Training to failure was a practice I wish I could’ve stopped in the '80s and replaced with this much more productive exercise prescription. Training to failure actually limits the number of muscle fibers stimulated.
== Scott ==
If I had a nickle for every time I heard the closer to failure the more fibers you stimulate I could buy a two arms up compound bicep and tricep and have Goulder deliver it! , ha ha !!
From my understanding, getting close to failure is good, but the point which you actually hit failure is where the extra fatigue to the nervous system and waste products are generated.
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I sounds like there’s a bunch of factors involved in making a success of this program as described by Dr Darden with 30 10 30 only being one of them. One of the parts that is of interest to me is the importance of the last rep of the ten portion. I’m wondering why that rep is so all important ?
Scott
My take from the article is that the last rep is when you are most fatigued, and hence most likely to break form and start cheating the rep. When you do that, you unload the targeted muscles and compromise effectiveness.
In the case of 30-10-30, on the last rep of the middle portion, you are as close as you are going to get to concentric failure. You don’t want your form to deteriorate because you are struggling too much on that rep, lest you then carry the same bad form into the final negative, and also compromise the effectiveness of the finish.
And also, if the same weight is enough to take the movement to both positive failure on the reps and negative failure on the last 30, then holding back one rep also reduces the intensity of the final negative, which may otherwise be hard to quantify in advance. It took me a while before I started failing with the same weight on the reps and final negative, but from then on the double failure has truly been a double whammy. Positive failure is not nearly as taxing as taking the last negative to the point where you can no longer control the downward movement, and taking a negative to that point with NO is not nearly as taxing as taking it to that point with 30-10-30, for me at least.
This is also in chapter 25 of “The New Bodybuilding for Old School Results”
[quote=“atp_4_me, post:49, topic:272701”]
So, even if maximum-possible effort isn’t a requirement (and I personally feel very strongly that it is, or that any difference is insignificant), such knowledge, if it comes, obviously must remain “unusable information” in light of the fact that there is no practical meals of measuring such percentages.”
== Scott==
I forgot about this quote. It’s interesting how like many things it seemed to be an all or nothing thing with him. I don’t think it’s that hard to tell when in a set you are getting close to failure but to him it has to be exact or it’s of no use? Not very flexible thinking.
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More bad news for CWT.
If VO2max is not improving, it ain’t cardiovascular conditioning.
LOL that is what drove me to make sure I was using a weight that would take both positive and negative to failure for 30-10-30. I don’t know that it is this critical, but it is this from Arthur that sold me on the idea.
I was wondering when you’d bring this up but it’s true in a sense that cardiovascular conditioning had from fast paced weight training does not come up to the high level of conditioning had from efforts like sprinting, cycling, rowing , swimming and the like. On the other hand the cardio or aerobic conditioning had from fast paced weight training has major health and physical advantages of their own.
Scott
The full text of the paper is available and worth reading.
One point to consider: the subjects were described as untrained. But does that mean no history of strength training, or no history of any kind of training? Perhaps they did not see a VO2 increase because they already had a good baseline of cardiovascular conditioning from non-strength training activities?
To that point, I will note that the subjects in the study were middle age (40-55). Before training, they had VO2 max’s averaging about 37 ml/kg/min. Based on some tables I found online, that put them in “above average” category for males of that age for cardiovascular fitness. That is notable because of this study:
What this narrative review found was that resistance training improved VO2 max in older subjects, but only if their starting condition was poor… less that 25 ml/kg/min.
Conventional wisdom is that VO2 max is only modestly trainable. I’d bet that most people who are doing conventional cardio have already hit a training plateau, and aren’t exercising intensely enough to further improve VO2max. Certainly most people who walk for exercise are not improving their VO2 max. After the first few months, that is probably also true for easy jogging.
As far as I am concerned, one peer reviewed article does not disqualify the results of the West Point Study. Let me know if I’m missing the point though.
The figure I’ve seen is 5-15% improvement, typically. So if you have an untrained 35 ml/kg/min, you might get to 37-40, well short of a top level endurance athlete.
I’ve seen one article by a track coach who says he can produce as much at a 25% improvement in an athlete. But he is typically dealing with top endurance athletes who probably have a higher genetic ceiling. And it takes years of dedicated training, and a high volume of training to accomplish that. Or go look up the Hickson Protocol. Very few people who are exercising for general health are willing to undergo the grueling training required to produce a large increase in VO2max.
I’m not dismissing the value of VO2max as a performance marker for endurance athletes. I’m questioning whether, from a general health perspective, you can judge the effectiveness of a training regime by it’s ability to increase VO2 max. By that standard, most of the “aerobic” activity that most people do would be judged worthless. Yet there is plenty of evidence that aerobic activity of sufficient volume is good for your health, even if it is not intense enough to keep raising VO2max.
Bro, NOBODY got to the point where Haney was without annihilating themselves. Dude had people assisting him past failure all day long.
Volume is on a sliding scale with intensity. You can’t do one set without it being a brutal fuckin’ set, and nobody has achieved greatness in bodybuilding without kicking the shit out of themselves along the way. There’s video evidence of it all. Not a single “greatest ever” in any category, in any decade, in any federation, that didn’t give it 110%, and the less sets they did, the harder they worked.
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The stuff I posted was meant to provide some context to the discussion around VO2max improvement, and what that might mean in terms of exercise selection.
I don’t think any VO2 max data was reported by the West Point study, though one might infer from the endurance test results that some improvement did occur as the result of that kind of training.
In general, single studies do not settle an issue. So what I’d say based on West Point vs ATP’s reference is that the evidence is equivocal.
Ther is nothing ambiguous about VO2max understanding among research exercise professionals. Only HiT aficionados obstinately clinging to outdated beliefs think proper cardiovascular conditioning replacement is circuit resistance training. By the way, metabolic conditioning is much different from cardiovascular conditioning.
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most of HIT/HD folks claims that, even late Mike Mentzer 