Body by science
A friend of mine talked to me about this book, and I found it very interesting. It is well researched and its point make sense to me.
The basic premise is that having more muscle is good. I have to say that I did not think that, I never liked over inflated muscles, and had very little interest in going to the gym. I do try to eat well and have an active life, and I definitely prefer doing sport outside to going to the gym. Still the book makes good points about the advantages of having more muscles (within limits): more active tissue that uses calories, more protection, more strength, better glucose sensitivity,…
Given that, the look at the best way to reach it. In particular they look at the minmum way to induce it without over-stressing (and wear out) the body. They conclude that the best signal to trigger it is high intensity training, with single repetitions, until positive failure (to sequentially use all fibers of your muscles).
The goal is not optimal results, but the minimum meaningful stimulus to achieve a good response, and to build up muscle having enough rest is crucial, indeed 7 days of rest is a good average choice (they discuss the details more in depth, depending on the inroading, i.e. how much you weaken your muscles, longer periods might be needed).
They propose a good “starting set” of exercices (the Big 5) that takes about about 12 minutes to perform. One should always reach failure (meaning that all fibers have been used), if for a given exercice more than 1:30 minutes is needed then next time the load should be increased (so that one fails after ~ 1 minute), because if you take too long the fast recovery muscle fibers have recovered and you fatigue them again, and it seems that repetions do not add much.
This is quite attractive because it is an amount of effort that can be easily added to one schedule, and still give good results. The drawback is that really going to failure is something that the body tries to avoid, so some grit is needed, and it is painful and (temporarily) weakens your body. This seems to be required to really signal to the body that more muscles are needed, and should be built.
I added this to my schedule (in which I do try to be generally active, for example biking to and from work), and so far I see good effects, mainly in my strength, I increased the load quite a bit from the beginning, we will see for the other effects…