SHOULD YOU TRAIN TO FAILURE?
Training to failure is pushing a muscle to its limit. This type of training is probably the most hardcore type of training that you can do in weightlifting. Is it beneficial? How can you do it? What’s the point of it? Should you train to failure, and if so, how often should you do it? If you have these questions then keep reading.
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What’s the Point of Training to Failure? Is it Beneficial?
The theory of training a muscle to failure is that you are guaranteeing that you are stimulating the muscle to adapt and grow. We stimulate a muscle to grow by pushing it outside of its comfort zone. Building muscle is your body’s ability to adapt to a “stressor” by increasing muscle size, endurance, and/or strength. In a simple explanation, you lift a weight and the muscle goes, “whoa bro that’s heavy” and then it builds more muscle so that it is more prepared to lift it next time. You can stimulate muscle to grow without reaching failure, but training a muscle to failure is a way to guarantee that you’re pushing the muscle's comfort zone to create that adaptation process and stimulate growth.
Is Training to Muscle Failure Dangerous?
It can be. I don’t recommend training dangerous movements to failure without a good spotter that you trust. However, intelligently training to failure with proper form is not that much more risky than normal weight training. The other thing that can be dangerous is consistently training to failure with poor nutrition and poor sleep/rest habits. If you push the body that hard then you need to feed it properly and get plenty of rest to allow for recovery. If you train to failure frequently, you don’t feed it properly, and you don’t give it adequate rest, then your chances of injury will certainly increase.
How Can You Properly Train to Failure?
The easiest way is to have one “top set” per exercise. This is usually the last set of the exercise and it’s usually the heaviest set as well. The sets that come before it are simply warm up sets. You start light with the first set and slowly increase weight from each set until you reach your heaviest set…aka “top set”. You can train that top set to failure meaning that you will pick a weight and lift it as many times as you can before the muscle physically cannot move the weight anymore.
There are advanced ways to train to failure and beyond. Forced reps are a great tool that you can do with a spotter. This is where you will train to failure and then get a few more reps with a spotter’s assistance. Forced reps are great, but the Rest-Pause technique is my favorite technique for failure training. This is taking a top set to failure, resting for 15 breaths, and taking the same weight to failure again. It’s like one top set to failure with a very short break in between that will allow you to squeeze out a few more reps. Better yet, you can log your top sets and push yourself to beat reps or weight each time you perform an exercise. This requires you keeping a logbook and fighting to beat that logbook to ensure progression.
The most important thing to understand here is that you should not be taking every single set of your workout to failure. Pick one set per exercise and that’s enough to stimulate growth.
You’ll likely also need periods of training when you aren’t taking any sets to failure. You’d do this when your body’s check engine light comes on and tells you that you need some rest. It’s good to occasionally take 3-4 weeks off from failure training, lower the weight, and just chase the pump in the gym. You can follow this up with 8-10 weeks of incorporating failure training. The best use of failure training comes with a logbook. This will show you where you are progressing and where you’re stalling so that you can make some adjustments to your training program and get past those barriers. Nobody can continue to make progress in a logbook forever, so if you find yourself stalled on all of your movements in the logbook then that would also be a good indication to take a step back and let your body rest before attempting to tackle failure training again. Sometimes, the body doesn’t need more and actually needs the opposite. Unfortunately, this is something you’ll learn with time in the gym and it isn’t something I can easily convey in an article…but if you’re here for it I’ll keep dropping this information and you’ll be able to learn it!
So, to answer the question of this article, yes you should incorporate training to failure…but it has to be done correctly or it will do more harm than good.
