The margin of time that determines muscle building success or failure in the gym is a heck of a lot shorter than you might think. Just as fraction-of-a-second moments during a 100 metre dash will make or break a sprinter's race, fraction-of-a-second moments will also make or break your body's muscle growth response in the gym.

There's more...although each entire workout will last for about an hour, only about 60 seconds will determine what kind of gains you achieve. That's right, how you choose to handle that 60 second time period could means great, mediocre or poor muscle building effects.

How does it works? Well, the first reps in your set means just a little bit than nothing in terms of muscular growth. However, they play an important role.

Reps 1-4 are only performed in order to get to reps 5 and 6. But there's more than meets the eye in that. The last reps you perform in a set actually are the ones that will determine if the results of your workout are or not the results you desire.

What's important then, is to overload the muscles on reps 5 and 6. And the most important thing to achieve better results is try to keep that stress level as long as you can at the end of each set.

There is simply no better way to trigger your body's adaptive responses than to train until your muscles cannot move the weight another inch.

So, if you perform 10 sets per workout, and the last six seconds are the ones that mean success or failure, there you have that 60 seconds i've been talking about. That crucial 60 second will give you, or not, the muscular growth youre looking for.

So, your success will be measured by this really short period of time, and the amount of effort you are willing to exert during this time.

The closer and closer that you can come to muscular failure, the more dramatically your body will respond. Two seconds, five seconds, maybe another one rep, or two, would actually mean a great difference.

You have to train really hard and with full effort every single day. When your muscles aches and you can feel they're burning, if you feel the weight really heavy, that's the right moment to give your maximun effort until true muscular failure is reached.

If you can't move the weight another inch, if your muscles ache and you feel them burning, you are going in the right direction to true muscular failure.

Every time you give up and take a rest, even if it's just for a couple of seconds, you compromise your gains. Keeping this in mind at all times in the gym and will give you the better results than ever before.