Cumulative Fatigue – the Real Secret of Fast Muscle Growth
Fast muscle growth – is it really possible? If you ask most people who try working out for a few months without actually achieving anything, fast muscle growth is just hype.
If you focus part of your workouts on this kind of training you will experience very fat muscle growth, especially if you haven’t been training in this way before. As strength coach Charles Poliquin likes to say, the best workout is the one you haven’t been doing.
What he means is that we adapt to a certain kind of training so changing something in the workout every few weeks or months ensures continued progress.
Fast Muscle Growth with Cumulative Fatigue?
I first heard the term cumulative fatigue from my friend Rusty Moore, author of the Visual Impact Muscle Building workout. What this technique means is to gradually exhaust the muscle more and more throughout the workout by using relatively short rest periods.
Both bodybuilders and athletes use this kind of training to grow muscle fast. In fact, cumulative fatigue training was one of Vince Gironda’s (pictured below to the right) favorite techniques. He practically implemented it in almost all of the workout routines he created, including 6 sets of 6 reps, 8 sets of 8 reps and 10 sets of 10 reps – all done with relatively small rest periods.
Charles Poliquin (in the picture to the left) introduced this kind of training with what he called German volume training. This was essentially a workout of 10 sets of 10 reps of a single exercise with less than a minute of rest.
How to Train for Fast Muscle Growth
- Mind muscle connection – focus your mind on the muscle. Imagine it contracting and relaxing while you are lifting.
- Short rest periods – rest between 15 and 60 seconds. You will eventually get fitter and be able to rest less, even if 15 seconds seem too little time at first. And when you are able to rest less while lifting the same amount of weight, you’ll be bigger.
- First sets set the tone – with this kind of training the first set or two might feel too easy, but it just sets the tone for the series of sets. Think of cumulative fatigue training as one giant set done by doing a few smaller sets with very small rest periods.
The Big Picture
I just want to make this point clear, when it comes to fast muscle growth or any muscle growth, in the long run you got to get stronger. So whatever workout you are doing, if you want to get more muscle, you have to work with increasingly more challenging workouts.
Two workouts that feature a phase focused on fast muscle growth through cumulative fatigue are Visual Impact Muscle Building and Hollywood Physique.
Visual Impact is a more balanced workout focused on both size and strength gains. On the other hand, the Hollywood Physique is a program that dramatically changes your body in 13 weeks. It is for guys who are fed up by working out without seeing the results they were after and can devote a few weeks of their life to dramatically changing their body.
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Yavor,
Visual Impact is a great program. What I like about it is that it stresses cumulative fatigue in Phase 1 and density training in Phases 2 and 3 which helps harden the muscles to add definition. I haven’t seen another program which incorporates this.
Alykhan
Alykhan, thanks for stopping by man. There are many workouts, but what I like about Rusty’s program is that it’s not dogmatic. It’s not just train for strength or just train with high volume for size. It takes the best of both worlds – bodybuilding and strength training.
Hi Yavor,
I’ve got a question about failure. I’m a 400m runner (6`4″ 80kg). With my strength training, if I’m doing 5 x 5 with 4 mins rest, does failing actually make you stronger if you’re doing it twice a week? Is the only reason you don’t fail so you can train more often and so get the volume in? So if I can only get to the gym twice a week, do I want to fail if my goal is to get stronger?
Also, my deadlift is about 80kg and bench is 55 – are these numbers too small for doing strength training – should I still be on the beginner’s workout?
Thanks
Tom
Hey Tom, I’ll answer your second question first. I’m guessing you are a young guy still in his teenage years. So you definitely have time to improve. That being said, yes your numbers are very low. You could stay on a beginner’s workout for as long as it gives quick results (meaning you get stronger from workout to workout. Which you should).
You should be able to reach 2-2.5 x body weight deadlift and 1.25-1.5 x body weight bench press. Right now your lifts are far far away from the capabilities of your body. To start seeing athletic gains from doing strength training, you simply need to (and will) get much much stronger.
Failing on the last set of an exercise is fine. The most important thing is effort. If you are doing 5×5 with equal weight, the workout usually looks like this:
set 1 5 reps
set 2 4 reps (you simply can’t lift 5)
set 3 3 reps
set 4 2 reps
set 5 2 reps
Next workout
set 1 5 reps (don’t try for 6)
set 2 4 reps (you simply can’t lift 5)
set 3 4 reps <– improvement
set 4 3 reps <– improvement
set 5 3 reps <– improvement
when you do 5 reps on all 5 sets, increase the weight with smallest possible increment.
