Training to Muscle Failure

Geschatte leestijd: 19 minutenIn fitness circles, you may hear terms like muscle failure, past failure, and beyond failure. These are terms that indicate that you do a certain exercise until you can’t anymore, until muscle failure, or longer, past and beyond failure. Failure, or muscle failure in English, for muscle mass. In this article, I will delve into the importance of this principle, how it works, and the different ways to execute it, both practically and mentally.

Table of Contents

• What is Muscle failure and Progressive Overload
• ” The mind is everything” – Kai Greene.
• More weight is not necessarily synonymous with training heavier!
• Is it worthwhile to train to muscle failure?
• Training to muscle failure
• Nerve fibers
• To failure in endurance sports: research
• Too much of a good thing
• Muscle growth without Muscle Failure
• Variation in your training
• “Psyching up”: Mental pumping
• Progressive Overload: past and beyond Muscle Failure
• “Cheating” and half repetitions
• Forced repetitions
• Accelerated repetitions
• Dropsets
• Supersets, trisets, and giantsets
• Pre-fatigue/ “Pre Exhaust”
• Personal differences: Athletes and sedentary individuals
• “Why run when I can walk?”,” Why take the stairs when there’s an elevator?”
• Summary: Is it worthwhile to train to Muscle Failure?

What is Muscle failure and Progressive Overload

The title of this article is intended to indicate the importance of training to muscle failure. In “The functioning of muscles” I discussed two processes in the body that contribute to muscle growth under training stimulation. The most important process, hypertrophy, which causes muscle growth (among other things, an increase in the number of muscle cell nuclei), is mainly activated by overloading the muscles. It is therefore important to have an overload of the muscles as a goal, or ” progressive overload” in English.

Overloading is by definition related to the ability of the muscle in terms of both strength and endurance. It’s nice if you can lift heavier bench presses, but the absolute weight is less important than the relative effort it requires from you if muscle growth is your goal. Especially when you realize that being able to move more weight is largely and always initially caused by your nerves more effectively controlling your muscles and not so much because the muscles have become bigger. This is evident, among other things, from various studies in which an increase in strength could not be explained by an increase in muscle mass.

Put simply: if you train below the capacity of your muscles, there is no need for the part of previously built muscle mass that is not used and this is broken down (use it or lose it). If you train at the capacity of your body, the muscle mass will be preserved (provided the nutrition is good), but not increased. If you train above the capacity of your body, various processes come into action that ensure that your body can handle this load next time. This happens both by letting the muscles grow and by better controlling them from the brain.

To sufficiently stimulate your muscles, you will have to go all out mentally, but also understand how the body responds to stress under different circumstances.

First, I will address how to go to the extreme and the most common mistakes and pitfalls. Then I will discuss methods to go beyond your limits.

“The mind is everything” – Kai Greene.

Ok, there are plenty of positivity gurus who preach about the importance of the mind and how thoughts determine success. The unofficial ambassador of positive thinking in bodybuilding is Kai Greene, who often talks about the mental aspects of bodybuilding rather than things like nutrition and training. Especially the mental ability to push yourself to the extreme and beyond is a trait he sees as a must-have for every aspiring bodybuilder. If you see Kai collapse to the ground exhausted during a workout to recover for the next set, you know it’s not just talk.

When was the last time you collapsed in the gym vomiting because your legs couldn’t carry you anymore? When was the last time you had to cling to the barbell (straight bar) with which you had just squatted because you saw stars and began to feel dizzy? Not that you should always focus on this. After all, then no more nice girls will enter the hardcore gyms if they stumble over bodybuilders rolling around in their own vomit. The point is that if this has never happened to you, you probably have never come close to your potential. This will yield results in the first year or two because your body was not used to anything, but after that, you will have to work harder and harder.

More weight is not necessarily synonymous with training heavier!

As a powerlifter, you want to move as much weight as possible; as a bodybuilder, you want to stress your muscles as much as possible. These are two different things, although both require applying the right technique. For example, in bench pressing, you could lower the bar only halfway to your chest and then strut around the gym as if you’ve achieved something great by pressing “so much weight,” but in reality, you’ll fail as both a bodybuilder and a powerlifter.

