How To Kill Your Muscle Gain In Sixty Seconds
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.
Let me try to explain. Every set of exercises that you perform in the gym will give you benefits on the last 1-2 reps. Why? Because muscles respond to stress, so, the first reps you perform are nothing but a mechanism to trigger the stress your muscles need to grow.
Then, reps 1-4 are only performed in order to get to reps 5 and 6, the ones that really matter in the bodybuilding process. The first ones, do very little in terms of stimulating muscular growth.
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.
There is simply no better way to trigger your body's adaptive responses than to train until your muscles cannot move the weight another inch.
So, if you perform 10 sets per workout, and the last six seconds are the ones that mean success or failure, there you have that 60 seconds i've been talking about. That crucial 60 second will give you, or not, the muscular growth you're looking for.
So, your success will be measured by this really short period of time, and the amount of effort you are willing to exert during this time.
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.
If you can force yourself to train to all out muscular failure, you'll achieve the best results possible. If you drop the weight 3 seconds before muscular failure, your growth will be compromised. If you drop the weight 8 seconds before muscular failure, your growth will be compromised even further.
You must train hard and with full effort at all times. When the weight feels heavy and your muscles ache and burn with discomfort, you must push through and continue until true muscular failure is reached.
Every time you give up and take a rest, even if it's just for a couple of seconds, you compromise your gains. Keeping this in mind at all times in the gym and will give you the better results than ever before.