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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Number you won’t forget

• Weekly wisdom

• Do grill marks increase your risk of cancer?

Fitness 
Number You Won’t Forget: 2-3 Reps

Most people log dozens or hundreds of workouts and never even notice a common error that's robbing them of results. 

If you just count reps without ever noting how many are difficult, you might be missing out on the reps that signal your body to transform.

Our understanding of muscle growth has grown extensively over the last decade. Things that we used to assume as fact — such as growth being determined by microtears in the muscle that recover and grow bigger — have been disproven and replaced with a much clearer and more direct understanding of how you need to train. 

Scientific reviews have eliminated other competing explanations, too — the pump, metabolite accumulation, the burn — suggesting they don't drive muscle growth. Tension is the key.

Mechanical tension (the force placed on your muscle fibers) is the primary driver of hypertrophy. And the muscular force doesn’t count all reps equally. 

As your muscles fatigue, your nervous system recruits more motor units to keep the work going, and that recruitment peaks in the final reps before failure. That's when individual fibers experience the tension that actually signals growth. 

The big lesson and breakthrough that will change your training: Research suggests that the final 2 to 3 reps before muscular failure are where the growth signal peaks. 

That means if the last 2-3 reps when you finish a set are not extremely challenging to the point where rep speed is unintentionally slowing down, then you’re likely not yet creating enough tension and not doing the reps that trigger growth. (Pump Club app members know this as “first set mindset.”)

If you're using an appropriate weight, the earlier reps in a set are building toward that threshold. The last few reps are where you cross it to maximize tension. 

When the final 2 to 3 reps in a set don't feel like a genuine struggle, the load is too light, or you stopped too early.

But that does not mean every set (or any set) needs to be taken to failure. Or that every set needs to be heavy. You can do this with lighter weights, as long as you take it near failure.

Scientists found that stopping 1 to 3 reps short of failure produces the same muscle growth as pushing to the limit, while allowing faster recovery and more productive sessions each week.

After every set, ask yourself one question: how many more reps could I have done? If the answer is more than three or four reps than what you completed, then you know you need to bring more intensity to the next set. 

If you need help with your training, accountability and support, diet, and habit coaching, that’s what we offer in The Pump Club app. 

Right now, to celebrate Arnold’s birthday, you can earn the app for free. 

Sign up for the app, and you’ll instantly get $50 off and receive a 7-day free trial. After your trial ends and once you complete your first program, we’ll give you another $50 back. And then, after you complete four programs, you get $50 more. That’s a total of $150 in savings, which means you got the app for free. 

The offer is only good for a week. 

Join us. Show up, earn it back, and get in the best shape of your life for free.

Mindset 
Weekly Wisdom

Replaying a bad day feels like accountability. Responsible people look hard at their mistakes, so you go back and look at yours. This is not the problem. It’s what happens next. 

You go through it once. But then again, and again. You overanalyze everything, trying to prevent the outcome you want to avoid.

Eventually, you stop searching with the goal of moving forward and just dwell. Ten passes later, it feels like proof of something about who you are.

All along, you consider this a form of self-awareness or processing. It sounds good and feels right, so you believe it helps. 

But at some point, all it does is rehearse the mistake.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent most of her career on this exact loop. In one experiment, she put people in a low mood, then had one group sit and analyze their feelings while another group turned their attention to something ordinary. 

The analyzers stayed low longer. Their thinking also narrowed and darkened, which left them worse at solving the problem they’d been thinking about. 

Decades of follow-up found that this is a typical pattern. Going over a bad moment on repeat keeps the mood running and strips you of the clear head you'd need to fix anything.

Arnold comes back to a version of this: You can't get where you're going if your eyes stay glued to the rearview mirror. A glance back tells you where you've been. Spend the whole drive looking there, and you'll drift out of your lane long before the past does you any good.

Emerson wrote his line to his daughter in 1854, while she was away at school. "You have done what you could" takes the day at face value, absurdities included, and calls it closed. The mistakes stay in the day they happened.

Turn Wisdom Into Action

Give the tough days an ending. Write down the one moment you keep going back to. But be brief. Maybe 1-2 sentences. It’s about the lesson. Then, give yourself closure. It could just be writing: I did what I could, I learned the lesson, it’s done.

It might sound silly, but there’s something to capturing what you were looking for and then closing the book on it. 

That doesn’t guarantee your mind won’t go back. But when it does, you already have spelled out the answer: you’re done with it. 

Reader Question
Are Grill Marks Increasing Your Risk Of Cancer?

Reader Question: "I've heard that using the grill will give me cancer. Is there any truth to it?"

This one hits home. Because far too many times we’ve been at a BBQ, the steaks barely hit the grill, and then someone announces that char causes cancer. Next thing you know, everyone's looking at their plate with a little more guilt and fear.

To be fair, some of the chemistry is accurate. But the concern is overstated.

You don't have to give up grilling. But you might want to be mindful of how much black crust from the grill you consume. It’s a mix of science and cooking style. 

If you cook meat hot enough, the amino acids and other nutrients inside turn into compounds called HCAs. At the same time, fat dripping onto the flames throws up smoke, and that smoke carries PAHs that settle back down onto the surface of your food.

Both are compounds that can damage DNA in the lab, and DNA damage is one of the ways cancer can start. 

But please don’t confuse grill lines or a brown crust with char. The potential for these chemical changes comes from the black, brittle, burnt spots, especially the crust that forms when flames flare up directly on the meat. 

The simplest rule there is: brown is fine, black is the part to trim.

What nobody can tell you is how much you can consume before it’s an issue. You can't run a twenty-year trial that assigns people to eat charred steak and waits to see who gets sick, so all we have is observational research, and those studies don't agree.

A 2017 review of 39 studies suggests a link to colorectal cancer, but it wasn’t dramatic. One of the compounds increased while the other didn’t. So this becomes as much about risk tolerance as it does cause-and-effect threat. 

If you love using the grill, there's an easy three-step process that can reduce compounds and ease your mind: pay closer attention, cook at lower heat, and marinate.

Scientists found that marinating chicken before grilling knocked PhIP, the most common of these compounds, down by 92 to 99 percent. 

Just make sure your marinade isn’t loaded with sugar (think more than 10 grams per serving). If your marinade is sugary and you leave the meat on the grill a long time — around 30 to 40 minutes — the sugar backfires. A different compound increases more than ten times higher. 

And no, there's no magic temperature to stay under. Any grill hot enough to cook is hot enough to make these compounds. The easiest approach is to flip it often so no one spot burns.

And that’s it for this week. Thanks for being a part of the positive corner of the internet. And remember: don’t wait to make a change. Take action on any goal, don’t quit in the hard moments, and the results will come. Have a fantastic weekend!
-Arnold, Adam, and Daniel

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

2. Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.

3. Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted by “Together With”). Why? Because it allows us to keep the APC emails free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell