Burnout Reps

Luke Bonner

Should I do a couple of sets of burn out reps after a full weight solutions session. For example, push ups to exhaustion, biceps burn out with bands, etc.

Sawyer Paull-Baird

Hey Luke-
Good question.. I suppose this depends a little bit on your goals.  Assuming your intent is to build muscle mass, it wouldn't hurt, but it also may not be necessary, and you do want to be sensitive to your overall volume/degree of stress on a given joint, depending on your injury background.

In regards to muscle growth, in the simplest sense so long as you are hitting the two below criteria within your workout (not going into nutrition), you should be meeting the conditions for gaining muscle;
1) You are going to failure some, but not all of the time. We generally suggest going to failure on the last set of each exercise.
2) You are progressively overloading your muscles by doing a little but "more" over time.  This could mean slightly more weight, slightly more sets, more exercises etc. over the course of weeks, months, and years.  Without progressive overload, muscle growth generally wont occur.

So, in regards to the burnout sets, you could use these as a method of progressive overload.  Say you are unable to do more weight or more reps, you could add some push-ups at the end of your chest exercises to add "volume" to that muscle group and achieve overload.  Does that make sense?

That said, there are so many ways to achieve overload, these "burnout" sets are just one way.
Does that answer your question?
Sawyer

Mike Stack

Great answer @Sawyer Paull-Baird! I'll also add that "burn out" set is simply a form a metabolic stress for the muscle (it builds up a bunch of lactate acid). This is mechanism for growth of muscle for sure, but it's probably one of the less significant mechanisms. I do think it can be used intermittently to change things up, but I probably wouldn't rely on it as a big factor in increasing muscle size. With that said, be cautious with doing too many burn out sets as I think your time can likely be better spent doing sets with heavier weight and lower reps (say 6-12 reps and the correspondingly appropriate weight), that will stimulate more growth than burn out sets.

I think the last factor to consider on burn out sets (in light of the fact they're a more minor contributor to muscle growth) is to watch the orthopedic stress that can result from doing a lot of these. When you're fatigued form and technique suffer, and even though the weight will be lighter for these sets, you can still can increase the risk of injury because of it.

Luke Bonner

Great feedback!