Reps in Reserve-Muscle Gains-Fatigue

[S317]

What do you think made this routine so effective for you?

Good question. I’ve been thinking about this. It’s a good mix of volume, frequency, and progressive overload. It’s also easy to throw in and try new exercises on the hypertrophy based days so it doesn’t get stagnant. It was hard but a very fun routine.
I also didn’t have a wife or kid at the time and was working at a club with no real responsibility

 

[gr8whitetrukker]

Been listening to Mike Israetel on a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos.

This is something I struggle with and I think a lot of guys here experience the same problem. I have trouble not going until failure on a lot of sets. I don’t do it every single time but on my hard working sets I have trouble stopping.

He is basically saying the difference between muscle stimulus at 3 RIR (reps in reserve) to 1 or failure is very minimal. But the additional fatigue is dramatically increased. I tend to have issues recovering and have to take more rest days.

I am going to try cutting my sets shorter and leave 2-3 reps on the table and see if I can increase my frequency in the gym and reduce my overall fatigue.

Anyone else experience this problem while training?

Yeah absolutely. Its counterintuitive for me to NOT go full failure every set. But its some thing ive learned time and time again you just cannot do if you want to make progress. But i also know without question if u dont go to failure you wont make the correct adaptation. The easy ones are near meaningless. So if you were to do 3 sets of 8 all picture perfect reps moving the weight up as fast and as hard as humanly possible and controlling every negative and even 1, 3 or 5 second pauses in the static position. The first 5 would be well within your capabilities. The last 2 or 3 would be the breaking point and the difference between an adaptation taking place or none at all. That being said ive learned to just take the last set to failure in any exercise. It has to be done and quite frankly i enjoy it.

The same can be applied in the strength department. If you want to get stronger you need as many FIRST reps as possible. Sets of 3 at a higher RPE. Rest pause sets starting at 3 full explosive reps wait 10 seconds, 1 rep wait 10 seconds 1 rep. This is a good formula for fast twitch dominant lifters. Slower twitch would benefit from a higher rep count done in the same manner.

Remember the key to building hard, dense large muscles is lifting explosively with a high intensity in a short duration. I was a sprinter in the 100m and 800m and training is night and day different from a marathon runner. Want to look small, lean and weak train marathons. Want to be explosive with tons of shape to boot train to sprint. Logic works 100% for any applied topic. All that being what it is you cant go out everyday and sprint as hard and as fast as possible all the time and expect progress. The individual breakdown of the workload takes care of the volume part which is necessary for progress but also you do need to apply 100% of your effort at certain movements at certain times. Thats the unscientific part. So how and when? I say one to failure last set of every exercise or as needed. And i will add that is extremely important if you intend on building lots of dense fast twitch muscle fibers.