Today, one can often find advice - to train to the point of muscle failure. Find out why not all bodybuilders adhere to this training concept. You are probably familiar with the advice to train to failure and you probably are. But the question is, how justified are such training in terms of gaining mass. Today you can get acquainted with the revelations of bodybuilders about training to failure.
What is muscle failure?
Muscle failure refers to the maximum fatigue of muscle fibers, in which they lose their ability to contract. In other words, by performing the movement, you push the muscles to the limit and you can no longer perform the next repetition. This is due to the fact that myosin bridges (the main contractile element) are unable to perform their task.
This is only possible if all energy reserves have been exhausted. It must be said that myosin bridges can be in two states:
- Disengaged - until the moment of reduction;
- Engaged - during contraction.
What these conditions have in common is the fact that the bridges are inactive, which indicates that there is no muscle contraction. The effort that a muscle can develop directly depends on the number of bridges that are interconnected. The muscles use ATP as energy. If the reserves of this substance are sufficient, then the fibers are reduced.
In addition to ATP molecules, creatine phosphate is also needed. In addition, the more of these energy carriers, the longer the reduction can last, and, consequently, more weight can be lifted. When myosin combines with actin, a certain amount of energy is expended on this. Energy must also be expended to disengage the myosin bridges.
If the energy reserve is small, then the bridges remain engaged. However, this only happens with those bridges for which there was not enough energy, which leads to muscle weakening. But in the body there is a mechanism through which energy reserves are replenished. Moreover, there are two such methods, and each of them is intended for a specific case.
With the help of the first, energy is replenished in low-volume work, when high speed and strength are needed. The second method allows you to provide muscles with energy at a time when it is necessary to carry out long-term work with little force.
The first method is the resynthesis of creatine phosphate and ATP from glycogen, and the second is the production of energy from fat. As you can already understand, the second method is used by the body during aerobic exercise.
From all of the above, we can conclude that failure can occur in two states of myosin bridges, when they are linked or uncoupled. If the failure occurs at a time when the bridges are in a linked state, then the muscles receive microtrauma, as a result of myosin rupture.
The effectiveness of training to failure
Today, you can easily find a huge amount of information about muscle building techniques. But we need to figure out how effective training to failure is. We know that the stronger the stress on the body, the greater its adaptive response will be. However, the recovery time from severe stress increases dramatically.
If during the exercise the muscles received many microtraumas, then first they must be healed, and only after that supercompensation or growth is possible. It is very important to understand that after training, not only the muscles should recover, but the whole body as well. After all, muscles are just a part of our body with you, and when an athlete forgets about this, then at this moment various problems appear, for example, injury or overtraining.
When you work to failure, after injuring the muscles, many athletes are confident that they will recover and everything will be fine. But other systems also need to recover, for example, hormonal. Indeed, without the production of anabolic hormones in the required quantities, there will be no muscle growth. The situation is similar with the central uneven system, which recovers longer than others.
Thus, if we train the entire body, then there is no need for muscle failure. This is due to the fact that we must first of all achieve adaptation of all systems to the loads. This can be achieved through high volume sessions. In turn, refusal training significantly reduces your training volume.
If we do not train to failure, then we will cause less damage to the muscle tissues, but the body will have more time to create new fibers. To stress the body, you only need to bring it out of balance, which is achieved thanks to the load that is maintained for a certain time. It is because of the large amount of work done during the session that your muscles grow.
You should understand that your classes will be high-volume anyway, even if you only want to increase strength indicators. The more weight you need to lift, the more energy will be consumed. If you are working to gain mass, then it is best to avoid rejection training. You can use it, but you rarely need to. Failure training will allow you to build more muscle mass, but the number of sessions in this case will sharply decrease. Thus, we can say that when gaining mass, it is not the fact of muscle failure that is of primary importance, but the tonnage you raised during the session.
Training to failure is extreme and should be used very rarely. Pay more attention to the volume of your workouts and vary the load over time. This will be enough for the body to receive stress and respond to it with adaptive changes.
To make it easier for you to control the volume of training, it is best to keep a class diary. With it, you will be able to plan and control your workload by monitoring your progress.
You will learn the basic principles of training to failure from this video from Denis Borisov:
