Saturday, July 28, 2012

Solana Beach Personal Trainer - Is The Final Hardest Repetition Probably The Most Dangerous?

By Manuel Murphy


Over the years as the Solana Beach Personal Trainer, I've seen some of our clients wrongly associate increased risk of injury with how difficult a repetition is. This wrong association will get in the way of producing maximum results from power training. What might happen as you start to feel burning in your muscles as they exhaustion, it's natural to associate the exertional discomfort of the burning muscles with additional risk of harm. And just because it is becoming extremely challenging and hard (and most productive), you might think "I might strain something, so it will be best to back off my effort so that I can avoid getting hurt."

In actuality, the deeper your muscles fatigue and also the harder the repetitions get, the safer the exercise is for the body. For that matter, the most trusted time within a group of repetitions is the time when you have exhausted to the point of "muscle success". ("Muscle success" is the point at which after a number of repetitions you're fatigued and pushing or pulling as hard as you can, and the weight refuses to budge even a fraction of an inch. I previously did refer to this as "muscle failure", and my wife Julie continues to remind me that because it is at this point that the benefits of strength training are stimulated most, it's more truthful to call this as state "muscle success".)

As the set of repetitions progresses, your muscles momentarily become weaker, so you become less capable of injuring yourself. Let's illustrate this with a hypothetical subject named Mary performing a biceps curl exercise. To pick some easy round numbers to use, suppose Mary's fresh strength of her biceps is 100 pounds of force. In other words, if she pulls as hard as she could when she's fresh and rested, she is capable of exerting no more than 100 pounds of force with her biceps muscles. And let us also mention that the tensile limit of her connective tissues for her biceps is 150 pounds of force. In other words, if Mary were to somehow exert over 150 pounds of force on these connective cells they would tear. So she has 50 pounds of "safety margin" with the tensile limit of her tissues and her fresh strength: 150 pounds (tensile limit) minus 100 pounds (fresh strength) leaves 50 pounds being the margin of safety when she is fresh.

Although at the start of the biceps curl exercise Mary could pull with 100 pounds of power if she tried pulling as hard it may possibly be in the first rep, if she does not pull as hard as possible at the start and instead starts doing slow repetitions with 70 pounds of resistance on the machine. As she continues, her biceps fatigue, and right after several reps she hits "muscle success" and is unable to budge the weight despite pulling as hard as she can. Her maximum force output of her biceps is actually under 70 pounds. At this point of "muscle success", she presently has more than 80 pounds of a margin of safety: 150 pounds (tensile limit) minus less than 70 pounds (momentary strength at "muscle success") results in over 80 pounds being the margin of safety.

Although it could have felt more hazardous as her muscles exhausted, her margin of safety actually increased (from 50 pounds safety margin at the beginning, until 80 pounds safety margin towards the end). Because her muscles got more exhausted, she has become less capable of injuring herself. The truth is the final repetition (the toughest one) was initially the very least likely of the repetitions to harm her.

Even though the hardest repetitions are less dangerous, it is still undoubtedly easy to injure yourself if you inappropriately hold your breath, lunge, heave, jerk, or jab on the weight as you fatigue (poor exercise form can significantly raise the force your body gets exposed to). But, if you keep good form, your border of safety increases the deeper you will have in a group of repetitions.

Being a Solana Beach personal trainer here are some of my tips. Within certain limits, the deeper you momentarily exhaust your muscles on an exercise, greater benefits and changes you stimulate in your body. So do not stay away from the most challenging repetitions on account of inappropriate fear of injury! As long as you keep good form, the final repetitions aren't just the best for encouraging change they are also the most secure.




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