needemloox
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STIMULATING REPS
why 4 hard sets mogs 20 shit ones
why 4 hard sets mogs 20 shit ones
if you want a program to copy scroll to section 11. if you want to know why your 20 set chest day did fuck all for two years then read it properly
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▸ 1. THE WHOLE THING IN SIX LINES
- a fibre only grows if that exact fibre got loaded. no sharing
- most of your fibres are maxed out from daily life and literally cannot grow
- the ones that still can only turn on when effort is high
- turning them on isnt enough. they need to make high force too, which only happens when the rep is slow
- high effort + slow rep happens in one place. the last few reps before failure
- everything else is just fatigue
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▸ 2. MOST OF YOUR MUSCLE CANNOT GROW
nobody explains this and everything else depends on it.
your bicep isnt one thing that gets a growth signal. its thousands of individual fibres and every single one has to be stimulated separately. the sensors that detect tension sit inside each fibre and they do not talk to the fibre next door. so a fibre that didnt switch on during your set got nothing out of it. not less. nothing.
fibres switch on smallest first, always, in a fixed order. size principle. small units fire for everything, walking, standing, carrying your shopping. big units only fire when effort is high.
heres the bit that matters. your small fibres have been loaded every single day of your life. theyre done. maxed. no amount of training moves them.
so the only fibres with growth left in them are the high threshold ones.
meaning every rep where you didnt get to high threshold recruitment did nothing. moved a weight, made you tired, never touched a fibre that could actually grow.
thats your mate whos done 25 sets a session at 4 rir for three years and looks exactly the same.
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▸ 3. RECRUITMENT ON ITS OWN DOES NOTHING
so we need high threshold recruitment. easy. just be explosive right, jump about, throw shit, thats max effort.
no. and this is where most people fall off.
recruitment picks WHICH fibres get trained. force-velocity decides HOW MUCH tension they get. two different things. you need both.
force velocity means a fibre makes less force the faster it shortens. slow = high force. fast = low force. thats just how actin myosin crossbridges work, at speed fewer heads are attached at any given moment so theres less force. you cant train around it, its physics.
which is why sprinters and jumpers have full recruitment constantly and dont grow from it. reps are fast so tension per fibre is shit. same reason throwing builds nothing despite being maximal effort.
you need the overlap. high recruitment AND slow movement. theres one place in a set where you get both.
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▸ 4. SO, STIMULATING REPS
set of 12.
rep 1 weight feels light, bar flies up, effort low. only small units firing and those cant grow. nothing.
rep 6 harder now, bar slowing, more units coming in. something starts happening.
rep 10 hard. bar is slow. effort near max so recruitment near max, slow bar so high force per fibre. this one counts.
rep 12 grinding. max recruitment, min velocity. counts.
only the last few reps do both at once. roughly 5 per set, somewhere between 5 and 8. arithmetic here if you care.
this also explains something the volume crowd cant. why do sets of 5, 10 and 20 build the same muscle when sets are matched and taken to failure? because they all give you the same 5 reps at the end. the set of 20 just has 15 pointless ones in front of it.
and it kills the pump cope on the way past. lactate doesnt recruit motor units. effort does. the burn is a byproduct. you dont need "metabolic stress" as a separate mechanism, one thing explains the entire rep range literature. thats what a real model looks like, not the mess of five different "pathways" people post on here.
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▸ 5. SET 2 IS WORSE THAN SET 1. SET 5 IS A JOKE.
if the stimulus is reps at high recruitment and slow speed, anything that lowers recruitment lowers the stimulus. fatigue does that, but not the way you think.
two kinds and they pull opposite ways. peripheral fatigue, the burn, the pump, actually raises recruitment because you need more units to shift the same weight. cns fatigue lowers it. and cns fatigue wins.
so heres the ugliest fact in training. late in a session you can hit real failure without ever reaching full recruitment. all the pain, all the fatigue, all the damage, and the fibres that could actually grow never turned on.
thats what junk volume actually is. not "wasted sets". sets that feel absolutely brutal while missing completely.
the decay is roughly halving each set. set 1 is 100%, set 2 is 50, set 3 is 25, set 4 is 12. by set 5 youre scraping for crumbs and paying full price in fatigue for them.
and that fatigue isnt free. damage repair and growth pull from the same pot, so a session that wrecks you spends your recovery fixing what you broke instead of building anything.
which is why the curve is probably U shaped and not a plateau. past a point more sets makes you grow less. not the same. less.
before some wordcel quotes it at me, the bloke whose model this is doesnt actually say low weekly volume. he says low per session, done often, and reckons moderate beats low. fine. thats still a fraction of the 20 sets a day everyone on here runs so the point stands.
