Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Does Training to Failure Help You Build More Muscle? What Science Says

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

If you’ve been slinging iron for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen quite a few “ONE MORE REP” lifters. They’re usually a 20-something year-old dudes in stringers and Waffen-SS haircuts with oompa loompa tans and maybe, just maybe, a bit of lip gloss too (yep, I’ve seen it). These boys just love training to failure, often ending set after set with the weights on the floor or their bodies. We might think they look ridiculous, but maybe the joke’s on us? Maybe training to muscle failure—the point where you can no longer move the weight—is the key to gains? Well, like rep ranges and training frequency, the topic of training to failure is a contentious one. Many bodybuilders, experts, and “gurus” claim it’s at least beneficial, and some say it’s essential for maximizing muscle and strength gain. On the other hand, others say we should never train to failure because it doesn’t increase anything but our risk of injury and overtraining. Who’s right? Well, in this podcast, you’re going to learn what the scientific literature has to say on the matter, including the effectiveness, safety, and usefulness of training to failure. 3:33 - What is training to failure? 6:20 - Why do people train to absolute failure? 9:22 - How does a workout routine that includes training to failure compare to a workout routine that doesn’t include training to failure? 25:46 - When and why should I train to failure? 25:11 - What are the benefits of training to failure? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please consider supporting my company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural, evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout drinks, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. And even better, we are currently running our big Labor Day sale, which means for the next few days, you can save up to 25% on everything in our store over at www.legionathletics.com. All you have to do is use the code LABOR at checkout and you will immediately save 15% on your entire order. And if you buy four supplements or more, you will save an additional 10% for a total savings of 25%. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you'd like to see and hear more of it, please consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like

this. Hello friends. I am Mike Matthews, and this is the Muscle for Life podcast. Welcome to a new episode. This time, I'm going to talk to you about training to failure, because I get asked about it fairly often, and I realized that I have not done an episode on it yet. So here we are. Now, if you have been slinging the iron for any amount of time, you have seen the one more rep type of lifter. You know, it's usually a 20 something year old dude in a stringer sporting one of those trendy Waffen SS haircuts and Oompa Loompa tans and maybe some lip gloss too. Yes, I have seen it. And you'll often see these peoples obsessively training to failure, ending set after set with the weights on the floor or sometimes on their bodies.

on the floor or sometimes on their bodies. And you might think that they look ridiculous, but is the joke on you? Is training to muscle failure the point where you can no longer move the weight the key to gains or at least a way to dramatically accelerate progress? Well, like optimal rep ranges or optimal training frequencies, the topic of training to failure is a controversial one. On one hand, many bodybuilders, experts, and gurus claim that it is at least beneficial, if not essential, for maximizing muscle and strength gain. On the other hand, however, others say that we should never train to failure because it doesn't increase anything but our risk of injury and overtraining. Who is right? Well, we're going to get to the bottom of that question in this podcast, where you are going to learn what the scientific literature has to say on the matter, including the effectiveness, safety, and usefulness

of training to failure. Okay, so let's start at the top as we always do with the simplest of questions. What is training to failure? Now, in most studies, training to failure is defined as doing as many reps as you can until you simply can't move the weight and have to end the set. It's also referred to as absolute failure. Now note that that isn't just pushing yourself until it gets really hard or really uncomfortable, it means that no matter what you do, the weight is not going to move any further. Now, this is important because although many people claim to train to failure, even fairly often, many do not reach that point regularly. Instead, they're stopping at the point where the weight starts to move very slowly. And that is not failure. That is not absolute failure. Again,

absolute failure is the point where you could not move the weight another inch, even if your life depended on it. Another important term to understand for the purposes of this discussion is technical failure, which is the point where you can no longer move the weight with proper form. In other words, you may have enough juice to squeeze out another rep or maybe even two if you really had to, but not without compromising your technique, not without getting sloppy. So for example, let's say that you are able to squat 315 pounds for three reps if you went to absolute failure, meaning that the fourth rep simply wouldn't happen under any circumstances. You are not going to be standing up with that bar. You are going to be

sitting the bar down. That would then give you a true rep max on your squat, 315 for three. Let's say though that on that last rep, on that third rep, your form starts to break down. You start to waver a little bit from side to side. Your hips start to rise faster than your shoulders and so forth. Well, that then would be your point of technical failure. Therefore, training to absolute failure would get you three reps and training to technical failure would get you two. Now, in general, most of your training, most of your sets, your hard sets, your muscle building sets should be ended a rep or two shy of technical failure, not absolute failure. And we will be talking about why a little later in the podcast. Okay. So that is a basic primer on failure, what it is. Let's now talk about why people often train to absolute failure.

