Failure Fixation
By
Frank Francisco
Did Arthur Jones have it right when he essentially devoted his life to
convincing people they needed to train to failure? Or was the Nautilus inventor
and High Intensity Training (HIT) pioneer just an angry, dissenting crank whose
primary goal in life was to upset the order and sell more products? Time will
tell, and maybe it already has. Either way, there are myriad considerations to
take into account when examining the practice of training to failure – points
that, once you’ve given them some thought, might just make you reconsider your
position and change the way you train.
“When everything else is managed properly with your training volume,
nutrition and rest,” says nutritionist Shelby Starnes, the overall champion at
the 2009 NPC Central States, “training to failure is the best way to elicit
growth. I always aim to beat my last workout with progressive resistance, and
training to failure is an easy way to track that. If you’re getting stronger,
and you’re supporting your training outside the gym, your muscles will have no
choice but to grow.”
When undertaking an analysis of the pros and cons of training to failure,
it’s readily apparent that there are some massive gaps in our collective
training knowledge. Most people have no idea what “training to failure” means in
the first place, and it’s a concept for which we need to find an accurate
definition before we go any further.
To gain a better perspective on what training to failure really is, envision
performing a simple bicep curl. Most people – even serious bodybuilders – aren’t
training to failure even when they think they are. They’ll pick up a barbell and
perform five clean reps with perfect form, and then things begin to break down.
The next few reps will be done “cheat” style, and the last few after that will
be nearly impossible to differentiate from a hang clean.
Given this scenario, at what point did you truly fail? Was it when you
stopped isolating the movement’s prime movers – your biceps? Or when the rest of
your body fatigued and you could no longer raise the barbell at all?
“One thing you need to consider,” says renowned strength coach Jim Wendler,
who consults for numerous college and professional strength and conditioning
programs, “is whether you have a goal in mind before you start a set. Are you
really training to failure? Or are you just reaching a predetermined number of
reps, then just giving up?”
In order to understand when failure really occurs, we need to know what stage
of development we’re in as lifters. For beginners, true “failure” is considered
to happen once technique breaks down. After that fifth rep, when you start to
cheat, you’ve not only reached failure, but passed it. This is
going to affect the way you recover and regenerate tissue, which is something
we’ll address later. For now, simply understand that failure occurs when your
exercise form has deteriorated to the point that what you’re doing is no longer
the exercise you started out intending to do.
“Beginners don’t necessarily need to train to failure,” says Wendler, “but
they do need to find out where it is. You may not want to step over the edge,
exactly, but if you’re going to avoid the edge, you’re going to have to know
where it is. You need to test it a little.”
For advanced lifters, things work somewhat differently. The experienced
bodybuilder has a solid understanding of proper form, and he’ll easily maintain
it through those first five reps. After that, he’ll loosen things up and cheat,
but he’ll know exactly how to do it in order to isolate his biceps and milk
every last bit of benefit out of a set. What you won’t see him do, however, are
those last two or three “hang clean” reps where he’s going so far past failure
that he’s negatively affecting his ability to properly recover from a workout in
time for his next session. “Older, experienced lifters need to be especially
careful with this,” says Starnes, “and it’s advisable for them to add this
training very selectively if they’re not recovering the way they could when they
were younger.”
“What you need to know,” says Elite Fitness Systems CEO Dave Tate, who
consults with numerous top-level bodybuilders, “is how far you’re taking things,
and to be able do this on demand during a set. You need to learn exactly how to
take a movement to, past and shy of failure. This is where most people go
wrong. It’s all undefined for them.”
According to Tate, most people do this on a completely random basis without
taking these three “positions” into consideration. “With pretty much everyone,”
he says, “training is done instinctively and recovery isn’t taken into
consideration. This can work very effectively for experienced lifters who know
their bodies, but your average beginner is going to overtrain if he doesn’t
understand these concepts with regard to failure.”
When training to failure, recovery is something to which you’ll have to pay
attention, because your need for recovery becomes crucial – you’re seriously
lengthening the time you’ll need – once you hit a point of true failure, as
defined above. Recovery time frames aren’t linear – they differ for everyone and
there are other “outside the gym” variables involved - but the effects of
training to failure can be described using something of an exponential scale.
When you train to a rep or two shy of failure, you’ll obviously need a period of
rest between workouts. Removing all other variables – we’ll get to this in a
moment – you can think of this in terms of a set period of rest for each rep you
perform until you’re just short of failure.
