arnold press

[Phineas]

no the bench press sets do not include warm ups and all the sets on my bench i was looking to go near to failure at least, i was looking to go to absolute failure on the last to reps of 6

so then just 6 sets for triceps? i see and have reserached that a lot of pople will nomrally do 5 or 6 sets after training chest, however i will be training triceps by themselves so theres no previous stimulation of the tricep areas so i though that 10 sets would be a good bet?

also i have been looking to incorporate higher rep scemes, what benefits will doing lat raises have at say the 15 rep mark rather then the 10 to 12 rep mark?

Just because a lot of people might do however many sets doesn't mean that's the ideal way to train. At my old gym this is how all the guys I knew and saw regularly trained, and every time I go back there after the year since I was a permanent member they're still training the same way, lifting the same weights for the same rep ranges; they're not stronger, faster, bigger, leaner, or anything. It's very hard to make progress this way, or remain injury-free.

What do you mean by lat-raises? The lats don't raise objects -- they pull. do you mean lateral raises? Regardless, performing an exercise at 15 reps versus 12 won't make any difference aside from developing a little more endurance maybe.

In my opinion you're overthinking rep ranges way too much. There are too many illogical arguments in internet and magazine bodybuilding articles out there on rep ranges that people completely misconstrue the whole concept of volume. There's no magic rep range for gaining muscle. Muscle development is purely diet.

3 rep sets will build muscle; 8 rep sets will build muscle; 15 rep sets will build muscle; hell, even 50 rep sets will build muscle -- so long as you're providing sufficient dietary resources to enable your body to carry out the necessary functions to create new tissue.

of course, you need to provide stimulus to the muscles to trigger to them that they need to grow larger and stronger, but you also need to do it in such a way that they're actually convinced. Remember, your body doesn't want large muscles; muscle tissue requires more dietary resources than fat, or no excess weight at all, so biologically speaking muscle is counter-productive to survival. This is why it's so hard to build muscle. We have to be as efficient as possible to outwit evolution, and convince our brains to make the changes to our physique that we desire. The problem is it's not as simple as providing stimulus and eating a lot. You can't just tell the brain that you need to be able to perform this strenuous activity and expect it to adapt. The body wants to adapt if needed, but only if it's safe. The body will do all it can to keep things as simple and easy for survival as possible.

Enter the central nervous system (CNS). The CNS is the number enemy to the athlete, bodybuilder, powerlifter, or whoever you are if you're looking for strength/muscle gains. The CNS will either make or break your results. If you provide just enough stimulus to the muscles the CNS will respond by telling the brain that it needs to increase its muscles' output, and the brain will release growth hormones assuming sufficient dietary resources are provided. However, if you put too much work on the CNS's plate it will fatigue, and it will tell the brain the opposite -- that it's being hurt and to protect itself it needs to inhibit its muscles' output. This is muscular failure. It's your CNS telling your brain that this is too much, and it shuts off your muscles' motor units (nerve connectors where nerves from muscle fibres meet and are activated to contract). It's beneficial to occassioanally train to failure, as sort of a sudden "shock" to the CNS, but doing it too often will increasingly damange the CNS. This doesn't tell the body it needs to adapt and grow stronger; it tells the body it needs to preserve itself from future damage -- and will either prevent strengthening of the muscles or in some cases weaken the muscles.

 

[jmesherghi]

good to know bout the rep ranges, erm you say that you shudnt go to failure all the time, i have always done this and everyone else that i know haas done this and have grown and got big so it can be done but what u mean is that if you didnt train to failure all the time u wud probaly see better results?

 

[Phineas]

good to know bout the rep ranges, erm you say that you shudnt go to failure all the time, i have always done this and everyone else that i know haas done this and have grown and got big so it can be done but what u mean is that if you didnt train to failure all the time u wud probaly see better results?

Likely.

Some people can do regular failure training. Some people can't. However, even for the people who "see results" with it, (a) it doesn't mean it's the ideal way to train and (b) it's not very safe or healthy.

Beating your CNS to a bloody pulp on a regular basis won't always play out in negative ways immediately. Some people can get away without symptoms of overtraining, but problems could arise later in life.

It's just not a smart idea for the long run. Also, other people you've seen training this way might be heavily using supplements or performance enhancing drugs. Also, what is considered "good results" is very subjective. I've seen people use failure training when they first started, gained maybe 10lbs in a couple months, and thought they had discovered gold. But, it's well documented that (relative) beginners make the fastest gains due purely to neurological adaptation to a stimulus their bodies aren't used to.

Also, many of the guys who claim to have seen great results from failure training tend to see the results in the same regions: chest, shoulders, arms. Part of the reason for this could also be the imbalanced training they follow. Even if you're "overtraining" certain muscle groups, as most guys do with the aforesaid muscle groups, the body at least has extra building resources due to the lack of muscle breakdown going on in other regions of the body, like the back and legs -- which most guys tend to "undertrain". This is why you see so many chicken legs and pussy backs in gyms. These guys swear by their arm curls, chest flies, and shoulder presses because in a few years they've managed to grow 17-inch arms. Yeah, that's nice, but what do you expect when 80% of your training goes into those muscles? Their legs and back are absolutely embarrassing, but they don't mind. There are so many guys at my gym who have arms quite a bit bigger than mine, maybe 2 inches bigger. They probably think they're such hot shit, yet my legs are twice the size of their, my back trumps theirs in thickness and width, my chest is proportionately as big, and for the difference in size of our arms versus our training methods I don't think it's very impressive. It's taken those guys years and years to build big arms but nothing else from doing a shit ton of arm work. For me, it's been 2 years, going from a malnourished distance runner, training the second of those two years with absolutely no isolation work, and I've developed better than them in every region but the arms -- and even my arms are big and well proportioned (without any arm curls or tricep extensions).

If you train with compounds your body will develop in proper, aesthetic proportions. Most guys' arms are disproportionate to the rest of their body. Isolation should be reserved for any muscle groups that, from a hypertrophy standpoint, are not responding as well as others (some people just have the genetics they have, you might not develop tricep mass as easily, for instance, or lateral delt mass, etc, then isolate them and it's all good) or, from a performance standpoint, are not strengthening as well as others (this is how powerlifters would use accessory isolation movements...maybe they need stronger triceps to help their bench lockout).