So the logic of training to absolute failure usually goes like this. The whole point of lifting weights is to repeatedly contract large amounts of muscle tissue as intensely as possible to generate large amounts of tension in our muscles, right? Because when we do this, we spark a series of genetic, physical, and hormonal changes inside the body that then lead to muscle growth and strength gain. And over time, if we do this enough, this process makes us more and more jacked. Now, as our muscles get stronger, we have to force them to contract harder and harder if we want them to keep getting bigger and stronger. Now, doing this, of course, is known as progressive overload, and it is the primary mechanical driver of muscle growth

and the primary reason why our goal as natural weightlifters, when we look at it over the long term, is to increase our whole body strength as much as possible. We have to keep adding weight to the bar or to the dumbbells over time if we want to keep on getting bigger. Now, that isn't to say that volume, the number of hard sets that you're doing per major muscle group per week, or you could look at it in terms of the number of reps you're doing per major muscle group per week, or you could look at it in terms of the number of reps you're doing per major muscle group per week, or even the amount of weight that you're lifting. There are different ways to look at volume. I prefer the simple and straightforward approach of hard sets per major muscle group per week, and assuming those hard sets are being taken to a point close to technical failure, which of course ties into everything that we're discussing here in this podcast. So volume matters and volume is also a mechanical driver of muscle growth. So forcing

your muscles to handle higher and higher amounts of volume over time is another effective way to stimulate muscle growth, but it is not as effective as adding weight to the bar. That is your primary goal and increasing volume comes secondary to that. Now, what does this have to do with training to absolute failure? Well, when you take a set to absolute failure, you ensure that you are activating, contracting as much muscle tissue as you possibly can in that set. And this sends a maximally powerful message to your muscles to grow. Now that's the theory anyway, because while there is no question that taking sets to absolute failure is better for muscle and strength gain than just breezing through your workouts. I mean,

the gym goer who regularly pushes themselves as hard as they can in their workouts, yes, is always going to gain more muscle and strength than the person who spends most of their time diddling around with bands, BOSU balls, and baby weights. So that's not the question. The real question is, how does a challenging, well-designed workout routine that does include training to absolute failure compare to one that does not, that instead ends most or all of the sets before absolute failure or even before technical failure? Well, that is actually a tough question to answer because many studies that claim to involve training to absolute failure don't properly ensure the subjects actually reached absolute failure. And in other cases, the programs are designed in such a way that it is nearly impossible to match the volume between failure and non-failure groups or simply don't even try to match the volume.

Oftentimes, the lifters who are training to failure end up doing more sets than those who do not train to failure. But sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes the lifters training to failure end up doing fewer sets than the lifters not training to failure. And so my point is these aren't proper apples to apples comparisons. That said, there are a handful of studies where the researchers did ensure the participants went to absolute failure and where the volume was matched. So let's look at those. One of these studies was conducted by scientists at Federal University of Sao Carlos. And in this case, the researchers split 32 untrained 23-year-old men

into two groups. Group one was forced to take all of their sets to absolute failure, absolute muscular failure. And group two was told to take all of their sets to the point of volitional fatigue or the point where the exercise became very uncomfortable. In most people, this is somewhere around one to three reps shy of absolute failure. Therefore, group one was training to absolute failure and the other was taking their sets to a couple reps shy of that point, somewhere around technical failure, the point where you can get another rep or two, but your form is going to be sloppy. Now in this study, both of the groups performed three sets of leg extensions at 80% of their one rep max, twice a week for 12 weeks, with two

minutes of rest in between those sets. Throughout the study, the scientists also monitored how many sets and reps everyone performed to ensure that both groups were doing the same amount of volume. And lastly, the researchers supervised the workouts to make sure that the people in the first group were indeed taking their sets to absolute failure. So what was the result of all this? Well, group one, the people training to absolute failure did show higher levels of muscle activation in their workouts, but both of the groups gained almost exactly the same amount of strength and muscle. Why? Why didn't the additional muscle activation seen in group one result in more muscle or strength gain? Well, the researchers actually weren't sure, but one plausible explanation is that the subjects were all untrained lifters. And this is important because thanks to various physiological factors often referred to as newbie gains, people who are new to resistance training are hyper responsive to it and do not require an extraordinary amount of stimulus to maximize