As a powerlifter or strongman (focused on strength), your aim is to maximize the result of the concentric part of a movement.

This means that during the part of a movement where the muscles are shortened, you want to be able to move as much weight as possible. Think of pressing the barbell during bench press, where the chest muscles and triceps are contracted together. A powerlifter will only contract these muscles enough during the descent to prevent the bar from crashing down on the chest, thereby saving as much energy as possible. Then, by immediately pushing the weight back up, they utilize the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC). During the stretching of the muscles and tendons, their elasticity allows them to absorb and utilize some of the energy when pushed back up. Additionally, a powerlifter will involve the shoulders and triceps as much as possible in the movement by hand placement and grip used. As a bodybuilder (focused on muscle growth), your goal is to maximize effort throughout the entire movement.

Regarding technique execution, this means:

• The range of motion is aimed at maximum loading of the muscle group you are training at that moment through isolation, range of motion, and maximizing the lever.
• More attention should be given to the negative/eccentric part of an exercise.

Is it worthwhile to train to muscle failure?

Think again about bench pressing.

As a bodybuilder, you’ll achieve better results by lowering the bar slowly (in about 3 seconds). This requires you to offer more resistance during the eccentric part of the movement. In this phase of the movement, the muscles are lengthened while simultaneously being contracted. Various studies have shown that this part of the movement causes more microtrauma to the muscles (small tears), leading to more hypertrophy (in short: muscle growth from overcompensation of the damage) and therefore more muscle mass.

This part of the movement is often neglected by most people in the gym. It makes the exercise much harder, so you can handle less weight or fewer repetitions. Since many, if not most of us, are too focused on egolifting (“look at how much I can bench press”), we often want to conserve that energy for the concentric part, the push. Again: ultimately, for muscle growth, it’s not about how much weight you move, but how hard you make it for yourself and how you stimulate your muscles to grow.

So, lower the weight slowly and controlled.

Once you reach the bottom, hold the bar for about half a second. Unlike the powerlifter, you don’t want to use the elasticity of the muscle and tendon to make the upward movement easier. To make it as difficult as possible for yourself, hold the bar still for a moment.

By the way, do this just above the chest. Not on the chest so that some tension is released, and not halfway on the chest so that you skip the heaviest part of the exercise. Simply remember that you are fooling yourself by adding more weight as long as you cheat in your technique to make it easier for yourself. Remember that your muscles have no idea what number is written on the plates, but only know the effort they have to exert. It’s nice if you can bench press heavier and heavier, but if muscle growth is your goal, the absolute weight is less important than the relative effort it requires from you. Especially when you realize that being able to move more weight is largely and always initially caused by your nerves more effectively controlling your muscles and not so much because the muscles have become bigger.

This is evident, among other things, from various studies in which an increase in strength could not be explained by an increase in muscle mass. Granted, it becomes easier to work with less weight and better form as you become bigger and more muscular yourself. The bigger you are, the less you feel the need to “prove yourself” in the gym. However, if you wait for that, the growth will take longer, and during all that time, you’ll learn a wrong training form that becomes increasingly difficult to unlearn.

More importantly: Bodybuilding is an individual sport. So, you really have to ignore the rest in the gym and focus only on your own goals. A perfect example of a useless technique that only pumps up the ego, I recently came across on YouTube. In the video, the actual training consists of loading the leg press with every plate in the gym. The first time I saw this video, I kept waiting for him to start the exercise until it turned out he was already doing it! The fact that he leaves the safety mechanism, which should be removed to lower the weight properly, says enough.

Believe me, this impresses no one.

Training to Muscle Failure

Going until you can’t anymore. ‘Muscle failure’ or ‘overload training,’ it turns out, is not suitable for endurance athletes. Adaptations of nerve fibers could actually reduce performance.

Training ‘to failure,’ ’till failure,’ or ‘overload’ are popular training methods in strength training. Straining the muscles to the extreme so that they are more stimulated for recovery and overcompensation. This makes them stronger and larger for the next load. There is much debate about the effectiveness of this training principle in strength training. But for now, it seems to have more proponents than opponents in practice.

For endurance sports, however, recent research suggests that pushing until you can’t anymore may not be the best method to then perform optimally.

