Momentary muscular Failure

Failure typically occurs when you can't continue the positive movement- the lifting portion- despite your best effort. After several seconds of trying to push or pull the resistance, you lower the resistance under control and stop the exercise. Besides your positive strength, you also have a negative level, which can be worked to failure. I'll talk about negative training in my next blog. And there's a type of failure that entails your lifting and lowering form, which I will explain. Strength inroad. Most of the time, you want to perform HIT sets with a 20 percent inroad into your starting level of strength. Here's what I mean by that: Let's say that you could do 1 repetition with 100 pounds on a leg- extension machine. A second repetition would be impossible. That means 100 pounds is your starting level of strength in the leg extension. If you reduce the weight by 20 percent, you work with 80 pounds. That feels easy at first. But with each repetition, you make a deeper inroad into your starting level of strength. By the 10the repetition, your temporary level of strength is 81 pounds- just enough to lift the 80 pounds. You fail on the 11th repetition. Thus, after 10 repetitions with 80 pounds on the leg-extension machine, you've reduced your starting level of strength to 79 pounds of less. You made at least a 21 percent inroad into your starting level of strength. A 20 percent inroad is a good place to start, all though you may find you do better with more of less weight. So in the leg-extension example, you might find you can do too many repetitions with 80 pounds and would get a better set with 85. That's a 15 percent inroad. Others may not get to 10 reps with 80 pounds and would perform a better set with 75, which is a 25 percent inroad. Recovery ability. This is describes the wide array of chemical reactions that must occur inside your body for your system to compensate from the stress of the workout and get you back to your previous level of size and strength. Your goal, of course is to supercompensate and make adaptations to the workout that allow you to grow bigger and stronger. I want you to understand this right now. ( Your recovery ability does not increase in porportion to your ability to get stronger ). What this means is that as you get stronger, you must do less overall exercise. Because this is the opposite of how most lifters go about things, it's important to understand this concept from the start. Less training. Ever try sprinting as fast as you can for a quarter of a mile. which is one time around a typical high school track? You'll be lucky to make even 300 yards at an all out pace. In fact, perhaps only one man, Olympic champion Usain Bolt, has actually been able to sprint a quarter-mile 400 meters. Going for failure on an exercise is similar to sprinting as far as you can. A HIT workout is the equivalent of 8-10 of those all- out sprints. In fact, Usain Bolt sometimes trained that way. But I guarantee you, he didn't do it often- especially if his sprints were in the 45 second range. This is a fact of nature: The harder you train, the less you can stand. So as you train harder, you must do less. Richard Gayle BNR Fitness