Starskeptic, I’m not feeding you dogma. And you are not talking to a creationist. Seriously . Look at your comments. Vague, off the cuff, dismissive, unsubstantiated, misleading. And mostly wrong, though I think you are trying to make a point that may be valid. Well, you were trying to make a point but you seem to have shifted to trying to defend your vagueness in your first point. I’m not writing about impressions of things I’ve heard. Nor is this an academic treatment. My training and reading as a bioanthropologist in human physiology has helped in my reading of the exercise physiology literature, and it has helped me sort through the popular literature which is presented with a wide range of validity.

If you want to make an off the cuff statement invalidating everything I said in a blog post, expect my unending gratitude if you happen to be right. If you happen to be wrong expect me asking for you to explain what you are talking about, or even, just disagreeing with you.

Here, by the way, are the words you seem to have not noticed putting in my mouth:

“if you think you need to detect significant amounts of myoglobin in your urine before any appreciable work has been done”

I’ve appreciated the contributions you’ve generally made to this blog but I’m afraid this isnt one of them.

If you’re continually progressing and challenging yourself with greater loads – you can achieve even hypertrophy goals without going to failure.

“There is essentially no â??riskâ? of damage in working out the way that Greg is suggesting.” – this is incorrect, or did I miss-read the ‘vomiting’ part?

And Greg, putting words in your mouth? Sir, I’ve done no such thing – and at the same time you’re doing it to me…enough!

I don’t see the point of adding more detail when I’m keep bumping up against dogma – it’s way too much like trying to talk to a creationist.

I guess we’ll just have to go with “impression(s) of things you’ve heard”

I’m done – thnx

When Greg is using the term â??failureâ?, what he means is that the muscle is voluntarily worked, within its force-producing range, until it can’t maintain the force that he is voluntarily directing it to exert.

He does not mean that there is muscle damage, muscle necrosis, muscle tearing, or any of the physical failure modes that muscle can exhibit. He means the â??failureâ? of the muscle not being able to exert force because it has exhausted its stores of ATP. This exhaustion of ATP through voluntary exertion then activates compensatory pathways within each muscle cell and with in the larger organism to change the threshold at which such exhaustion occurs in the future. This â??tuningâ? of physiology to match ongoing needs is the mechanism by which exercise causes increases in strength and endurance. Many of the changes are not within the muscle. The vasculature needs to remodel, the nervous system needs to remodel, the liver needs to remodel. For these non-muscle tissue compartments to remodel, they need the appropriate signaling.

The reason this is necessary to achieve maximal performance is because the physiological state of each muscle cell is regulated locally and internally to that cell. Muscles are not completely uniform. Some muscle cells take more of the load than other cells do. One reason for this is so that the muscle has a broader injury profile, that there is warning before the muscle fails catastrophically through injury, as for example by snapping a tendon. If you want the muscle cells to all work together uniformly, you have to tune them to do so.

There is essentially no â??riskâ? of damage in working out the way that Greg is suggesting. However, a muscle that is trained this way has a sharper force-damage curve. That is the differential force needed to go from an undamaged muscle to a damaged muscle is less. The force at which that happens is higher than in the muscle that is not so trained. In the limit, such a muscle can be worked and then fail catastrophically where a muscle not so worked would fail non-catastrophically but at a lower force. This won’t happen during the workout, but might happen elsewhere, but probably not under voluntary direction. I wonder if the destruction of Greg’s knee occurred in part because the tendon was struck very hard by the fall, and then the spinal reflexes activated the muscle strongly enough to snap the various connections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lalane

You have to remember, that pain is a signal, and at some point you may be doing actual damage. Damage that reduces long term function. You should stop before that happens.

Pain killers for range of motion, maybe. Pain killers for ischemic pain, or tendon pain, no.