I highly recommend you watch this video of Dorian Yates training with Leroy Davis, Blood and intestines.
There is no such thing as “I can’t” when it comes to building muscle and strength. No matter what field you excel in, progress is fueled by one thing and one thing only – the catalyst that sets off a series of metabolic events that lead to your desired outcome: can’t.
What is training for failure?
To improve, the goal should be to the point where you can’t physically do more. In other words, you have to fail. Failure—real failure (more on that in a minute)—is the one and only message your brain gets to start an incredibly complex, nutrient-dependent cascade. events leading to muscle hypertrophy– expansion of existing muscle fibers and possibly hyperplasia, activation of satellite cells that create new muscle tissue. The end result is increased strength to deal with the imposed stress. Your exercises.
So established fact #1: Muscle growth is stimulated by progressive repetitive stress. Adaptive response. This adaptive response exists under the auspices of survival. This means that the pressure applied must seek the limits of the existing structure to force adaptation. In English, you need to give the muscles a reason to grow.
Why most lifters quit before growth begins
And as long as that’s true, it can’t exist without established fact #2: Tension seeks failure. And therein lies the problem. Failure has a distant cousin – fatigue. Too often we confuse fatigue with failure because the pain of having to endure what you asked to achieve is real failure. I’m talking about where you’re practically asking God to intervene. It hurts enough that every instinct you have tells you to stop. But as long as you can still produce the disorder, despite the pain, you haven’t failed yet.
When the electrical impulses from your brain to your muscles are disrupted, you fail. Your brain says to contract… and your muscles say to beat you.
Now, most people criticize genetics as a limiting factor in muscle development. To some extent this is true – but only in the sense that you have to have the mental wiring to be able to produce extremes. Because history has proven time and time again that strain can overcome less than perfect genetics.
Look at running Boy Gaspari made genetically superior in Li Hani. The same thing happened when Dorian Yeats threatened Haney’s rule. Dorian was working hard for him, plain and simple. So is Mike Mentzer and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold had great genetics. But no human being on earth can produce as much as Mike Mentzer was able to.
The psychological side of intensive training
So how do you navigate the path to hypertrophy? Honestly, I would rather explain the meaning of life. Because the pursuit of true failure exists within a very small niche where elite athletes, regardless of their stress, pain, emotions or will to live, want to go above and beyond.
It is not human nature to hurt yourself, even though some cultures insist otherwise. There are great athletes among them. In the early 1980s, sports physician Dr. Bob Goldman asked elite athletes a famous question: If a drug guaranteed an Olympic gold medal but killed you five years later, would you take it? About half of them reportedly said. This is the mindset we are dealing with.
How elite bodybuilders push through pain
So, at a level far beyond their normal self-performance, an elite athlete, especially an Olympian, must train to legitimate failure. Understand this: at that level, lifting involves more mental strength than physical strength. Your goal is to focus effort where failure is absolute. Imagine dangling your arms from a steel railing 500 feet above a pile of rocks. Your support is starting to fail. I can promise you that you will not give up voluntarily. You keep going until your muscles legitimately fail.
Now grab a fixed camber bar, go to the bench and start curling. If you drop this bar, you’ll fall 500 feet onto a pile of rocks. This will be a failure.
Sounds like too much, doesn’t it? This is because. Mother Nature does not want you to have excess muscle. Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive. To maintain it, your body must constantly feed it, support it, and sacrifice valuable nutritional resources. Your body only grows muscle and increases strength when it realizes its progressive needs, This need should be constant and this need should be enough for the body to adapt. The more you can produce, the greater your potential for size and strength.
So the question becomes, how bad do you want it?
