Muscle Growth, The 60 Seconds That Make The Difference
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.
In fact, your entire margin of success in the gym can ultimately be reduced to just a short time span of 60 seconds. That’s correct, how you choose to handle a short 60 second time period during your workouts will translate to either poor, mediocre or significant muscle building results. Although each entire workout will last for about an hour, only 60 seconds of that actual time will determine what kind of gains you achieve.
Let me try to explain. Every set of execises 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.
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.
What’s important then, is to overload the muscles on reps 5 and 6. And the most important thing to achieve better results is try to keep that stress level as long as you can at the end of each 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.
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 youre looking for.
Well, if we assume that you perform 10 total all out sets per workout and have a margin of 6 seconds between success/failure per set, this gives you 60 seconds of total time per workout to either battle through with full effort or to surrender and settle for mediocre results.
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.
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