muscle and strength gain. And once the ceiling for muscle growth and strength gain is reached, adding further stimulus in the way of more muscle activation, intensity, volume, frequency, or anything else is not going to further boost progress. In other words, your body's muscle building machinery can only work so quickly, and when you are new to lifting, it is much easier to prod it into overdrive than when you are an intermediate or an advanced lifter. Therefore, in the case of the study that we just discussed, although the group of lifters who took every set to absolute muscle failure did activate more muscle tissue than those who did not, failure did activate more muscle tissue than those who did not, it's likely that the people who did not train to muscle failure activated more than enough to produce the majority of the potential muscle building response. That is, it simply didn't require training to absolute failure for the newbies to stimulate maximum muscle and strength gain.

Another study on the topic at hand that is worth reviewing was conducted by scientists at the University of Brasilia with young untrained women. And in this case, training biceps curls to absolute failure did not produce more muscle growth than training to the point of a few reps shy of that in each set. So at this point in our discussion, I think it's fair to say that beginners have little reason to train to absolute failure. What about more experienced lifters though? Well, this is an important question to ask because it would stand to reason that more intense training would most benefit people with more training experience because it does get harder to achieve the stimulus needed to continue gaining muscle and strength.

And that is what a team of scientists from East Tennessee State University explored in a recent study. Now, in this case, the researchers divided 15 trained 27-year-old lifters into two groups. Group one trained to absolute failure on the last set of every exercise they did. group two, trained based on a percentage of their one rep max, which had them finish each set a few reps shy of absolute failure. Now, both of the groups trained with heavy weights three days per week, doing three sets of eight to 12 or four to six reps, which varied throughout the course of the study on four different exercises. They also did one day of explosive training and two days of sprints per week.

And it's worth noting that this is not made clear in the study, but these guys were most likely football players. And so that type of training is what they are used to. The researchers measured everyone's strength and muscle mass before and after the study, and the result was group one, the guys who were training to absolute failure on the last set of every exercise performed worse than group two on almost every measure. The differences were only statistically significant for strength on a handful of exercises, but group one still saw almost no improvement on any metric, whereas group two saw improvement on almost every metric. Everyone in group one also reported that the workouts required more effort and caused more feelings of overtraining. Now, why? Why this result? Well, two likely reasons. One is that sets taken to absolute failure are not more anabolic

than sets taken close to failure. Now, I've said this a couple of times already, but here is where we will dive into the details. So in many ways, muscle cells are like little engines. They can only produce so much force. They only have so much natural horsepower and can only do so much work until redlining. So in other words, muscle can only move so much weight and do so many repetitions of a movement before quitting. Now, when you push a muscle cell close to its limits, it triggers a cascade of signals that lead to more muscle endurance, strength, and often size. And in this way, the last few reps of each set that you do influence muscle building more than the first few reps, but pushing to the point

of absolute failure does not provide much of an additional boost or stimulus compared with ending sets a couple reps shy of it. So to go back to the engine metaphor here, what I'm saying is by shoving the pedal to the metal, you might get slightly more power out of your muscles, but you are not going to get much more in the way of strength and muscle gain. And you will also increase the risk of breakdown. So injury and symptoms related to overtraining, which brings me to my next point, which is taking sets to absolute failure beats up the body more than ending sets with a couple reps still in the tank. This has been shown in research too. Studies have shown that training to failure causes disproportionately more fatigue, soreness, and wear and tear on the body than training to

near failure. And so the more often you train to absolute failure, the harder it can become to recover properly and thus optimize your volume, regardless of how you want to look at it, hard sets per week, reps per week, total weight lifted per week, as well as your intensity, the load for maximum muscle and strength gain. You simply will not have it in you to train hard enough week in and week out if you are also taking many of those sets to absolute failure. That, of course, is a good recipe for stalling out, for getting stuck in a rut or hitting a plateau. Another downside to training to absolute failure is it often causes your technique to break down. And one of the reasons this occurs is we gradually lose the ability to accurately feel what we're doing with our bodies as our muscles and our entire bodies

