If the act of going to failure doesn’t cause your body to adapt and progress, then you’re a physiological oddity. And/or you’re just not recovering properly.
Seriously, if pushing yourself to your momentary physical limit doesn’t stir anything, then literally nothing will. Perhaps take up knitting.
And I say that in the nicest possible way.
recovery is “delicate” part of the game. everybody talk about it but nobody say what is.
feeleng strong, feeling energyzed,feeling bad,feeling good. mood…
what is Recovery ?
I agree it’s a crazy part of it. Early on when first doing hit I was always trying to be aware of ‘recovery’ as the importance of it was always hammered into you in articles on this style of training. I think now sometimes I was TOO concerned about it to where I’d skip a workout and take a week off when I probably didn’t need to or reduce my volume when it wasn’t really necessary.
I believe it’s the most overlooked part of training but it could also be taken too far and you can under estimate yourself. I think I realized you CAN train too little when I tried 6 times a month training ; Mon , Fri , Wed. ( reduced from a twice a week routine ) and immediately became de conditioned and weaker and felt like shit.
Being ‘recovered’ or ‘over trainied’ is one of those things that for me was learned from just 40 years of doing it. It’s sometimes hard to determine whether you’re really tired or just looking for a excuse to skip the workout.
Many times when I was convinced I wasn’t ready for the workout but pushed myself out of my truck and into the gym , I had some of my best workouts. Other times when training would be going great and I’d have my next couple weeks training planned, I’d wake up and while making my coffee know I need a week off.
Yeah, being recovered is important but like anything else , skipping workouts or taking unnecessary time off can be done too much.
I’ve also noticed that if I FORCE myself to get in and train, I become better conditioned to handle it. I’ve also noticed that Training again can help lactic acid buildup that’s causing soreness subside. I think especially while you’re pretty young in your training life (teen-early 40s) you should be pushing as hard as you can while you can still recover from it, because you have the highest ceiling for growth during this time doing that. I can always scale things back with age if I encounter issues, but I want to get everything out of my training that I can.
As resilient as our bodies are, I think we tend to underestimate our ability to recover and adapt. I this mindset can lead us to under-training, rather than overtraining. I’m not saying you really want to do either, but I think overtraining is further away than many of us think. Especially those of us that train 2-4 times a week. If we really want to push our levels of muscle and strength to the extreme, we have to push our training and eating to that extent as well. I know some people on here have a more casual point of view, but I do not.
The harder I push, the harder I find it is to be under-recovered.
I can DEFINITELY be underfed, but if I have THAT sorted out, it’s been REALLY hard to train too hard…
Harder Training with more food has proven to be a winning formula for not just you and I, but almost everyone who has accomplished anything significant in strength or physique sports. I don’t even train hard when I compare myself to some of my heroes. Like when I read about what Kurt Angle’s Training was like in the years leading up to the ‘96 Olympics or Dan Gable’s Training in the 70’s. I would say they did alright for themselves.
Hard to accurately assess without scientific instruments, and hard to gauge just going by your body or mood. Also very easy to over or under think.
It’s very individual.
The recovery period could be as little as 24 hours, or as much as a couple of months. Depends on where you are on your bodybuilding journey and how close you are to maxing out your full genetic potential.
The latter point is what Mentzer still gets a lot of stick for, when he wasn’t talking about total beginners who could easily train a muscle a few times a week and grow like weeds (ideal programs for beginners is another matter entirely), regardless, but people who were close to their genetic limit. More muscle equals more muscular fibres that have to repair themselves when broken down and that takes time.
If someone needs a couple of months to recover from a workout, they need to see a Dr. and get a proper evaluation for a health problem.
Shit … don’t sell yourself short !
I still look at that Dip and TBDL workout of yours in disbelief 
when I’m ‘tired’ and wonder if you’re really doing those weights, set after set like that or is the video is recorded in a loop , playing itself over and over ?
Either that or you have the largest collection of balsa wood barbell plates 
Speaking figuratively.
