Is Training to Failure Better for Muscle Growth?
It’d be a gross understatement to say that lifting weights attracts the type of crowd that is prone to pushing things to the limit and being overly aggressive.
As such, training to failure is something that most people assume you should be doing right off the bat. The logic is that if you don’t train to failure, then, my child, you are a failure.
GO HARD OR GO HOME.
Ah. Impressive. Inspiring, even.
Sure, that gets you fired up while battalions of heavy metal blast through the airwaves and Chuck Norris backflips off a dragon through a flaming hoop while a majestic bald eagle lands smoothly on his shoulder…
…but is training to failure really all that it’s cracked up to be?
…or is it just another stubborn myth of muscle-building that needs to be exterminated?
In this article, we’ll be looking at training to failure for muscle growth to get an aesthetic physique and addressing the following:.
Should you really be doing it..?
And if so…how would you about carrying that out..?
Defining Training to Failure
First things first. Let’s define what training to failure even is.
There are several ways that you can go about defining failure, but here’s the definition that I use in practice that will anchor our discussion moving forward:
Failure is the inability to complete another full rep in clean form.
This is the definition I roll with because it wraps everything up nicely with regards to concentric failure & prevents the lawyers in the crowd from contorting their bodies to push past their limits to grind out another rep.
Now that we’ve that settled, let’s talk about the pros & cons of taking sets to failure.
Pros of Training to Failure
Fully Train the Muscle
By training to failure, you can be sure that you’re fully training the muscle by recruiting all the fibers you’ve got til they’re spent.
With heavy loads (~80-85% 1RM – or ~5-8 reps), you pretty much get full muscle fiber recruitment right away. But for lighter loads, you don’t get full muscle fiber recruitment until the set goes on and the fibers can no longer produce enough force to move the load. More fibers must be recruited to keep lifting the weight (this is the Henneman size principle). This is the proposed reason why light loads are still just as effective at generating muscle growth as heavy loads.
By going to failure, you can be sure you’re giving everything you’ve got, which ties us into the next point…
You Know Your Effort Level
Training to failure makes training “fool-proof” and takes the guess work out of knowing whether or not you’re busting your ass hard enough in the gym.
People are generally averse to the burning discomfort that pushing a set hard brings on and are not so good at gauging how far away from true failure they really are. Training to failure solves that and makes damn sure you gave it your best.
…but this doesn’t have to be every time, all the time to know how far from failure you are does it? No – as you’ll see later.
Sets the Standard
Training to failure will also let you know exactly how strong you are at a given point in time because – by definition – you couldn’t get another rep.
After all, everyone is always itching to know…
“How do I know if I’m progressing?!”
Going to failure takes the guess work out (see above) and serves as a test of how you’re coming along, which can be very motivational. If you went all out and got more reps or more weight for the same reps, you had to have had made progress, right?
…but that doesn’t mean you have to do it every set, every workout – for reasons that you’ll find out about in the next section.
I have likened this to opening the fridge door every 5 seconds to see if the food is getting cold. Yeah, you can check – but you’re counterproductively letting all the cold air out.
Cons of Training to Failure
Now what about the cons of training to failure?
There are plenty.
Vanishing Volume
Refer back to the trinity of gains:
Training to failure fits snugly within what I have defined as “Intensity” – a catch-all term that focuses primarily on the % of 1RM (how heavy and for how many reps) that you are lifting with but also encompasses elements such as training to failure (also known as intensity of effort— how far you are from failure) for reasons that should be readily obvious to you.
When intensity goes up, something else must go down to compensate.
What goes down?
By hitting muscular failure, you will be limiting the total amount of volume that you can perform.
Volume = Weight x Reps x Sets
You likely know this from experience. When you go all out on your first set, you simply can’t crank out the same number of reps with that weight. You’ll either have to drop the weight or settle for less reps – both of which cripple volume.
And if you keep taking those subsequent sets to failure, you’ll see a major drop in performance that’ll severely limit the volume you can do in terms of weight, reps, and sets.
Given that productive volume is the #1 determinant of muscle growth there is, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you get greedy and go too high on intensity by training to failure.
Recovery Risks
Training to failure can also slow down recovery.
As you can see in the Trinity of Gains, frequency is also an important aspect of creating training programs for muscle growth. As a whole, the scientific literature shows that 2-3x/week per muscle group (factor in total volume) is the sweet spot for muscle growth.
