Scientific Research Reveals the Secret to the Perfect Workout

To gain muscle mass, you need to excel at the quality of your exercises

Optimizing muscle mass gains is an important goal for strength training enthusiasts. The question often arises as to how far you should go to achieve maximum results. A new study from Florida Atlantic University sheds light on the impact of exercise on muscle failure.

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Training until one can no longer perform another repetition has long been a subject of debate. However, no previous meta-analysis has determined whether the distance to failure in the number of remaining repetitions is linearly related to muscle strength and size.

Previous studies have confirmed that for muscle growth it is important that a person train to the limit of his capabilities, and not constantly to the point of exhaustion. The new analysis compiled data from 55 studies to evaluate how extreme training affects muscle growth and strength. The results, published in the Journal of Sports Medicine, show that maximal training has no apparent effect on strength gains, but does significantly promote muscle hypertrophy. This is likely due to the fact that intense training results in increased mechanical tension on muscle fibers, which is a key factor in determining muscle growth.

Researcher Michael Zourdos notes that hypertrophy is more significant when training is close to failure. regardless of adjusted training volume. For strength, this proximity is not decisive. Recommendations suggest stopping 3-5 reps before failure to increase strength and 0 to 5 reps to increase hypertrophy.

Previous research has shown that training to failure will not hurt your gains and your muscles will still grow, but the risk of injury and overuse increases.

For strength development, it is more important to focus on heavier loads, but not to work to exhaustion. This makes sense from the point of view that training to exhaustion can be very difficult for the body and is more difficult to recover from in subsequent sets.

The study highlights that training close to failure improves the accuracy of counting the remaining reps, positively influencing the choice of load and therefore muscle growth. However, this type of training can be difficult to recover from and may impair results in the long term.

These results offer avenues for future research and provide valuable insights for coaches on the impact of muscle failure. However, the exact relationship between training close to failure and strength gains requires further investigation in larger studies.

“Based on this meta-analysis, we can suggest that it is possible to use a range of different programming methods, tailored to our own needs, to achieve different training goals. Perhaps this is further encouragement to not stress over the minutiae of ideal rep counts and set ranges and instead focus on training hard and intensely, which may lead to loss of results,” the study authors conclude.