Making sure that all muscle fibers have been exhasuted during a given exercise is one of the difficulties that bodybuilder face. Only by pushing your muscles past their limit will you get the biggest gains.
But here is a good path to follow to try and get the most out of your muscles:
1. Increase resistance – increasing the weight lifted in meaningful increments ensures the muscle is pushed beyond its previous point of failure thus maintaining the muscle building process. Aim to increase the weight when you reach six to eight reps and failure does not occur.
2. Vary exercises – change up the exercises you do so that you aren’t always using the exact some muscles. Varying the angle of the exercise like incline press helps as well.
3. Take shorter rests – taking shorter rests between exercises makes your muscles work much more intensely as it has had less time to recover.
4. Pre exhaustion – The weakest muscle in an exercise involving two or more muscles will always fail first. This means it will fail before you have the chance to exercise the main muscle to exchaustion. To overcome this, focus on tiring out the main muscle before doing the exercise with both muscles working together.
5. Do supersets – supersets are done by doing two exercises without any rest in between them that focus on the same muscle groups but are different types of exercise. This will fully utilize all the muscle fibers in that muscle group.
6. Do partial repititions – You will not be able to complete the full range of movement for any given exercise once you reach the point of failure. Using only a segment of the lift by doing a partial rep will work your muscles beyond the point of failure. It allows you to increase intensity without adding extra routines that could cause overtraining.
7. Try using isometric contractions – Holding the weight still at the point of failure to stimulate a static contraction in the muscle.
8. Do one more rep than possible – Going past the point of failure by doing one more rep will need the help of a friend. Once you have reached the point of failure, your assistant can help you go just past the point of failure to complete one more rep.
