Welcome to the Get Fit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfeld. I'm the Get Fit Guy.

And in this episode, you're going to learn whether you really need to fatigue your muscles to actually make them bigger.

Okay, let's jump into today's episode.

If you lift weights to build muscle, you know that one of

the holy grails of weight training is muscle hypertrophy, which is simply an increase in the size

of skeletal muscle through a growth in the size of that muscle's cells. Now, one commonly held belief

is that a muscle must be worked to fatigue if you really want it to experience seriously

significant hypertrophy. The idea here being that a muscle is induced to grow after the muscle

damage, metabolic stress, and mechanical tension that happens as a result of muscular failure

during a weight training sense. Now, I'd tell you more about the science behind this

in the episode, How to Build Muscle. And I'll link to that in the show notes over at quick and dirty

tips.com. Just grab the show notes for this episode, episode number 260. So one of the things I've talked

about before in previous shows is the concept of forced repetitions. And these are exercises that are assisted by a training

partner or a spotter. They're typically performed with a much heavier weight than you could normally

lift on your own or significantly more repetitions than you could normally do by yourself. When you get

to failure, the spotter helps you or forces you to complete the set. But do you really need to do forced

repetitions or work a muscle to absolute and complete failure and fatigue to get it to grow larger?

Well, in this episode, you're going to discover the truth. Now, surprisingly, at this point,

only one forced repetition study has ever been done.

In it, 12 basketball and 10 volleyball players trained three times a week for six weeks using the bench press.

They were split into three groups, each of which performed a different number of forced repetitions.

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