Muscle Round adaptations

[Scott Stevenson]

When I first started with these about 18 months ago, the outcome was always muscular failure through the muscles under load "giving out", followed by five to 10 minutes of breathlessness/lying on the floor.

Now, though, the outcome is muscular failure through the pain of metabolic waste/blood pump, followed by effectively no time at all out of breath.

Weights have increased significantly over the duration, with no loss of form, so training stress hasn't lessened.

I can't get over how different the muscular feeling at failure is now and how it is possible (though probably not desirable when avoidable) to complete a tier one turbo MR workout moving from machine to machine with no downtime bar setting up weights.

I could probably reason with myself that an aspect of getting "fitter over time" that has lessened/negated the between set downtime, but what's the deal with the change in muscular feel (I'm having a hard time explaining it here).

Anyone else experiencing similar?

Dr Scott - any thoughts?

I think this is simply a prime example of a training adaptation:

• Faster recovery HR
• Greater ability to clear metabolites (which stimulate both HR and ventilation via Type III and Type IV afferents in skeletal muscle).
• The above is secondary to basic enzymatic adaptation in skeletal muscle (probably glycolytic and mitochondrial, as well as increased monocarboxylate transporter activity to move lactate and a proton out of cells, increased capillary density, etc.
• Increased neurological drive (rate coding, etc.), pain tolerance, disinhibition, development of psychological strategies, etc.
• More muscle mass, too, of course.

And also, you are willing / have the proclivity to train very hard and keep pushing limits as well as possibly good genetics for adaptation to this kind of training.

-S