If you want to get the most out of your lactic training, your systemic conditioning cannot be a limiting factor.
The problem with most people lifting for muscle growth is they may stress an individual muscle in terms of lactic threshold, but they very rarely do this to their entire body. So the limiting factors become not the muscle your trying to work, but your ability to clear the waste being produced by that muscle so it can keep working. Take for instance a very hard leg workout…
Many people if they take a set of leg presses to failure have to allow for an absurd amount of recovery time before they can repeat that effort. This isn’t because of their quads, they are systemically out of shape in terms of dealing with all the metabolites the legs are generating.
This is likely not a problem when you’re working a very small muscle, but for large muscle groups, this can greatly cut down on your training volume and intensity if you don’t improve your total lactic tolerance.
Training a muscle to lactic failure in a set is a great way to signal many hypertrophy pathways… however your ability to repeat those high effort sets is dependent upon your ability to clear the lactic and other metabolic metabolites from the muscle and replenish the energy producing pathways.
Some of this happens within the muscle, but a large part of recovery is dependent on your muscles shuttling out lactate and other metabolic waste into the blood where it is then metabolized by liver and even other surrounding musculature.
This sudden rush of metabolites in the blood is why your heart rate and breathing increase after a hard set to failure.
You need the extra oxygen to fuel these aerobic pathways to clear the metabolites from the anaerobic work – the rate at which you can do this will ultimately determine how much volume of lactic work you can do, and how dense you can do it.
For the first half of this program, you will be stressing the total lactic tolerance by training multiple muscle groups in superset, and multi-set fashion. This will allow you to create a greater overall load on your entire body’s ability to deal with lactic acid and the other metabolic waste products. Your aerobic capacity will improve, and your cardiovascular system will become more efficient.
The net effect of the total lactic period will condition your body to recover faster from lactic work.
In the second half of this program we are going to take advantage of your improved conditioning and start testing each individual muscles ability to push its lactic threshold. This will be done by way of supersets and NOS variations in a dense training fashion.
When you reach this point, your systemic recovery should be improved, and you should be able to stress each individual muscle with more prolonged sets and less rest… ultimately increasing the amount of work and stress that the muscle is going to get each session.
To summarize, we will improve our entire body’s conditioning and lactic tolerance in the first half of the program, then when we switch to training for maximum lactic stress for each individual body part, we will have no limitation beyond the working muscle.
Expect to see noticeable changes in body composition as you move further into the program, you’ll be stressing your total lactic tolerance… this is one of the key ways to increase growth hormone secretion similar to that seen from HIIT!
Time to toughen up and embrace the burn…
So, stay focused, fully committed, and get ready to grow an extra pair over the next 6 weeks 😉
