I was thinking about this yesterday, and it’s only a theory. So feel free to tell me why it’s stupid and wrong if you think so. When training for macular endurance, are you really getting any stronger? Or is your body just building a tolerance to lactic acid and a bigger capacity to hold fresh oxygen for thus muscles to use? Like if you start out being able to bench press 50 pounds 30 times. And your max is 120 pounds. Then you never go up in weight from the 50 pounds and you only bench it more every time.
So after 3 months of doing the 50 lb bench press routine, you can bench it 60 times. Will your max have gone up very much if any? Are you still just as weak and incapable of producing high amounts of force as before? Are you now just more tolerant to lactic acid and your muscles are now holding more oxygen so you can produce that same amount of force for longer? By the way, those aren’t my stats for the bench. I was just using simple numbers.
So what do you guys think? Can doing that sort of muscular endurance training, increase the amount of force you can produce or is it simply doing “cardio for your muscles”, so to speak. Thoughts? Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I couldn’t decide…
It depends on the lifters current capabilities. If his muscular endurance is near peaked it makes sense that the extra reps will come from strength right? Also if the lifter is a complete beginner he will easily improve both endurance and strength.
I’m thinking it depends on your definition of strength… It seems like you’re specifically talking about 1RM strength, which depends on a few factors. Just one factor: With no additional CNS training around your max (even if it’s only a 120 lb bench), it’s unlikely that a million sets of 30 will make you able to lift more than that max if you’re only training at 25% 1RM. This type of work would jack up the metabolism (similar to complexes of exercises training one-two muscle groups), but probably wouldn’t do much for this type of absolute 1RM strength. Another good example would be the line from Ben Bruno’s article yesterday, where he said he could squat 225x35, but there’s no magic formula that says what he could squat if he went for a 1RM. If you train for muscular endurance, you’ll come out with muscular endurance–not with the power required to add on to your 1RM.
Muscular endurance is simply the ability to perform many muscle contractions against a given resistance. It is specific to the task in question, ie high rep squats require different adaptations to marathon running.
The progression in the OP would likely lead to little if any increase in 1RM, however training in high rep zones (25-30 reps) and progressively overloading does have some carryover in beginner/intermediates.
BTW, lactic acid is not the cause of acidosis (‘fatigue’) in muscles and is in fact beneficial since lactate production slows down acidosis.
hmm. alright. i used those numbers to be relative to the weight of a pushup for me. for a while i was doing strictly pushups, got up to where i could do 50-55ish, nose to the ground. was wondering what was the real cause of muscular endurance. thanks for the thoughts