****************
Here's another variation.
Set 1 5 reps (light)
set 2 5 reps (moderate)
set 3 5 reps (work set)
set 4 5 reps (can't do 6)
set 5 4 reps
When you can do sets 3,4 and 5 for 5 reps, you increase the weight with the smallest increment. Note that sets 1 and 2 are just warm up sets in which you practice the move in this variation.
Ok thanks, Yavor. Yes I’m nearly 18. When Rusty talks about not failing while strength training because it sends “negative feedback” to your muscles, is he talking about only in explosive movements? So when you recommend not failing while doing pull ups to get better at doing the skill, is that purely so that you can get the volume in? Otherwise, won’t you get stronger at pull ups (or renegade rows for example) if you DO fail?
Thanks
Tom
http://fitnessblackbook.com/strength-training/explosive-pushups-to-increase-your-bench-pressing-power-and-pectoral-definition/
Cumulative fatigue is a great way to grow for most but for some reason I don’t get the results like others … maybe I’m doing something wrong? I seem to get better results low volume, heavy lifting!
Could be a number of factors perhaps like my age(47), vegetarian diet, eat low amount of calories most of the time so I guess more times in deficit than surplus …maybe all of this doesn’t set me up for cumulative fatigue ..any suggestions?
thanks
Raymond
Ray, I don’t know why it doesn’t work with you. Have you tried the mind muscle connection method with very low rest periods? For example 6×6 or 8 sets of 8 the same exercise. But with only 15 to 30 secs of rest and with a focus on contracting and relaxing the working muscle (as opposed to just lifting the weight). Here is a video of Arnold doing the mind-muscle connection on the bench press
Note how this is different from say a powerlifter doing a bench press. Here the focus is on the pecs only. With this kind of training the muscle is visibly larger within days – for example chest and shoulders are very receptive to this.
I don’t think it is the age thing or the diet.
The heavy low rep training is fool proof. It works in the long run when you start pushing heavy weights.
Tom, volume is crucial when training complex moves such as pullups or renegade rows. Lets say you can do only 5 pullups. If you train to failure, your workout will be like this:
5 reps, 4 reps, 3 reps, 2 reps, 2 reps. Total of 16 reps only! But you can do instead 10 sets of 3 reps not to failure. that’s twice as much reps.
Complex multi joint movements are best not done to failure. When you fail, you only fry one of the muscle groups BUT at the same time you are unable to train anymore leaving the remaining muscle groups not fully trained.
Getting stronger is a “skill.” The skill of contracting your muscles very very hard.
Have in mind however, that failure training is necessary when doing isolation exercises for moderate to high reps. But don’t train to failure on multi joint low-rep exercises.
High quality post man, good info, love the pics, especially Logan!
Good Job dude,
Mark
The shot of ‘wolvie’ up top – a lot of people don’t realise that he’s actually holding some heavy bags of sand during that photo shoot.
It’s a great technique to utilise under heavy down-lights to get that vascular look. Try it some time
Clint, yeah man, they use all sorts of dirty tricks. Overhead lighting, make up, pumping dumbbells between ALL takes, etc..That being said, Jackman is big in real life too.
Edit: here it is from Wolverine himself:
--HUGH JACKMAN
Nice article. Anything that mentions Vince Gironda gets my vote. I recently was doing 6×6 with just one deep breath between sets and it works!I think the approach of alternating between a routine like this, then building your strength is a good one.
Michael
Mark, thanks buddy!
Mike, that’s exactly what I advocate – alternating size/strength ==> http://relativestrengthadvantage.com/workout-results/
Btw – 1 deep breath. Now that’s hardcore!
What about training one day with low reps and big weights,and the next day: same excersize but with half the weight and high reps?
Alex, it will work, if you know what you are doing. The big picture is what counts – getting stronger over time.
Of course, I am progressively loading more weights on the both heavy and light days.But i have never put on mind that i should do the light workouts only with isolated exercise.Gironda says that every man have its own number of muscles fibers and we cannot make them more.But we can make more and bigger capillaries therefore bigger muscles.That’s why we should train one day for strength and the very next day to pump the muscles with blood.
You are forgetting that these men used steroids to achieve these amazing results. Using steroids is an absolute requirement in any short term powerlifting program if you want to achieve superhuman goals.
Jack, Gironda has been known as a big advocate of not using steroids. Other than that, you are right.