Posted on 08/05/2024 6:08:30 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
When performing resistance training such as lifting weights, there's a lot of interest in how close you push yourself to failure—the point where you can't do another rep—and how it affects your results.
Researchers analyzed how training close to failure or not impacts muscle growth and strength. The study primarily looked at how training close to failure affects muscle growth in the main muscles used in an exercise. For example, if an individual was doing leg presses, the focus was on how training close to failure affects the quadriceps.
Researchers estimated the number of repetitions in reserve, which means how many more reps you could have done before reaching failure. They collected data from 55 various studies and ran detailed statistical analyses to see how different reps in reserve levels affected strength and muscle growth.
Results of the study found that how close you train to failure doesn't have a clear impact on strength gains. Whether you stop far from failure or very close to it, your strength improvement appears to be similar. On the other hand, muscle size (hypertrophy) does seem to benefit from training closer to failure. The closer you are to failure when you stop your sets, the more muscle growth you tend to see.
The researchers suggest that individuals who aim to build muscle should work within a desired range of 0-5 reps short of failure for optimized muscle growth or while minimizing injury risk. For strength training, they suggest individuals should work toward heavier loads instead of pushing their muscles to failure. As such, they recommend that to train to gain strength, individuals should stop about 3–5 reps short of failure without applying additional physical strain on the body.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
Doing it to failure also helps you build more muscle/muscle cells.
Bodybuilders in the 1970’s would do a couple months of powerlifting to increase their strength after their big contests.
Part of the problem in analyzing the data is that those most prone to gaining strength tend to be least able to rep out their exercises beyond a few reps. They would be exhausted in the low rep range.
“Doing it to failure also helps you build more muscle/muscle cells.”
“However, growth in cell numbers is limited to the prenatal and immediately postnatal period, with the animals and man being born with or soon reaching their full complement of muscle cells. “
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2222798/
light weight high reps doesn’t look cool but works.
Since my rep limit is 3 -5, I’m safe at zero. I’ll lay here on the couch smug in knowing I’m saving my muscles.
Mark
Not to failure, but definitely not wanting to test it.
Works for moi.
12 - 16 oz. Is my goto for high reps.
Interesting.
ued to read up on strength training to figue out load, repetion count, # of sets, and rest interval time.
hard to find it clearly spelled out.
Now I am old and just do not want to tweak anything, takes to long o heal it.
“light weight high reps doesn’t look cool but works.”
Maybe that is why all the chicks do that?
I tell my wife she is helping circulate the air with all that waving around.
One of the toughest guys I knew showed me a light rep slo-motion thing to deal with a shoulder injury and I was convinced. Eventually my focus became flexibility and that coincided with old age in a fortuitous turn of events.
When I was young I never could get the muscles I wanted. Now I'm old and glad to have pain-free flexibility. I see too many who when young had the physique I was aiming for but who now just can't move around very well.
Interestingly, that may not be the case:
“A novel imaging method (FIM-ID) reveals that myofibrillogenesis plays a major role in the mechanically induced growth of skeletal muscle
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38466320/
It’s late. I must have missed where they said muscle cells increase in number.
“Muscle fibers are largely composed of myofibrils, but whether radial growth is mediated by an increase in the size of the myofibrils (i.e. myofibril hypertrophy) and/or the number of myofibrils (i.e. myofibrillogenesis) is not known.”
“After extensively validating the automated measurements, we used both mouse and human models of increased mechanical loading to discover that the radial growth of muscle fibers is largely mediated by myofibrillogenesis.”
https://elifesciences.org/articles/92674
Myofibrils are components of the cell. Increasing the number of myofibrils does not change the number of cells.
“the radial growth of muscle fibers is largely mediated by myofibrillogenesis.”
Is equivalent to:
the radial growth of muscle CELLS is largely mediated by myofibrillogenesis.
Farmer strength is a real thing. Not big muscles but man, they can life HEAVY stuff like it’s a snap. All without some scientific training regimen, just working hard and lifting stuff all the time, every day, just because it needs lifting.
Would you share the “...light rep slo-motion thing to deal with a shoulder injury ...” that worked for you?
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