Best Technique to Grow Your Muscles!

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Table of Contents

• Men’s Must Read Article

• Parker’s Breakdown: Muscle Failure 🏋️

• Fitness trivia ❓

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🚨Men’s Must Read Article🚨

PUSHING PAST MUSCLE FAILURE

My first couple of years in the gym were sub par when it comes to growth!

I was leaving so much in the tank on every exercise and I was maxing out at least once every 2 weeks for no reason.

It wasn’t until I started taking my exercises to failure and past failure that I really started to grow! 🤜

Here is a great article by Muscle & Fitness about how to take your workouts to and past failure! Here is a couple main points: 👇👇

• Normal muscular failure is when you can no longer do a full-range, strict form rep

• Pushing past failure means continuing a set beyond the point of normal muscular failure using intensity methods

• Going beyond failure is generally not recommended for beginners as they can build muscle efficiently without it

• It's easy to overtrain using these techniques so they should be paired with proper nutrition and supplementation

• Intensity methods to push past failure include forced reps, negatives, drop sets, rest pause, etc.

Parker’s Breakdown: Muscle Failure 🏋️

I wish I knew early on that intensity of your workouts was one of the most important pieces when it came to muscle growth!

For years, I was growing really slow and even hitting plateaus until I had a mentor introduce intensity to me.👍

The idea of all of this is that not all reps are created equal. The reps at the end of a set that are closer to failure are the reps that force more tears in the muscle, resulting in more growth during recovery.

A study done by Goto et al in 2005, took 2 groups. Group 1 did sets of 10 continuous reps to failure and group 2 did sets of 5 reps, a 30 second rest, and then 5 more reps. This would prevent group 2 from reaching failure due to the rest. This would encourage group 1 to go to failure due to no rest in between. Group 1 or the failure group saw a 12.9% growth in muscle mass, while group 2 only saw a 4% growth in muscle mass. 🧐

So does this mean you need to take every set to or past failure?

Well no, think of the results on a graph and imagine an S-curve. Eventually there is a point of diminishing returns and “overtraining”. So my rule of thumb is I like to take every last set of every exercise to or past failure. So in a week, per muscle group, I’m getting roughly 3-5 sets to or past failure.

So how do I go to or past failure? Well, getting to failure is pretty self explanatory. Just move the weight until you can’t hit a proper form rep anymore. But there are multiple ways to go past failure. Some of my favorite ways are: 👇👇

• Doing partial reps on a machine

• Drop sets

• Pause sets

• Negatives

• Forced Reps

I recommend that only intermediate (1.5 years) to advanced lifters (2-3+) do this and to only do 5 sets of failure max per muscle group a week because this can make it harder for your muscle to recover. Hope this helps! 💪

Fitness trivia ❓

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