If you are training to failure, are you making a huge mistake? In this video, I am going to explain the importance of knowing what failure is and how to apply it to your training when it comes to building muscle. This might be one of the most important videos I have ever made and I want to make sure that you understand how critical this concept is if you want to build more muscle.
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It starts with knowing what you are training for: strength versus hypertrophy to be specific. When you are training for strength applications, whether that is through percentage based training or the use of RPE, you aren’t aiming for failure. As a matter of fact, this is a situation where you need to be training short of failure.
The irony of this situation, however, is that you need to know what your failure point is in order to gauge your percentage or RPE number. Just remember, though; your maximum effort is your last rep - knowing that you cannot complete another rep at all.
When it comes to muscle growth, your knowledge of failure becomes that much more important. This starts with defining what failure is. We know that there are a myriad of forms of failure; there is form failure (not being able to complete another rep in good form), mechanical failure (not being to move the weight at all), or even eccentric failure (not being able to control the weight through the eccentric portion of the lift even after using a little cheat or momentum to get the weight moving through the concentric).
There is also a nuance in the type of lift you are performing. Reaching failure on a pulling exercise is going to look much different than on a pushing exercise. Take the lat pulldown versus the bench press for example; with the lat pulldown, you are able to cheat your way through a few extra reps by using a little extra momentum on the concentric. On the other hand, the bench press does not allow for any cheating through the use of momentum.
Leg training is more like the pushing exercises as well, there is a lack of momentum that can be used on most exercises.
Now, another factor of training to failure that has to be taken into account is what rep range you are training in. When lifting in a lower rep range, such as 4-6 reps, you will notice that fatigue comes very quickly and failure is reached within a rep of that fatigue. In moderate rep ranges, such as 8-12 reps, failure starts to approach later, but you are able to squeak out at least another rep or two. In higher rep ranges, your ability to grind through reps where you are fatigued becomes greater.
Some might think that those repetitions where you have to grind them out, when reaching failure, is considered form breakdown. If you take the examples that I am showing you in this video, you can see that the reps are still attempted and completed in good form. They reps still look like the exercise that is being performed. In this case of pulling exercises, this is where you allow for a little cheat / momentum. On the pushing exercises, you won’t be able to cheat them, but as long as the repetitions look like they are supposed to (in terms of form) then you need not worry.
The problem with all of this, however, is the lack of knowledge of failure is and when it occurs. Why? If you don’t know what failure is when training to build muscle, especially when you are prescribed to stop short of failure, then you are leaving gains on the table. You might be quitting the set when you have more reps in the tank. RPE and reps in reserve are hard to gauge without knowing what failure looks and feels like. The problem here is you might be gauging your reps too short of failure - you might be basing this off of initial fatigue, not true failure. So when you are told to train with reps in reserve or RPE, instead of stopping short of 12 reps, you might be stopping short of 8 reps when you could have pulled out a few more that would have been your ultimate failing point.
The fact of the matter is that you need to have knowledge of what failure is, what it looks like, and most importantly, what it feels like if you want to build more muscle.
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