The best training article I’ve ever read… I

I’m going to share a long article with you in installments, though its actual title is different from the one you see above. The original article comes from Tnation and is titled “The Thib System – Basic Principles Behind My Updated Training Philosophy”, written by Christian Thibaudeau. I gave it this “title” of my own because it truly is the best training article I’ve ever read. It offers the best explanations for all the questions that have been nagging at me. Of course, I already had some idea about several of these issues, but it’s good to read clear confirmation of your hunches and ideas. I warmly recommend the various sections of this article to anyone with an interest in training, experts and training fanatics alike—perhaps you too will find something new and useful to add to your knowledge. I’ll translate the most interesting sections of this long piece, though I won’t be sharing it in full.

The best training article: should you take a set to failure?

Whether or not to train to failure has always been one of the most hotly debated topics in strength training. Put simply, reaching failure means that fatigue prevents you from maintaining proper exercise technique during a set. Fatigue has reduced your ability to produce the power needed to maintain that technique (Edwards 1981, Davis 1996).

In other words, when you take a set to failure, you reach a point where each repetition feels increasingly difficult, and you can no longer maintain proper technique or complete full repetitions correctly.

So what’s the right approach? Even the experts on our own site are divided into two camps, with supporters on both sides. On one side, coaches such as Chad Waterbury and Charles Staley are firmly opposed to training to failure. In some of their articles, they even recommend ending a set as soon as your tempo or repetition speed begins to slow. That is well before you actually reach failure. Their main argument is that training to failure places enormous strain on your central nervous system, which already takes 5 – 6 times longer than your muscles to recover from intense training. If you constantly train to failure, or take every set to failure, your central nervous system remains in a state of exhaustion, making it completely unthinkable to train a muscle or a lift two or three times a week. And on this point, they are right!

In fact, training can exhaust your nervous system so thoroughly that it takes so long to recover that your muscles begin to lose their adaptations to the training load of the previous workout while your central nervous system is still recovering. That, too, is a bad scenario.

You certainly shouldn’t train this way, then, because your muscles will start to lose the adaptive gains (adaptations—ed.) from the previous workout. On the other hand, if you don’t allow your nervous system to recover, you won’t be able to put in a proper workout at full capacity, which again leads to deterioration and reduced progress in the long run.

Another group of excellent coaches, including Charles Poliquin, recommends precisely the opposite: you should definitely aim to take your sets to failure. Their argument is that stimulating muscle growth requires you to fatigue the muscle as much as possible and maximize microtears through training, specifically through your sets. This philosophy also aligns with the views of the renowned Russian sports scientist Vladimir Zatsiorsky, who holds that muscle fibers that aren’t sufficiently fatigued during training aren’t trained and, consequently, aren’t stimulated to grow.

Taking a set to failure, or to the brink of it, guarantees that it is as productive as possible. Remember that simply recruiting a motor unit does not mean that the unit, including its muscle fibers, has been stimulated to grow. For muscle fibers to receive a training stimulus or be stimulated to grow, the fibers involved in the effort must also be fatigued (Zatsiorsky 1996).

What about central nervous system fatigue? When it comes to failure, the nervous system is not the only reason we reach it, of course, but we cannot overlook its role. The nervous system is still king! After all, it controls motor unit recruitment, regulates the speed at which nerve impulses travel and ensures both intermuscular and intramuscular coordination. There is an important link between nervous system fatigue and reaching failure: more specifically, it is associated with declining levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and acetylcholine during exertion.

Translator’s note: these are compounds that convert the electrical impulse traveling along a nerve toward a muscle into a chemical signal. The entire process takes place at the nerve ending—the synapse. This is the structure where neurotransmitters relay the electrical impulse traveling along the nerve cell to the muscle, allowing it to contract.

A reduction in acetylcholine at the synapses automatically makes the transmission of nerve impulses to muscle fibers less efficient. In other words, when acetylcholine levels are low, your central nervous system has great difficulty recruiting motor units.

So, if we’re looking for an argument in favor of training to failure, we find ourselves at an impasse again. Ending a set before failure isn’t entirely useless, but it doesn’t expose the muscle fibers to enough training load or stimulate them to grow to the fullest extent.

If you stop before failure, muscle fibers are recruited, but the stimulus they receive from the training load is far from maximal. Yet if you go to failure, you ensure that the muscle fibers receive the greatest possible stimulus from the training load, but risk overloading your central nervous system, which can bring your progress to a halt for a very long time.

So how should you train, and what exactly should you do? We want to progress and grow as quickly as possible, so should we train to failure or not?

The answer is simple: you should train both ways, to failure and short of failure! Whether you train to failure largely depends on the exercise. The more demanding an exercise is on the central nervous system, the further short of failure you should stop your set. With exercises that place very little stress on the central nervous system, you can confidently push to failure and beyond every time.

Translator’s note: this also gives us direct answers about how to design and structure training programs. A sound approach is to put heavy compound exercises first in the program, use heavy weights, follow a system and leave plenty of repetitions in reserve. For assistance work, the more an exercise isolates a muscle (body part), the more scope there is to use longer sets and take them to failure. Likewise, the further short of failure you stop your sets, the more frequently you can train a muscle/lift/body part over a given period.

This also explains why bodybuilders who consistently perform long sets to failure cannot, for example, train the bench press or squat as frequently as powerlifters without overtraining. Powerlifters do train at a higher intensity (in terms of weight), but their volume per workout is considerably lower, with shorter sets and plenty of repetitions in reserve.

These factors are critical in determining training frequency. From my own experience, the first two thirds of an 8 – 9 week 5 x 5 program are never particularly challenging. For most of those first two thirds, you finish your sets with a fairly large number of repetitions in reserve. This does not mean that the weight used to calculate the program was chosen incorrectly. This is exactly how it should be: when training for maximal strength, you leave repetitions in reserve, just as you do when training for speed. A brief effort with maximum explosive force, and you’re done; get enough rest before starting the next set.

High intensity (training weight) in a compound exercise is taxing on the nervous system, but because the volume is so low and controlled, a powerlifter can train a lift more frequently than a bodybuilder who performs long sets to failure. I won’t comment any further, or I’ll start giving away the contents of my book.

Author: Janar Rückenberg (translation)

Source:Turg.Fitness.ee

Come and train! ArtGym