just a myth?
- torben-friis 9mo agoI’ve never heard that, it’s usually the opposite- people do strip sets and the like to reach failure
- wswope 9mo agoThat’s a Pl/Oly mindset rather than a BB/hypertrophy mindset. Totally valid advice in the right context. Long story short, failed reps get much more risky and problematic as the weight you’re lifting approaches your 1RM.
- Moto7451 9mo agoExactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties. Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
- matwood 9mo agoDon’t sell yourself short though. Those are very respectable numbers ahead of the vast majority of the population.
- Moto7451 9mo agoYeah, for sure. It is in line with someone who went to the gym 4-5 times per week and had a coach/trainer. Just hard work and help from an expert.
- sethammons 9mo agoLook up lifts and weight multiples and a 3x weight deadlift is advanced to elite. https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/deadlift/lb https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/deadlift/lb
- bschwarz 9mo agoBe sure to not take strengthlevel.com too seriously.
- Moto7451 9mo agoYeah I was doing fine for the usual people going to the gym. I’d be last in a competition. I’m neither on steroids or an elite natural athlete. My point isn’t to say I’m weak, only that I’m not unusual for someone who went to the gym 5x per week and had a personal trainer/coach.
- teecha 9mo agonot an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
- nzeid 9mo agoIt's definitely way more nuanced than that. You have to approach exhaustion to get the body to eventually build strength. But you need to carefully time your rests/deloads and handle plateaus with more volume.
- thatcat 9mo agoWhere could I find more information on proper set timing?
- Moto7451 9mo agoHonestly from a personal training/lifting coach. When I could spend serious time in the gym there’s a lot to just having someone with expertise for 30 minutes to give perspective. You can do a lot of it over video today as well. In general YouTube is a good resource. There are a lot of respected coaches that also produce content.
- matwood 9mo agoIt ends up being personal, but you want enough time to catch your breath and be “ready” to go again, but no more.
- aeonik 9mo agoThis guy has a PhD in exercise science and is a very evidence based dude and breaks things down very nicely. https://youtu.be/DupQfkoI-Sc?si=QK_w2d99TcvNcQsD https://youtu.be/DupQfkoI-Sc?si=QK_w2d99TcvNcQsD
- teecha 9mo agoI like Mehdi's description over here as a good starting point: https://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5/intermediate/#rest-periods https://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5/intermediate/#rest-p... Has a paper from 1976 but this seems in line with what I've read elsewhere basically, 2-3 minutes is probably good for most of your lifting, you could go to 5 minutes if you are doing your heaviest lift of the day this is also a reasonable way to make sure your workouts aren't going to take 3 hours at a time some people really mix max this though if they're focusing on super heavy lifts. i remember being at the gym and watching people take 8-10 minutes between sets when they were putting up 400-500lbs on a squat. they also arrived before me and weren't done when i was leaving and, i'm assuming, they were interested in powerlifting competitions i've actually started looking at reactive training system with mike tuchscherer who has a lot of interesting things to say about training, rest times, etc. been startin to build his stuff on RPE and fatigue percentages in to my training and it has already been super insightful and helpful https://store.reactivetrainingsystems.com/blogs/default-blog-1/how-to-use-rpe-in-your-training-correctly https://store.reactivetrainingsystems.com/blogs/default-blog...
- NoLinkToMe 9mo agoIt holds true, but with some caveats. Generally training to failure is completely fine for say a set of tricep extensions. Generally safe. However, training to failure on compound lifts like a deadlift or benchpress, or involving sensitive muscles like a shoulder press, isn't. Technique generally suffers at the point of failure. Making a habit of doing thousands of repetitions in the next decade at the point where technique fails, on an exercise that can mess up your back permanently, or your shoulders, is bad advice. For these exercises it's better to stop 2 reps short of failure. This is more safe. Also it requires moderate recovery getting you back in the gym quicker, meaning you can compound more incremental improvements in a given training period (say 5 years). Even then, some still cautiously go to failure to keep an understanding of what their failure point really is. You could go for a PR once or twice a month for example and go to failure, with a proper warmup, spotter etc. But purely for hypertrophy there's not really a point, this is more for strength training. Generally people that say they train to failure mean 2 reps in reserve. Training to absolute failure on all muscles is very rare and generally advised against.
