The standard lifting regime was made popular by men on steroids like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Working out too often actually hurts muscle gain. The fitness industry is a fiat psyop like most other things.
https://video.nostr.build/37224635d9f4882031e90480e597333db760f87c50e95eb6a361ea520aa103e0.mp4
Seems like I just need to go up in weight again. Expensive... Grr.
My sets are currently 20 reps and I do it 3 times usually. Could go 5 times if I'm feeling serious about it. When I started, it was usually failure at 6 reps.
You gotta slow it down. You don’t need to go super heavy. That’s actually dangerous and increases risk for injury. Also bad for your joints. Look up Jay Vincent on YouTube and watch how he does his sets.
I tried the Jay Vincent program back in the day. It’s garbage. Never felt sore and saw absolutely no improvements in muscle mass.
Multiple sets near your max form-correct weight to or near failure is what will bring you to experience improvement in size.
It’s not rocket science, like anything, you get out what you put in. Gaining muscle is a very hard thing for the body to do, it’s unnatural. In nature there is no reason to be muscular and it will never happen over baseline from typical ancestral activities like hunting, running, walking, climbing and various toil. You see old pictures of native people from all over the world and they are all wirey and vascular but almost none of them are muscular especially vs today’s standards.
Most people have to put their muscles under extreme duress over time to build small amounts of additional muscle over their baseline.
I’m sticking with 3 sets
The pump doesn’t really happen until after the second set. Biggest tell. That and having tried 1 beast set in the past I saw no improvements.
Soreness is not a reliable indicator of a good workout. You don’t have to feel sore. It is satisfying af though.
I think everyone is different. Jay Vincent never said that more volume doesn’t create results but I think for some people, less volume will give them better gains. For me, my arms looked more pumped and grew more after I dropped bicep curls and tricep extensions. My back and chest exercises were intense enough to stimulate growth there. The fact that my arms grew after I stopped doing those two exercises says a lot about how much stimulus my body needs. I was overtraining. Op said that no matter how much additional exercise he does, he can’t make any growth. Which makes sense because your muscles have a limit to how much force it can generate. You can do a full speed sprint for only a few seconds or you can do a low intensely slow jog for an hour. Both are forms of exercise that stimulate the same muscles but sprinters and have much more jacked bodies compared to marathon runners. Intensity vs volume. In other words you can train very intensely for a short period of time or you can train for a long period of time at low intensity. As intensity increases, volume must decrease. The problem is that fast twitch muscle fibers are difficult to sufficiently fatigue without going really fucking heavy and risking injury. Or you can train at a moderate weight to failure and reduce risk of injury substantially.
Mike Mentzer trained a lot of normies on high intensity sets to failure and he noticed that when he’d give them more rest, they’d come back stronger.
Here is a good example of the difference in force generated when going slow and controlled to failure compared to fast reps.
https://video.nostr.build/53cc16f1676bf13190f0286ccdde0d93c1cdc4768d0ae78afb56c832d1293b39.mp4
Also you can always do a warmup set before you go to failure. I also like to do drop sets to failure if I feel like I didn’t push to my limits.