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▸ 6. WHICH MEANS FREQUENCY
follow it through and frequency falls out on its own.
set 1 is the best one and everything after decays. so you dont get more good sets by adding sets. you get them by adding sessions.
10 sets in one day = 1 great set, 9 mid ones.
10 sets over 4 days = 4 great sets, 6 mid ones.
same weekly volume. completely different stimulus.
the every other day bit isnt random either. damage doesnt peak til hours to a day after you train. so training back to back days means youre training straight into yesterdays damage. and damage makes inflammation your brain reads as that heavy cant be arsed feeling, which drops your output before you even touch the bar. train on the off day and you start every session with your ceiling intact.
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▸ 7. HOW HARD
stimulating reps are the last 5 before failure so obviously you have to get near failure. near. not necessarily to.
both of them land on 0-2 rir and thats where id put it.
but heres the reframe that actually changed how i train. going to failure is the easy option. takes zero judgement, you just keep going til the bar stops. stopping at 2 rir means you have to actually know what 2 rir feels like and most of you dont. which is why most peoples "2 rir" is really 5 rir and grows fuck all. if youre not sure where you are youre further away than you think. go to real failure occasionally just to recalibrate, otherwise youre guessing.
why stop short at all. the last rep or two is where the stimulus to fatigue ratio goes to shit. loads of extra calcium influx, loads of extra damage, tiny bit of extra stimulus. bad trade.
theres a practical one the failure lot never mention either. going to failure on set 1 costs you reps on sets 2 and 3. stop at 1-2 rir and you get the same total work with less damage. you dont even lose volume. you just stop paying for it.
isolation stuff, single arm tricep extensions, curls, 0-1 rir, no reason not to. heavy compounds, squats, rdls, 1-2 rir because that last rep costs you three days.
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▸ 8. EXERCISE SELECTION
if only activated fibres grow then selection is just what does this actually turn on. mechanical answer. not a feel answer. nobody cares what you "feel it in".
rule: whatever muscle has best leverage at the hardest point of the rom is what grows.
curl is hardest at the top. at that angle your brachioradialis has best leverage, not your biceps. so your curls have been growing your forearms. congrats. the muscle with the best moment arm at the hardest point eats the stimulus and everything else is along for the ride.
so resistance profile matters more than people think. look at the cam on the machine. cable close to the pivot at the bottom, far from it at the top, that machine is easy at the bottom and hard at the top, so it trains whatever has leverage up there.
when profile and stability fight, take stability every time. wobbly exercise means your nervous system caps output so you dont fall over or blow a joint out, so you never hit your recruitment ceiling no matter how nice the profile is. bad profile you can work around, just stay in the half of the rom where the target has leverage. instability you cant work around at all.
which is why machines and cables beat free weights for isolation. you want the limiter to be the muscle. not your balance.
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▸ 9. THE STRETCH THING
everyone assumes this camp says the stretch is fake. its not what they say and if you repeat it youll get dunked on and deserve it.
actual position is stretch mediated hypertrophy is real but narrow and has been massively over applied.
smh isnt "training stretched". its sarcomeres getting pulled past a specific length threshold which triggers adding sarcomeres in series, making the fibre longer not thicker. sarcomeres dont pass the threshold, stretching does nothing at all.
mechanism is titin. giant spring protein through the sarcomere, three segments. relaxed fibre, all three move freely, stretching makes almost no passive tension, which is why lazily stretching a cold muscle does sod all. activated fibre, one segment locks onto actin, only the stiff bit can extend, way more tension from the same stretch.
so: stretch only counts on fibres you already recruited. its a modifier on top of recruitment, never a replacement. exercise that stretches hard but recruits badly gives you nothing.
it also switches itself off. add sarcomeres, each one now sits shorter, stretch stops hitting threshold, adaptation stops. thats why its mostly a beginner thing, plateaus in weeks.
muscles that actually benefit: chest, quads, hams, glutes. biceps triceps and traps have too many sarcomeres in series to make enough passive tension each. brachioradialis, front delt, soleus, lats have shit leverage at long lengths so theyre barely activated stretched anyway.
and the actual conclusion is way milder than people make out. its not "stretch is fake", its "same result, not easier, not less fatiguing, so why bother".
one thing while im here since people lump these two together. King Deltoids isnt a stretch sceptic. went looking and he doesnt seem to have a position on lengthened partials at all, if anything he leans the other way and keeps citing the long muscle length isometric stuff. hes low volume high effort high frequency. different argument entirely. stop conflating them.
