All Your Effort Gone In 60 Seconds
By Ricardo daryans | July 29, 2008
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In the same way a small fraction of a second is crucial in a sprinter’s race during a 100 metre dash, fractions of seconds can mean success or failure in a bodyduilding process. That seconds will make or break your body’s muscle growth response in the gym.
There’s more…although each entire workout will last for about an hour, only about 60 seconds will determine what kind of gains you achieve. That’s right, how you choose to handle that 60 second time period could means great, mediocre or poor muscle building effects.
How does it works? Well, the first reps in your set means just a little bit than nothing in terms of muscular growth. However, they play an important role.
If a given set consists of 6 reps, then reps 1-4 are only performed in order to get to reps 5 and 6. Reps 1-4 will do very little in terms of stimulating muscular growth, but are necessary to perform in order to overload the muscles on reps 5 and 6.
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.
The best way to trigger your body’s adaptive responses is training until your muscles cannot move the weight another inch. Drop the weight some seconds before the guy next to you and you will see the difference between his and your muscles after some weeks.
Let’s do some math. If you perform 10 sets per workout, and have a margin of 6 seconds between success/failure per set, then it means that the way you handle that 60 seconds could mean a significant muscular growth…or a total waste of time.
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.
If you can’t move the weight another inch, if your muscles ache and you feel them burning, you are going in the right direction to true muscular failure.
If you stop short, even a second short, your gains will be compromised. Keep this in mind at all times in the gym and you’ll experience better results than ever before.
Topics: Nutrition |
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