It is estimated that it is a hot issue among strength trainers whether they should be exhausted during training. If you come up and say “we are a big muscle bully in the gym, he said Balabala”, then we don’t have to discuss it. Today, we will take a look at the necessity and effectiveness of training to exhaustion according to some research.

If you don’t do exhaustive exercise, you can also get muscle enhancement effect

The first thing to be clear is that if you don’t exhaust, you the best fitness equipment can also gain muscle enhancement effect. According to a recent study, the volunteers were randomly divided into two groups, using 85% 1RM weight for biceps bending. One group did not need to be exhausted (4 reps in each group), and the other group was exhausted (6 reps in each group). After 12 weeks, there was almost no difference in the biceps muscle enhancement effect between the two groups.

In another study, the participants were divided into four groups, the groups were still large weight (80% 1RM) and small weight (30% 1RM); after training to exhaustion, no training to exhaustion, they did four head leg lifting training. After 12 weeks, the results showed that there was no significant difference between the four groups.

However, it should be noted that the participants of the above two experiments are novices without training basis, but we can still think that the difference of muscle enhancement effect between the two experiments is almost negligible.

Can basic trainers get more benefits from exhaustion?

Research shows that the higher the degree of muscle fiber participation, the higher the stimulation intensity, the better the effect of muscle enhancement. Training to exhaustion, at least to ensure that your training, muscle fiber participation and stimulation intensity, income is certain.

Then the question becomes: since exhaustion has the same benefits as exhaustion, will each group have side effects after training to exhaustion? If the side effects are greater than that of exhaustion, our choice must be exhaustion.

Intuition tells us that if each group is exhausted, it will definitely reduce our total amount of training. According to the relevant research, the total amount of training has a very obvious effect on muscle hypertrophy. Then we can infer that: each group is exhausted, the total amount of training is reduced, which is not good for muscle fat.

One thing to note: the research is about the relationship between muscle hypertrophy and the total amount of training, not the relationship between muscle gain and the total amount of training. There are some small differences between the two (muscle hypertrophy pays more attention to muscle size, muscle augmentation pays more attention to muscle size and muscle strength)

Another problem caused by each group’s exhaustion is that it is difficult to guarantee the quality of movement. This should be obvious. Under the premise that the quality of movement is difficult to guarantee, the potential damage caused by training is far greater than the benefit of exhaustion.

Should we avoid exhaustion?

Obviously not, training to exhaustion can effectively ensure the progress of your motor nerve, that is to say, let your nerve better control muscle, which is also what many trainers lack. The most important thing is to let you know the real limit of your training, so as to effectively ensure that your training will not be too small.

So my final suggestion is: the last group of each training movement can try to be exhausted, or close to exhaustion, and the previous groups do not need to be exhausted in order to ensure the size of training and the quality of movement.

In addition, different actions should be treated differently in the way of exhaustion. For such complex movements as squatting, lying, pushing and pulling, which are multi joint, multi muscle group and heavy weight, my suggestion is not to do exhaustion frequently, but for small muscle groups such as biceps, triceps and deltoid, you can do more exhaustion to increase the stimulation intensity of muscles.