LACTID ACID FOR GROWTH?

We’ve all come to know that excruciatingly painful few seconds at the end of a set that relentlessly burns until you’re forced to drop the weight. As painful as those seconds are, you’ve got to live through it if you want to pack on monster-like muscle. An increasing amount of evidence supports the theory that lactic acid production triggers the release of powerful anabolic hormones such as testosterone and growth hormone.

The presence of lactic acid in the blood after a gut-wrenching set may signal your body to crank-up production of these crucial musclebuilding hormones. The best way to maximize your body’s production of lactic acid is to keep your sets in the 30-90 second range. This will tap into the glycolytic energy system, which produces lactic acid as a metabolic by-product during a set. If the average bodybuilder takes about two seconds to complete the concentric and two seconds to complete the eccentric phase of the rep, a twelve rep set would take about 50 seconds to complete – an ideal time period for lactic acid production! If you can live through the agonizing pain of high-rep training, you’ll have all the lactic acid you need send your body into anabolic overdrive.