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Originally Posted by
marcus300
I've been getting some pm's regarding training all out for one working set, some members find it hard to get their heads around the idea of how to train to your max so I will try and explain. Usually many members who I speak to will warm up and then either do 3-4 working sets to fully exhaust that muscle area, lets have an example of upper chest and your doing incline DB press. With the way I train I fully warm the area up which could take 2 or even 3 warm up sets of high reps, I will stretch between warm ups and will do very slow strict reps tensing and squeezing to get as much blood as possible in the muscle area.
Once my muscles have fully warmed up I will then calculate what weight I will be doing on my working set, this weight will target around 5,6,7 reps. There isn't a set rep range what I will hit and then stop, its when I can't lift anymore no matter what. infact probably the last one my training partner is just slightly touching my elbows and spotting me just to get the last one up. At this stage my positive strength as totally gone, ive left nothing left in the tank for another set. Once ive reached this stage which could be anywhere from 5,6,7th rep my training partner will help me with 2 forced reps, he will spot me so the weight keeps moving slowly but I am still pushing as much as possible, it could well be around 3 forced reps but usually its only 2 because my strength as fully been exhausted and can only do 2 reps with the help of my partner. Then on my last forced rep at the top I have zero strength left to complete another rep so now the only strength I have is negative strength so I would lower the dumbbells slowly for 2 negative reps, at the bottom my partner will help me get the weight up and I will slowly lower the bells again. The pain when doing these negative is extremely painful if done right its recruits many muscle fibres if you execute this movement slow and controlled. Once you have totally exhausted your positive and negative strength that's it, its game over and the muscle area has been fully worked. You haven't left anything in the tank for another set, you have gone through every pain barrier you can think of and your muscle has been fully worked. One set to failure plus 2 forced reps to failure then 2 negatives to failure. The example is done with forced and negatives but its the same principles with dropsetting or rest pause. That's it upper chest press done - next movement and so on in the same fashion