— yourself hard in the gym on a regular basis. e buck stops with you. Only
you can push yourself through the discomfort of hard training—again and
again. A good training partner or supervisor can be a great help for extract-
ing the growth-stimulating extra effort from you, but you need to have the
ability to be able to train that hard by yourself.. As a caveat, getting the intensity side of matters in order is not good enough
in itself, though it is the most difficult component to satisfy. No matter how
determined you are to train intensively, if between workouts you do not
supply all the factors for recuperation, you will not be able to respond to the
growth stimulus arising from the intensive work. And if you cannot respond
to the stimulus, your body will not produce the muscle growth and strength
gain you want.. Remember, you stimulate growth and then you rest, recuperate and grow;
then you stimulate again and follow it with sufficient rest and recuperation
in order to respond and grow again. If you train an exercise before you have
fully recuperated and overcompensated from the previous time you worked
it—i.e., built some “reserve”—how are you going to use a slightly bigger
poundage, or perform a rep more?. Ensure that you can meet all out-of-the-gym recuperation factors before you
go training very hard in the gym. If you do not ensure this, quality effort in
the gym will be wasted and only wear you down. Hard gainers have to be
much more particular about this than easy gainers.. e harder your training becomes, the greater care you need to give to being
well rested during the day, having lots of sleep every night, and following
as good a diet as possible. Absolutely no corner cutting! And if your life is
full of stress and turmoil from work, personal relationships and any other
source that runs you ragged, then that will ruin your progress. Your body
can only cope with so much before it stops being able to respond to intensive
training.Three types of muscular failure
. Consider these three types of conditions—concentric (lifting), isometric
(holding) and eccentric (lowering). ey are directly related to three types
of muscular failure. Using simplified terminology, concentric strength is less
than isometric strength which, in turn, is less than eccentric strength. In
other words, when your concentric strength is exhausted you still have iso-