Once you reach failure, however, the reps you perform at the top end of a set
– the actual failure rep and the reps you squeeze or cheat out after
failure – hit your central nervous system (CNS) and your muscle fibers much
harder than the ones you do with perfect form at the bottom end, so the more you
train to and past failure, the more recovery time you’ll need.
“Beginners don’t manage this correctly,” says Tate, “because they don’t know
they need to. The best thing you can do for a beginner is to start him out with
the understanding that failure occurs when form and technique break down. The
other problem beginners have with recovery times is that they’re simply not in
good enough shape to be training to failure.”
Your ability to recover from workouts where you train to failure is dependent
upon a number of factors, but it’s primarily a function of your general physical
preparedness (GPP) or work capacity. The better shape you’re in, the harder you
can work without needed extended recovery periods to repair what failure breaks
down.
“The amount of work you can do inside the gym,” says Wendler, “is directly
proportional to what you do outside the gym in terms of your cardiovascular
shape. You need to get in shape to lift, especially for this type of training.”
The biggest factor affecting recovery from failure, however, is mental, which
is ironic because the mental aspect of training to failure is one of this
technique’s main advantages. Psychologically, this works in a variety of ways.
Training to failure is advantageous because it builds a sense of accomplishment.
If you’re always leaving the gym thinking you had more to give, it’ll eventually
stall your progress, so these “hard effort” days are vitally important from a
mental toughness standpoint.
There are very few feelings in life as satisfying as walking out of the gym
knowing you’ve given your all – that you picked up a barbell and gave every last
bit of yourself to your workout with nothing left “in the tank.” This is
important when you train on your own, because it builds confidence and helps you
figure out what your limits are and how to push through them. It’s also
important for trainers on a professional level, because this feeling of
accomplishment is what keeps clients coming back.
The flip side of this, however, is where you’ll encounter problems. Let’s say
you’ve just performed a particularly brutal lower body workout. You did so many
squats or leg presses that you can barely walk, and you’re having trouble
working the pedals in your car. Now, you’ll feel great because of what you just
put yourself through, but what happens when you have to do it again the
following week? You’ll remember what it was like to push yourself to – and
perhaps past – failure with these difficult exercises, and you’ll find that
talking yourself into doing it again is a bit of a challenge, to say the least.
“The psychological part of this is why you have to keep your volume low,”
says Tate. “That’s why, with programs like Doggcrapp and HIT, the volume is so
low. It’s also why, with programs like FST-7 that have much higher volume
levels, most sets won’t go to failure.”
This feeling of dread before a set is mental fatigue, and it can be every bit
as debilitating as physical and CNS fatigue in terms of getting the most out of
your workouts and making progress. What good is scheduling a ridiculously taxing
group of sets to failure if you’re afraid to even pick up a barbell?
“People too often take a myopic view of training,” says Wendler. “You have to
look at the bigger picture with this, instead of just living in the moment and
worrying about what you’re doing that particular day. Training isn’t a one day
or one week process. You have to think in terms of months and even years, so in
the long run, is getting that one extra rep or that one extra set really going
to do that much for you?”
The recovery solution for training to failure is twofold. First, you need to
understand the exercises you’re selecting and the effect they’ll have on your
recovery. Compound movements like the bench, squat, deadlift and military press
are much harder to work to failure with because they take so much more out of
you, both physically and mentally, than isolation exercises like bicep curls or
lat pulldowns.
“I look at it this way,” says Wendler. “You have to be very cautious about
training to failure with compound, multi-joint exercises. If you have to psyche
yourself up to do a set, like you do when you squat or deadlift, you have to be
much more careful about training that lift to or past failure. You can get away
with much more on your smaller accessory lifts that don’t require that level of
mental preparation.”
It often makes more sense to train to failure using machines than it does to
train this way using free weights. This is because you won’t run into form and
technique breakdown as easily with machines as you will when using barbells and
dumbbells. For beginners especially, being locked into a machine groove
virtually eliminates form breakdown altogether, so your last rep will be your
true point of muscular failure, and not the start of a cluster of forced or
cheat reps.
Next, think about the frequency with which you train to failure. Since this
type of training breaks down more muscle tissue and requires such extensive
recovery, it’s potentially counterproductive to do it every week. As with any
form of training, however, variety is a key component to long term progress and
development. Adding some sets to failure every few weeks or so can shock your
body into progressing just as effectively as any other program adjustments or
changes you might make.
“If you haven’t trained to failure in a while,” says Tate, “a six week cycle
of selectively and intelligently doing so will give you gains beyond belief.”