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▸ 10. SHIT THAT ARGUES AGAINST THIS
post this stuff and youll get argued with. some of its actually decent so know it before someone swings it at you.
1. the effective reps model has fuck all direct support. nuckols counted it up. 18 measures across 8 studies, the group doing more effective reps grew significantly more three times, and significantly less once. average it out and its 8.9% staying away from failure vs 9.2% going to failure. if the model was straightforwardly true that shouldnt happen.
2. force velocity might be backwards. sharpest one and it goes at the core. model says late reps are slow so force per fibre is high. but a fatigued fibre makes less force at any velocity. so possibly your high threshold units peak early in the set and are making way less by the end. if thats right the stimulating reps are the early ones and the whole thing flips.
3. recruitment might already be maxed from rep 1 on compounds. quad emg barely moves from 50% to 90% 1rm in the squat. pec emg basically unchanged 70% to 100% on bench. so on big lifts you might be at near full recruitment from the first rep anyway.
4. the volume data is against the strong version. pelland 2025, 67 studies, 2058 people. 100% posterior that more volume means more hypertrophy, diminishing returns but still going up. and worse for us, frequency showed basically nothing for hypertrophy in the same analysis. which is a direct problem for "frequency is king" and i dont have a clean answer for it.
5. the overhead triceps study. maeo 2023. overhead extensions with 34-39% lighter loads still grew the long head 28.5% vs 19.6%. straight hit, because this framework says triceps dont respond to stretch at all. hardest thing on the list to explain and im not going to pretend i can.
6. past failure partials worked in a trial. larsen 2025. medial gastroc 6.7% failure only vs 9.6% with past failure partials. untrained subjects and the trained version was much weaker but its real.
what survives
best evidence for training like this is hermann 2025 and its out of schoenfelds lab, whos the volume guy. one set of nine exercises, twice a week, 8 weeks, trained lifters, proper gains. even milo wolf who argues the other corner for a living admits "4-10 hard sets/muscle/week can work pretty well if they're truly near failure."
so the honest version. low volume done properly is not proven better. its proven enough. most of the available growth for a fraction of the time and fatigue. anyone telling you high volume does nothing is talking shit. but if youve been grinding 20 sets a session and stalling for two years then yeah, worth knowing.
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▸ 11. THE PROTOCOL
structure
- full body every other day/3x a week.
- hate full body? upper lower 6x. do NOT run a bro split, 1x frequency bins the entire model. PPL is just fatiguemaxxing for no real reason.
- dont train back to back days, you want to land after the damage not in it
volume
- 1-2 sets per muscle per session. thats it.
- 3-6 total per muscle per week for most things
- one set of two exercises beats two sets of one. more first sets, more regions
- around 14-15 hard sets in a session before quality falls off a cliff
(Never forget the optimal rep range is 5-8 reps.)
effort
- 0-2 rir on everything. not negotiable, its the whole mechanism
- isolation 0-1. compounds 1-2
- if you arent sure youre at 2 rir youre at 5
selection
- stability first, profile second
- hardest point of the rom should be where your target has best leverage
- machines and cables for isolation
- lock your rom in on set one and never change it.
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▸ 12. TLDR
- only high threshold fibres can still grow, rest are maxed from daily life
- they only turn on at high effort and only make high force when the rep is slow
- both only happen in the last 5 reps before failure
- fatigue lowers recruitment so later sets have fewer of those reps, halving each time
- extra sets in one session buy almost nothing and cost a lot of damage
- spread them over more sessions. 1-2 per muscle per session, 3-4x a week, 0-2 rir
- pick exercises where the target has best leverage at the hardest point
- stretch is real but narrow. chest quads hams glutes, and only on fibres you already recruited
100x better than high volume. proven to work, for a fraction of the time and fatigue.
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◈ END OF GUIDE ◈
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◈ END OF GUIDE ◈
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everythings linked, go read it yourself instead of taking my word for it. section 10 is the stuff that argues against me and i wrote it myself rather than wait for one of you to post it.
if ive got something wrong quote me and ill fix the op.
took ages. rep it if it helped.
