childishkillah
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This new study was conducted on advanced lifters with over 6 years of experience in the sport. This study has produced several novel findings that help us fill some important gaps in the current literature on hypertrophy and not just give us details on whether or not to train to failure.
First, the results indicate that notable muscle gains can be achieved with relatively low volumes in already strength trained individuals. This makes it clear that advanced athletes do not need ever increasing volume to create hypertrophy or they may plateau, contrary to the popular belief held by many.
Mass gains were achieved despite all participants having previously been training with higher volumes and therefore experiencing a reduction in volume throughout the experiment, reinforcing the idea that low volumes, AGAIN, are shown to be capable of enhancing muscular adaptations.
Although failure experienced very little noticeable hypertrophy, this fits with a meta-regression that explored the dose/response relationship between proximity to failure and muscle hypertrophy indicating that muscle size increased as sets were completed closer to failure. Thus, that meta-regression seems to contrast with the results of having created a minimum of more hypertrophy in this study despite lacking strong support, since the hypertrophy that was created was minimal but slightly bigger.
This study also makes it clear that fatigue exists during and after the training session. When comparing the results with other studies, it is possible that failure in muscle hypertrophy is more potent with routines of a single set per training session versus routines with multiple sets, so it is likely that the differences between the conditions of proximity to failure and muscle mass gain are due to the sets performed in 1 training session. So for Failure vs. RIR 2, failure is probably better with lower set volumes and RIR 2 is probably better with higher set volumes. Although I personally speculate that this may be attributed to the effects of accumulated fatigue, as we know that sets that are taken to failure produce greater muscle damage and can allocate a portion of our protein synthesis to that muscle regeneration, and going to failure will also create more fatigue due to the release of calcium ions.
This study also demonstrates that Chris Beardsley's weekly net stimulus model is correct.
When you perform 2 sets a week not done on the same day, you create hypertrophy, but when you perform 3 sets on the same day, they do not create enough hypertrophy to prevent atrophy and muscle gain from being lost before the next training session.