The body doesn’t work based on the Gregorian calendar (see Law III of the Architect of Aesthetics here : The Body Acts in Phases), so 1 time per week is in all likelihood not the best path to optimal growth.
If you’re training at higher frequencies – especially advanced lifters who practically have to train at high frequencies just to split their volume requirements up effectively – then training to failure can get you into some trouble.
Injury Risk
While I made it an explicit point in my definition of training to failure as not being able to complete another rep IN GOOD FORM, the reality is that people are not going to end their set once the form gets fuzzy.
By training to failure, people without strict form and supervision may get a little greedy and open themselves up to allowing a compromise in technique under load that can lead to acute or chronic, nagging injuries just to push things to the point of failure.
This is also an important consideration for whether you have spotters helping you out in case you try to hit failure but can’t complete the rep on your own.
Sucks more
Finally, the obvious:
Training to failure is an overall sucky experience.
Taking your muscles to the point where they can no longer move the given load is not a pleasurable feeling to your body that is a survival machine bent on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. It burns, it’s tough, and you find yourself gassed – some exercises more than others. Deep squats to failure, anyone?
Now, the bros might say to suck it up and be a man. Even Arnold himself said that those last few reps are what separate the losers from the Champions.
But why push there unnecessarily when there is no clear-cut benefit?
As I discussed in F.A.T.E, work smarter, not harder. Maximize the experience of the journey. There is no extra muscle protein synthesis awarded for masochism: only the unbiased scientific principles behind the triggers for maximal muscle hypertrophy.
By ending your sets with reps to spare, you can set yourself up for more long term success with adherence and enjoyment than grinding yourself through every session that makes the gym feel torturous. I discussed the importance of Psychology and the other 2 Ps here: The 3P Fitness Program Approach.
The Verdict on Training to Failure?
All in all, training to failure is unnecessary to make great gains and is simply another tool in your utility belt of muscle hypertrophy.
You will make great gains leaving a rep or few in the tank, and this will have the added benefit of allowing you to perform more volume both within the workout and across your mesocycle.
This idea is the basis of the RPE scale and repetitions in reserve (RIR) which I tend to simply call RITTs in practice (reps in the tank) because RIRs sounds like you’re growling, repeitions in reserve is a tongue twister, and the RPE scale requires the extra step of subtracting from 10 to get a gauge on how many reps you’ve got in the tank.
This could easily be another article in itself, but we’ll keep it brief for now.
How to Train to Failure Without Hurting Your Muscle Growth Potential
Given that going to failure is nothing more than a tool at your disposal, let’s look at how & where you can implement it in your workouts.
- For small muscle groups
- At the end of work sets
- At the end of a mesocycle
- As a gauge of progress and/or effort
By working failure into your training in such a way, you will be able to reap the benefits without getting burned by the negatives.
For small muscle groups/movements
What’s going to smack you harder physically and psychologically- a set to failure of lateral raises or back squats?
You can likely get away with going to failure on the smaller muscles and your accessory movements after your main lifts with little to no detriment to your overall progress.
At the end of work sets
As we went over, training to failure can hurt muscle growth by limiting the total volume you can perform in subsequent sets.
But what about on your last set? Here you can go closer to or hit failure and not have that drop off that’ll be detrimental.
At the end of a mesocycle
In line with this idea, you can also hit failure on the final week of your mesocycle right before you deload.
As a gauge of progress and/or effort
Finally, you can perform sets to failure as a gauge of your progress and your intensity of effort.
If 3 months ago you did an all out set of 225lbs on the squat for 8 reps and today you just did 225 for 12, it’s safe to say you’ve made some gains. This is what’s known as an AMRAP set (as many reps as possible) and is more useful for testing for those with the goal of aesthetics than going for a 1 rep max (which is stupid – see here)
This can also be helpful for setting your weights and reps. Since you know you can do 225 for 12 all out, if you want to stay away from failure and increase your volume, you know you’ll be looking at sets of 225 for 8 or 9.
Similarly, you’ll see how your intensity of effort is. If you’ve been lifting that same 225 in your workouts for sets of 6, you know you haven’t really been working hard enough and can actually do sets of 8 or 9 since your max is 12 reps.
Fin.
For more on training and much more, check out my full-length book: Architect of Aesthetics, the ultimate guide to building the ideal aesthetic physique.
Comment your thoughts and experiences on training to failure for muscle growth.
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