Male, 40, 250 pounds (120kg) lifting seriously for 10 months. 💪

According to Jeff Nippard, 10 or more sets per week per muscle group is optimal for hypertrophy. Problem is, however, fatigue is multidimensional—local/peripheral (muscle metabolites, calcium handling, connective tissue), central/systemic (CNS, immune, endocrine), axial (spine/hips), and psychological. To add insult to injury, a certain type of prescription medication I take masks fatigue and boosts mesolimbic neurotransmitters (dopamine, norepinephrine) further exacerbating the problem.

As a result, I struggle to do more than 10 working sets per day, even when I split my daily volume into a morning session and afternoon session with 3-5 minute rests between sets. If I do more than this, I begin to fall behind in my personal life. (apparently "executive function" is one of the first victims of collateral damage for training too hard)

I take ice baths regularly in 6C water. I pride myself on mental toughness so it's not simply a matter of being lazy or cowardice. I'm also totally fine with doing 10 working sets per day because I've made more progress than I ever thought possible and if 10 working sets per day is my limit, I'm fine with that. I'm not complaining, just asking out of curiosity in case others here have gone through this and figured out a solution to this mildly annoying problem.

TL;DR: Is "lowering the systemic cost per set" the only viable solution for a lackluster systemic fatigue ceiling? (i.e. incorporating more "greasing the groove" style training that utilizes a high percentage of 1RM coupled with low RPE and high RIR)

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[–] [S] -1 points 14 hours ago* (1 child)

Lets assume that your activities represent mental toughness. Does that translate to knowing how hard you can push yourself during a set? Why would it?

I plan to answer this final part of your question as a standalone post that I will share here next week (and reply again to this comment and link you to my OP).

The "short answer" is probably yes because it allows you to go beyond muscular failure from the perspective of someone with normal intent and normal pacing issues that we all face at the gym. As a 15 second thought experiment, if you have a grueling 15-working-set gym workout and you "go to actual failure" on your first set, how do you know that your brain is not secretly limiting your intent based on the fact you still have 95% of your workout remaining?

In summary, intent & pacing are 2 things I have spent dozens of hours thinking about this year because it seems that most pop-sci influencers (such as Jeff Nippard) seem to treat the concept of pacing/intent as less interesting and less important than the main hypertrophy concepts (which is true, admittedly) but pacing/intent are the 2 topics to fitness which I find the most interesting. I love asking myself "why did I reach muscular failure"? Could I have tricked my brain into forcing 1 more rep by manipulating my life story temporarily so that my brain believes that my entire life has been leading up to this 1 singular moment?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    Your personal narrative/will power/mental toughness will not allow you to exceed muscular failure by definition. You do you man but I stand by my comment that you're way over thinking this.

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