Step Five

Step Five: Go to positive failure on all of your work sets and increase your training poundages on the big, compound exercises as often as possible.

Building muscle mass requires progressive resistance, or overload. You must push your muscles to failure-until you can't get another repetition in good form-during a high-intensity phase, and you must continue to add weight or reps to your exercises, with special emphasis on compound movements. If you don't use this progressive overload, your muscles will have no reason to adapt with muscle increases.

    You must also hit positive failure in seven to nine reps on most exercises. That means you should select a weight that allows you to get at least seven reps but no more than nine. When you get to nine bring your weight up so that your rep count back to seven. Seven to nine is the optimal rep range for stressing the white, fast-twitch muscle fibers that have the greatest potential for growth: However, it's not so much the rep range as the time it takes to do this number of reps with a two second positive and a two-second negative . Research has shown that pushing a muscle with high-intensity exercise for up to 45 seconds is ideal for stimulating fast-twitch fiber hypertrophy. If you take longer, one of two things will happen: You run the risk of having lactic acid and other fatigue products shutdown your muscles before the majority of fibers fire, or , if the weight is light, you end up working mostly the red, slow-twitch fibers, which are aerobic and don't have as much potential for growth as the white, fat-twitch fibers do.

    As for the number of sets, don't do more than two per exercise. Two sets will hit many fibers as possible on any particular movement without overstressing the muscle. Here's why the two-set rule is so important for encouraging hypertrophy while avoiding overtraining.

    First, keep in mind that a muscle fiber fires completely or not at all. This is known as the all-or-none principle. Let's take a hypothetical set of curls to demonstrate exactly what happens during each rep.(Keep in mind that theses numbers are merely hypothetical and that there are thousands of fibers in each muscle.)

    Your first rep may require, say, 20 fibers to move the weight, and the 20 fibers completely. On the second rep those same 20 fibers fire completely again, but now they're somewhat, so three more fibers join in and fire completely for a total of 23. On the third rep the same 23 fibers fire completely again, but they are fatigued, so five more fibers are called in, and they fire completely for a total of 28 This goes on until you hit failure, at which point the majority of your biceps muscle fibers that can contract during the exercise have fired completely.It's the reason that your reps drop when you attempt another high-intensity set-you simply can't get the same number with the same weight, because so many fibers have already worked to exhaustion on the first set.

    Based on the all-or-none principle, you might conclude that hitting positive failure means you've trained the majority of the biceps' fibers maximally, but the are still fibers that haven't been called into play. For example, if on the eighth rep of the above set you use 100 fibers and your ninth rep requires 130fibers to move the resistance, but you only have 125 available, you'll fat; to do that ninth rep and 25 fibers will be left unused.

    One way to get at those unused fibers is to do another set.In other words, if you only go to positive failure on a set of a given exercise and you're interesting in hitting as many muscle fibers as possible for maximum growth stimulation, then you need to perform one or more positive-failure set-after a res6t of 1 1/2 to two minutes, which is the amount of time it takes your worked muscles to recover so they can recruit and contract the maximum number of fibers again. What actually happens on that second set is you get a different fiber-recruitment pattern; that is, fibers that were left unused after your first positive-failure set are brought into the action, and your previously taxed muscle fibers fire in a different order.

    Physiologically speaking, even if you do two sets to positive-failure, there are still fibers left in reserve.You can never exhaust a muscle's total makeup, no matter how many sets you do-of the same exercise. During the third set of, say, standing barbell curls only stresses the biceps fibers that have already worked maximally and won't call those reserve fibers invocation. In order to get at some of those reserve fibers, you must use more-isolated exercises, specifically ones that provide prestretch, or myotatic reflex, and peak contraction. The addition of exercises that use these reserve-fiber-recruitment tactics is the reason why you graduate to phase 2 of the Size Surge Routine after you complete phase 1 and a one week medium intensity training phase. (Note that some of the above discussion on fiber contraction and recruitment hasn't been scientifically validated, as researchers have yet to delve that deeply into this complicated physiological process.)

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