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Originally Posted by Madcow
The nervous system is what recuits your muscles and to do heavy work it fires hard (rate coding). So knowing that workload is a proxy for stimulus to the muscles and hypertrophy, getting those extra reps by going to failure becomes particularly expensive. Not that failure is bad but simply that rate coding skyrockets and that impacts fatigue and accumulated fatigue is overtraining - it is not an accident that failure or HIT type protocols default to low volume and stress recovery (they just didn't realize it wasn't the muscles that were failing, it was their nervous system redlining i.e. failure is not a stimulus unless you are trying to get better at the neural level and that is a viable way to load the muscles progressively with more weight but it isn't as direct as Mr. Mentzer seemed to think).
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I'm particularly glad you said this part. It's something I (and others) have tried to tell people a million times that come on and say I just can't work my muscles more than once a week or they can't progress (or even less) cuz they won't recover and 90% of the time it turns out they think they have to hit failure or beyond...not just HITites but others under the general impression this is necessary. It can be a useful tool but it is only that: a tool that must be managed and used properly.
You get tired of saying it...your muscles are fine it's your nervous system that is fried.
*Edit* By the same token I recall someone complaining how his muscles would stay sore for like a week or more. Nothwithstanding the fact that you CAN work a sore muscle I would think that someone who never worked anything more than once a week or less would have bad recovery on the muscular level