Saturday 2 July 2011

Another take at muscle building

I had this idea the other day that I may have overlooked in my research on muscle building. The golden rule of biology is that, in all circumstances, cells always seek to adapt to thier environment in such a way so as to maintain homeostasis with that environment.

In light of this, it may not be wise to complete strength training sets to failure or near failure. Going to failure surely creates an environment for the cell that ultimately favours aerobic respiration, i.e, high endurance. So this is what the cell adapts to, endurance, i.e. lots of type I fibres with densely packed mitochondria.

It could therefore be alot more beneifical to not go anywhere near failure when performing a set, giving us the stimulation for type II fibre hypertrophy WITHOUT the stimulation for many high endurance type I fibres.

This is just another theory, I will test it on myself in the coming months by only performing enough reps in a set to take me to about ~70% close to failure.

For example, if for a given weight I can only perform 12 reps of bicep curls before I hit failure, ( so I cannot complete the 13th rep ), then I will pick that weight and only do sets of 8 reps.

To compensate for the reduced volume this would bring ( and we know that volume is one of the important things for building muscle ), I will increase the total number of sets I do for a given exercise , 1-2 or something, depending on how I feel the muscle is coping.

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