become more and more fatigued, which obviously happens with some of the bigger lifts in particular. If you've ever done a hard set of squats or deadlifts, you know what I'm talking about. We might think we are keeping our form in as we are getting closer and closer to absolute failure, but we're not. And if you don't believe me, work on camera for a little bit and you might be surprised at how your perception of what you're doing as you get deeper into a set, especially when the weights are heavy, is not what you are seeing on camera. And that's not a big deal if you're just doing a biceps curl, but if you are doing a deadlift and you're trying to do it to the point of absolute failure, it doesn't take much to tweak something, tweak a muscle, tweak a joint when the weights are heavy and when you are pushing to

the limit. Now that said, I do understand that slightly compromising form every now and then to get a PR or do a rep max test makes sense and it's fine. It's part of the game, right? But that is not the habit we want to get into. We don't want to get used to training with poor technique or finishing a lot of our sets with poor technique because the more we do this, the harder it gets to actually do exercises correctly to correct what we're doing wrong. And that's especially true when the weights get heavy. And that right there is a very common mistake among people who are new to weightlifting. By regularly training to absolute failure, they ingrain flawed movement patterns that are then difficult, in some cases very difficult to correct later down the line

when the weights start getting heavy and they either realize that they have to fix their form or they just get injured and realize that they have to fix their form. Now, there is one final study on training to absolute failure that I want to discuss here, and that is a meta-analysis conducted by scientists at the University of Sydney. So the researchers found eight studies that compared people training to absolute failure and people not training to failure. And half of the studies also ensured that both of the groups performed the same amount of volume, which of course allows for a clearer analysis of the results. So after analyzing the data in these studies, the scientists concluded that training to absolute failure produced no meaningful difference in strength versus not training

to absolute failure. Unfortunately, they didn't look at muscle growth, but chances are good the results would have been similarly unimpressive, and especially in intermediate or advanced weightlifters, where the correlation between strength gain and muscle gain becomes a lot more pronounced, where it becomes more and more important to continue getting stronger if you want to continue getting bigger. Thus, as the authors of the paper concluded, quote, it seems unnecessary to perform failure training to maximize muscular strength. And that jives with my own personal experience training many years now and the thousands of people I've worked with

over the last six years or so, six or seven years, I have never found a significant benefit to regularly training to absolute failure versus training to a few reps shy of technical failure and sometimes to the point of technical failure, which is usually one to three reps shy of absolute failure. And I will be talking a little bit more about that in a few minutes. So if you are wondering, Hey, wait a minute, how do I do this exactly? Don't worry. We'll get into the details in a minute. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread

the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Now, one argument in favor of training to absolute failure that we haven't touched on is that many freakishly big and strong people, you know, powerlifters, bodybuilders, and fitness models and influencers swear by it. In fact, many of these people seem to train to absolute failure in one or more sets in just about every workout and oftentimes on big compound exercises too, like the squat, bench press, and deadlift. And it's usually guys. These guys never seem to run out of steam or run into problems

related to overtraining. What about that? What gives? Well, this might sound a little bit cynical, but steroids gives. Once drugs enter the picture, everything changes because when you use the right drugs the right way, you can train much harder than you ever could naturally. I mean, even a relatively lightweight dose of testosterone drastically increases muscle protein synthesis rates and post-workout recovery. And many of the people who advocate heavily for absolute failure training take moderate or high doses of testosterone along with a cocktail of other drugs like Trenbolone, Nandrolone, Winstrolsarms, and many others. What's more, many drug users also ingest and inject chemicals specifically for enhancing recovery and preserving joint health, like growth hormone, for example. So just keep this in mind. If you see someone on the gram who is A, jacked, B, consistently training to absolute failure, C, consistently making progress, and D, rarely

running into issues related to injuries, overtraining, or burnout, they're probably on steroids. Okay, so let's shift gears now and get to some practical advice. Let's talk about when to train to failure and why. Because you know now that there are a number of reasons not to train to absolute failure, and you can do just fine without it. However, that does not mean that failure training has no place in any and all weightlifting programs. And to understand why, let's review the three main benefits of training to absolute failure. So one, it ensures you are pushing yourself in your workouts. You know, many people tend to get complacent in

their workouts. They may say that they're ending their sets with just a couple reps left in the tank, but maybe they could have gotten four or five if they really went for it, if they really screwed up their courage. By training to absolute failure, people are then forced to give it their all, at least even if it's just one set, even if it's just the last set of each exercise. And that helps them recalibrate their actual capabilities and helps them keep fresh in their minds how many reps they really have left when they feel like it's getting hard. Another benefit of training to absolute failure is it helps you assess your progress because you'll never really know how strong you are or how strong you can get unless you push yourself at least close to absolute failure now and then.

