Love this graphic explaining one of the most misunderstood components of training: fatigue. —— Great work by @bayesianbodybuilding ・・・ So you decided to perform five 20-rep deadlift sets to failure. Today your deadlifting sucks ass. Is your CNS burnt out? __ 🏵Your central nervous system (CNS) ‘decides’ that a muscle should contract. Peripheral nerves then forward this message to the muscle. Between these nerves and the muscle there’s a so-called “neuromuscular junction”. There, the nerve message gets converted into an actual muscle contraction. __ 🚗To use a car analogy: The driver is your CNS, the pedal foot is the neuromuscular junction, and the engine is the muscle itself. __ ⛽Training balls to the wall (like failure training in a big exercise) greatly increases the time to recover to old strength levels [Morán-Navarro 2017]. __ 🏋However, it’s probably not CNS fatigue that causes this. Multiple studies show CNS fatigue simply doesn’t occur [Latella 2017, Marshall 2015, Howatson 2016]. __ 🔬Behrens et al. 2012 offer a better explanation. They needed a 40% bigger electric stimulus to get the same muscle contraction strength after a hard workout. __ ⛔They think stressful exercise impairs the functioning of the neuromuscular junction. Additionally, the muscle damage decreases overall strength of the muscle fibers. __ 😴So while the driver (CNS) stays rather unaffected, a gruesome workout tires out the pedal foot (neuromuscular junction) and damages the engine (muscle), which reduces muscle strength. __ 🕞So just realize that your puke-inducing session of deadlifts probably won’t affect your bench press strength the day after. The fatigue is not in your CNS, but mostly local, meaning close to or in the deadlifting muscles themselves. __ - Stijn (@stijnvanwilligen) __ Peaked your interest? Read our article on 3 CNS fatigue myths : https://bayesianbodybuilding.com/cns-fatigue/ __ Shortlink to study: http://bit.ly/2nO8UmY __ #bayesianbb #sportscience #deadlift #bayesianbodybuilding #musclescience #cardio #shredded #squatlife #squatday #liftweights #lift #strengthtraining #iifym #fatlossdiet #squat #benchpress #bodybuilderworkout #fatlossworkout #buildmuscle (at Luquillo)