Muscle Failure And Training Intensity

Build Muscle With Hypertrophy Specific Training

The key to muscle growth is to push your muscles to a point where it is forces to recruit all muscles fibers, thereby shooting the intensity.

Temporary Muscle Failure

I will explain this with help of the basic barbell curls. Suppose you lift 60 pounds on this exercise for 8 reps, and when you try to push one more rep, you find that you cannot lift your arms to the fully contracted position (top of the concentric movement). This is the point of temporary muscle failure. In other words, when you cannot perform any more rep for any movement (fully contracted position), it is known as state of temporary muscle failure.

5 Bodybuilding Strategies To Realize Muscle Hypertrophy

The best idea at this point of time would be engaging into partial reps. I have covered the concept of partial reps training in the following article. Give it a shot.

Partial Reps

What’s the sense in performing partial reps once you have reached temporary muscle failure? Partial repetitions engage (stimulate) the muscle fibers that could not come into action earlier. This is important to support larger muscles in moving the poundage. Hence, you can achieve maximum intensity by recruiting these unused muscle motor units via partial reps.

Static Contraction Training For Maximal Muscle Growth

 

Intensity

Intensity is closely related to muscle failure. Just because you are tired after performing a few reps does not necessarily mean you have reached the point of muscle failure. Exertion is not always synonymous with muscular failure. In order to reach true muscle failure, you would have to think beyond pain. You will have to push your body to new limits. I am not asking you to foolishly lift crazy weights and injure yourself. I am talking about pushing a few more reps with the weight you can lift.

Let’s explain this using the bench press. Assuming you are lifting 200pounds for 6 reps, try to perform a few more reps. Always have a spotter when engaging in the training method outlined in this post.

Now try to perform 2-3 more reps with little or no assistance. When you truly find it impossible to perform any more complete reps, perform 3-4 partial reps. By the end of the last rep, you should be experiencing HELL! That’s what high intensity training is all about.

Bottom line

It will not be possible to accomplish this method in one shot. It will take you a few days to understand the concept. But once you get used to training to and beyond muscle failure, you will unleash a new, unexplored area of muscle growth. Remember, in order to truly experience muscle hypertrophy, you will have to push yourself to new limits. A little pain is normal as long as you don’t injure yourself. Most of these come from training instinct.