Muscle Fatigue-How to Blast Through the Dreaded Muscle Failure that “Hits” Us All
If you’ve been working out for any amount of time, you’re probably well acquainted with fatiguethat sensation of your muscles being “done,” “cooked,” “toast”… You know, the “please have mercy before I’m permanently trapped under this weight,” or “you might just have to drag me off the track because I’ve collapsed” feeling.
We typically use the term fatigue to describe general sensations of tiredness and the accompanying decreasing muscular performance. What this really means is we “hit the wall” and can no longer perform reps on a particular lift; we can no longer run any farther or harder; we can no longer produce the “optimal” output of muscular contractions as we did at the beginning of the set or workout.
What Is Muscle Fatigue?
Fatigue is a very complex phenomenon in which multiple sites fail during muscular work. The underlying causes of fatigue fall into one of two categories: central (neuromuscularthe mind/central nervous system) and...