- calmbonsai 9mo agoTrue. Generally, the more isolated the exercise and the smaller the muscle the "safer" it is to train-to-failure at a higher duty-cycle. Put another way, you can do crunches to failure every single day, but you'll want to keep some reps in the tank for squats and you'll want to plan on at least 12-24 hours of recovery between squat sessions.
- coffeebeqn 9mo agoFailure also taxes your nervous system and joints which don’t take as kindly to stimulus as muscles do and take longer to recover (or accumulate damage in case of joints)
- torben-friis 9mo ago>While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" The caveat is that you need anaerobic training. Low enough weight and it’s cardio, you don’t get giant legs by walking to failure for example.
- nnutter 9mo agoHas anyone really ever walked to failure on a regular basis? I typically have to stop because of blisters not muscle failure. (The furthest I've done is 12 miles with +10% weight.)
- worthless-trash 9mo agoI used to persistent hunt to failure, ended up with bulky calves and tibialis.
- bglazer 9mo agoWhere were you doing this? Were you ever successful? How did you do it, like what were your tactics? So many questions! I’ve never heard about modern people doing serious persistence hunting, except for a stunt that I read about years ago. I think it was organized by like Outside or some running publication that got pro marathoners to try and they failed because they didn’t know anything about hunting
- conception 9mo agoRight? Where’s the well written blog post on this I want?
- worthless-trash 9mo agoI'm honestly surprised that anyone would care to read about it, we just called it 'hunting' with knives.
- NoImmatureAdHom 9mo ago
- amelius 9mo agoHow about making muscles fail by stretching them under load?
- jimbo808 9mo agoSounds like a great way to injure yourself, also would only work for eccentric motion
- amelius 9mo agoTo me it doesn't sound much different than "taking your sets to muscular failure".
- jimbo808 9mo agoNot all muscles resist extension, some do the opposite and contract.
- pasquinelli 9mo agoi don't understand what this means. the stretch feeling is an involuntary muscle contraction that is happening to resist extension on the opposite side.
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- mrob 9mo agoDepending on what you mean by "fail" and "stretching", that sounds a lot like eccentric training [0] (a.k.a. "negatives"). It's effective but notorious for causing delayed onset muscle soreness. I trained myself to do pull-ups using this method, repeatedly lowering myself in a controlled motion from the top position while I was too weak to actually pull myself up. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_training https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_training
- vasco 9mo ago> Loads for each set were adjusted to ensure that volitional fatigue was reached within 8–12 and 20–25 repetitions for the HL and LL limbs, respectively I would argue both categories of the study are about low reps. I don't see how the body would tell the difference between 12 and 25 reps. If you said between 5 and 500, like it has to meaningfully take much longer, otherwise why would doing something so similar have any meaningful difference? The way I think about it is that nature mostly reacts to order of magnitude changes. 12 to 25 is the same thing. Like why not make a study to see if its more nutritious to eat dinner in 15 or 20 minutes?
- pjc50 9mo agoThis is spoken like you've never done any reps at all?
- vasco 9mo agoThere's not much difference in hitting max at 12 and at 25, from anecdotal experience. The study corroborated that as well, even though with small n.
- solumunus 9mo agoWhat do you mean by there’s no difference? The difference is in the relative load needed in each example.
- vasco 9mo agoWell of course you change the load, but the stimulus is interpreted the same way by the body. I didn't think the question was at that level.
- solumunus 9mo ago> but the stimulus is interpreted the same way by the body That may be your intuition, but it’s certainly not everyone’s, hence the studies… Many people will intuit heavier weight = more effective.
- fudged71 9mo agoBrad Schoenfeld Has been on this body of work for a long time, and he is "Mr. Hypertrophy" in the field. So yes
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- landl0rd 9mo agoFifty is excessive but you’re better-served doing 12-20 reps more than fewer, heavier reps if you’re pushing hypertrophy and already well-trained.