And this is why doing that at least a couple times per year on your key lifts is worthwhile. It helps you understand where you stand. It helps you understand if you have really gained strength or not. And finally, another benefit to training to absolute failure is it is not equally detrimental with all exercises. Training to absolute failure with compound exercises like the squat, bench press, and deadlift absolutely takes a toll on the body and increases the risk of injury. But isolation exercises like a biceps curl or a triceps press down or a pull-up, yeah, of course, not so much. You can train to absolute failure on those simpler exercises fairly often without any serious negative consequences. That said, I still don't

recommend training to absolute failure because there is a better way to incorporate failure training into your workout routine. So here's how I go about it. And here's what I recommend in my programs for men and women, bigger than you're stronger and thinner than you're stronger, respectively. First, don't train to absolute failure. I know I'm being redundant here, but I just want to make the point. The marginal rewards of training to absolute failure simply don't justify the considerable risks. And as you've learned, in some cases, training to absolute failure can actually produce worse results over time. And these are the reasons why I do not intentionally train to absolute failure. And even when I'm testing rep maxes, instead, I take those sets to technical failure to the point where my form starts to break down.

Otherwise, I generally avoid even technical failure on most exercises, but not always. Which brings me to my next point, and that is do not train to technical failure more than once every couple of weeks. This will ensure that you are not accidentally cutting into your performance on your bigger lifts, which are more important for your whole body size and strength development. So personally, I like to do some training to technical failure in the middle and end of my training blocks, which usually last about six weeks and then which end with a proper deload. My third tip here is don't train to technical failure on more than two to three sets per workout. So limit your technical failure sets to just a couple sets per workout. I like to save these

sets for my very last exercise of the workout, which gives you a hint to my final tip, exercise selection. Which exercises would I be doing later in my workout? Isolation, of course. So the fourth and final tip here is rarely train to technical failure on the squat, bench, or military press, or deadlift. Most of your training on these big, major, multi-joint, multi-muscle group exercises should be done to a point just shy of technical failure. Not absolute failure, but just shy of technical failure. The point where you feel like if you do another rep, it's going to be pretty sloppy. That's a good point to end. And that's usually two or three reps away from absolute failure. And you should only reach technical failure, which is that point where you finish the rep, but you know that your form

got a little loose. You should only do that when you are testing a rep max, at least on these big exercises. And you shouldn't be doing that very often. Now, it's also worth noting that to do all of these things properly that I'm talking about, you do need to have a good sense of how many reps you still have in you at any given point in a set. And this does come naturally as you gain weightlifting experience, but an easy way to accelerate the learning process is to familiarize yourself with the RPE scale, which you can learn about over at legionathletics.com. If you search RPE, you'll find an article I wrote on it. And I also did record a podcast on it as well. So if you search my podcast feed for RPE, you will find it. I think I posted it

some time ago, so it's going to be somewhere downward. It's not going to be a recent episode. I think it's also embedded in the article over at Legion, so you can read or listen over there. Anyway, the final point here is most of your technical failure sets should be performed with safer, simpler isolation exercises. Alrighty, well, that covers everything I wanted to share with you on training to failure. And if you follow the simple guidelines that I have given you in this podcast, you will enjoy the limited benefits that training to failure can provide and avoid the rather large pitfalls. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help

me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please consider supporting my company Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural, evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout drinks, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. And even better, we are currently running our big Labor Day sale, which means for the next few days, you can save up to 25% on everything in our store over at www.legionathletics.com. All you have to do is use the code LABOR at checkout, and you will immediately save 15% on your entire order. And if you buy four supplements or more,

you will save an additional 10% for a total savings of 25%. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you'd like to see and hear more of it, please consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this.