That said, a section of “Heavy Duty: A Scientific Perspective” from the Mike Mentzer website (which seems to be down at the moment) springs to mind.
“ For example, Cleak and Eston (1992) considered maximal eccentric exercise of the biceps, reporting changes in relaxed joint angle and swelling between 24 and 96 hours. In fact, maximal isometric strength had not returned within the 96 hour period. Newham et al. (1987), also considering maximal eccentric biceps exercise, reported a 50% decrease in strength immediately after training, and only a recovery to 80% of that prior to training after 2 weeks!”
So it’s perhaps not unreasonable to say full recovery can be a long drawn out process for some. Although, I emphasise, saying a couple of months was again me speaking more figuratively.
Eccentric could delay to a degree, but I believe most studies generally show protein synthesis is completed within 24-48 hours with standard positive/negative training. The issue can be CNS recovery from overly intense and/or long drawn out workouts, too many days a week, etc. Nwlifter probably has studied this more anyone I know.
Right - With unaccustomed exercise where there is no RBE, physical recovery and protein synthesis can last for a very long time (up to weeks even) but that’s not about growth, the synthesis is being used to repair/restore the muscles from the loss of contractile function.
Yes Mentzer’s website is probably gone for good, after JoAnne passed away last year, it seems no one was maintaining it and when it’s domain expired, it looks like no one (I think her daughter inherited all that) is going to renew it.
ha yeah a couple months? No one is going to look like a bodybuilder training a muscle 6x a year lol 6x a month sure, 6x a year? that’s beyond silly
Holy crap Joanne Sharkey died???
yes lost her last June 
Thats sad news
Awhile back you guts were talking about ‘Muscle Rounds’ and I mentioned I did something similar which I referred to as ‘Cluster set Breakdowns’ . Then there are ‘regular’ cluster sets and rest pause … 5 X 5 , 6 X 6 , etc
This isn’t meant to discredit anything anyone put a name to or did an article on and introduced it to everyone as something ‘new’.
My question is MR as I saw it demonstrated was basically 6 sets of four reps with ten seconds in between , cluster sets are multiple sets of low reps with a few seconds rest between sets, my ‘cluster BD’s’ are that with a drop in weight each set and I usually use the same number deep breaths between sets as the number of reps I did to keep it simple , etc etc.
Question is if you are totaling 24 reps in a ‘MR’ , cluster sets , or maybe two sets of 12 reps with little rest between sets ( like 30 seconds ) do you think there’s any difference in what the end result is ?
Reason I ask is I remember many, many years ago asking the same question on two forums , the Garage Gym and Cyber Pump , and everyone going ballistic claiming doing multiple sets of lower reps just being an excuse to avoid working hard with the long, Leistner-type ‘Death Set’ .
Back then in the HIT community , doing multiple sets short of failure was NOT the way you did it … though when Brooks Kubik promoted multiple sets of low reps in Dinosaur Training, it was OK with everyone, lol
Wondering about opinions from some of you regarding one or two long sets compared to several shorter sets , for about the same number of completed reps. So what’s the difference ?
I think both should be used at times but I see one advantage of multiple sets of lower reps allowing you to keep better form through all the reps as you can get set and think about it more than just ‘surviving’ until that 25 th rep.
Garage Gym forum! Obscure reference.
Well you are usually supposed to pick a weight where you would normally fail at about 15 reps. Then you do your cluster sets and drop the weight enough to finish however many sets you have left (shouldn’t fail until at least the 4th set, if you haven’t failed by the 6th set, take it to failure). You are basically delaying failure a bit and acquiring more high quality volume, and only hitting failure once, so you should be at a lower level of fatigue as well which could allow for a higher frequency of training or an extra exercise for that body part.
Is it better? That’s hard to say with certainty. It sounds better on paper. You get to use a heavier weight for more reps than you could get in a straight set to failure, and less fatigue than 2 straight sets to failure. In practice, I found that it worked very well for me, helped me gain a lot of mass, and it’s a very fun way to train. So I certainly endorse it.