- taneq 9mo agoThat matches what I've been told by various personal trainers. 6-8 reps if focusing on strength, ~12 for all round, and 16-18 for size/endurance. Do three sets, weight should be enough that the last couple of reps on the first set are a bit of a struggle. Subsequent sets just push through as far as you can.
- hatefulheart 9mo agoYour trainers clearly never read Starting Strength.
- taneq 9mo agoNo idea, I certainly haven't. This was decades ago, though, so it's entirely possible that established best practice has changed.
- oarfish 9mo agothese days your better of not reading that, probably. bunch of outdated and bad advice coming from that corner.
- hatefulheart 9mo agoWhat do you recommend?
- taneq 9mo ago"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Also probably move around a lot, doesn't matter how, ideally by finding something fun to do that involves moving around a lot.
- toshinoriyagi 9mo agoThe weight does matter. You will never get bigger if you don't add weight to the bar, and you will never get bigger if you only train at 1% of your 1 rep max, no matter the number of reps. Producing a training stimulus requires placing the muscle under sufficient tension (enough weight) enough times to be at or near failure.
- safety1st 9mo agoThere are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation. Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure. The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
- Retric 9mo ago2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest. As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo agoBoring is subjective though. For some like me the ideal weight gives endorphins where as too much feels like cortisol. Too light is sort of nothing. So I aim for that "yeah I pushed something" feeling. Which isn't failure.
- Retric 9mo agoLet’s be realistic, everyone goes through periods when they just don’t want to work out. So optimal in terms of personal preference is defiantly worth considering alongside optimal in terms of results, but optimal in terms of returns on effort defiantly has a place at some point in our lives.
- sedivy94 9mo agoNovelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.
- solumunus 9mo ago> bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus Some will, many won’t. It’s clearly not necessary.
- machomaster 9mo agoThey mostly cycle for health (injury prevention) and sanity (not to do the same damn thing).
- calmbonsai 9mo agoThere's also the risk of injury. At very low reps and high weight, particularly for highly coordinated motions (squats, dips, pull-ups, Pulver press back-extensions), there's a much higher chance for injury due to insufficient support at one or more positions within the entire range of concentric and eccentric efforts by all activated muscles. We all have, at the very least, minor intrinsic asymmetries that need explicit addressing. There's also intra-set recovery. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, your endo-neuro-muscular system "adapts best" where there is a refractory period for a reset-to-quiescence between exertions. There is real truth to "muscle memory" and the exclusive way to achieve that (and avoid injury) is through a sufficient amount of well-formed repetitions. The only way to achieve those repetitions is by using a resistance that's sufficiently low.
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- vjerancrnjak 9mo agoAsymmetry is normal and you cannot address it (outside of repeatability of movement, aiming for no form degradation during high load). As long as your movement does not degrade horribly, asymmetry is fine. Even before strength training, your one arm is dominant, more precise. But this has an effect on your leg as well. Doing unilateral work will never change that asymmetry. As you get stronger, due to drastically different activations of the nervous system between the sides, you will get slightly different adaptations. Looking at powerlifters, most of them have visibly different sizes of hip, leg musculature between sides. They even have drastic flexibility differences where one hip goes deeper, or the musculature makes the barbell sit skewed on the back.
- machomaster 9mo agoEven Smolov has clear discrepancies in the way his feet are positioned.
- calmbonsai 9mo agoTo be clear, by "addressing" I did mean altering form and training to lessen the risk of injury due to asymmetry. FWIW, I wear a heal-cup in my right shoe and do additional rotator cuff warm-ups to due minor leg asymmetry and an old injury.
- kombine 9mo agoTraining to failure for me personally only brought injury and set back my progress by weeks.
- samiv 9mo agoIf you were a newbie just getting started.. the ligaments and tendons take much longer to strengthen than the muscle. So the muscles getting stronger will outpace the connective tissue. Second potential issue is too much training vrt recovery. A good way to add safety margin when training to failure is to reduce the weights and slow down the exercise and increase the time under load. For example bench press, do 5s down (eccentric), 5s pause (isometric) and then (optionally) 5s press (concentric). Your weights will go way down because this exercise will be so hard. But the stress on the joints and ligaments will be reduced.
- marknutter 9mo agoNot being able to do a rep with proper form is the definition of failure.