The theory behind overload training is that you train to the point of complete exhaustion, so that when you rest and recover, you will be able to perform at a higher level than before. But that may not be entirely correct.

Alexandra Coates, University of Guelph

Nerve Fibers

Previous studies on overload training in endurance sports measured the effects based on indirect physiological factors such as variations in heart rate. This recent study looked at the effect on the nerves.

We’ve often written here about the different muscle fibers. You probably didn’t know that there are also fast and slow nerve fibers. Researchers from the University of Guelph studied the effect of overload training by looking at its influence on the nerve fibers. This is a new method to measure the stress caused by training in the body, where a more direct effect can be measured.

The research showed an increase in sympathetic nerve activity in the muscles due to overload training. This causes, among other things, blood vessels in the muscles to contract. Athletes who didn’t use overload but did the same training each time didn’t have this extra stress on the body. Their overall condition improved, and other indicators of the cardiovascular system showed improvements. These improvements were not seen in the overload group.

To Failure in Endurance Sports: Research

The study worked with triathletes and cyclists. For three weeks, one group did overload training, consisting of a volume of 150% of their normal training. The other group continued training as usual.

Before and after the three weeks, several things were measured, such as sympathetic nerve activity, heart rate variability, and regulation of blood pressure. Measuring this nerve activity is complex and can only be done by specialists with specialized equipment. While the athlete is lying still, a microelectrode needle is inserted into a nerve in the lower leg. This needle records how often the sympathetic nerve fires.

In general, high sympathetic activity at rest predicts an unhealthy status. Very healthy athletes usually have very low levels of sympathetic activity at rest. Coates and her team found that this activity at rest had increased after three weeks in the athletes who trained to failure.

This was very interesting to us, because generally sympathetic nerve activity stays pretty consistent day to day, therefore we believe the athlete’s nervous systems were temporarily altered by the overtraining. In this instance, it seems like the athletes overdid it.

Too Much of a Good Thing

But what does this research really say? Very little, in my opinion. If you suddenly maintain 150% of your usual training volume, that’s a huge increase from your usual regime. Doing 30k instead of 20k is anything but the normal progression you often see in endurance athletes. Your body will then undergo a shock. Very different from strength training, where people often push to failure. How representative is this research then? It would have been nice if other volume increases were also tested.

Moreover, you shouldn’t ask a bodybuilder to do their heaviest deadlift the day after a leg workout. After all, the muscles are not fully recovered. Before they become stronger, they are temporarily weaker. What would be the effect of this overload training in endurance sports in the long run?

So, still plenty of questions.

The researchers are proud of their new method of measuring the effects of training on nerves. Although this method may be very interesting, its application in this research may not be ideal.

Muscle Growth Without Muscle Failure

One of the biggest pitfalls of fitness and bodybuilding is falling into habit and routine. While habit and routine are fantastic qualities to keep you adhering to your schedule regarding training frequency and diet, they can also mean that your body doesn’t receive enough new stimuli. If you do the same exercises every week, your body will hardly respond anymore. This effect of the law of diminishing returns also applies when you keep using heavier weights. Mentally, you’re not challenged either if the only change is adding another plate. It is therefore important to constantly find new ways to stimulate your muscles, and this variation will lead to even more muscle growth.

Variation in Your Training

There are various ways in which you can train the same muscles in different ways.

Do different exercises.

There is no “best method” or “best exercise.” I often show the results of EMG studies in articles, which demonstrate how heavily a certain muscle is loaded during different exercises. The effect of these different exercises is compared. However, this does not mean that, for example, you always have to do lat pulldowns for a wide back because it seems that they stimulate the latissimus dorsi (“large back muscle”) more than, for example, a vertical row. The differences are often not so great that choosing “the best exercise” outweighs the loss of effectiveness of this exercise due to the habituation factor. For example, the difference in effort of the latissimus dorsi between the mentioned back exercises is less than 5%. The extent to which your muscles respond less with growth due to habituation to an exercise can be much greater. The trick is therefore to know enough alternatives that focus on the same muscle group and load them in a somewhat comparable way, but transfer this load in a different way. Although you often see the same exercises being performed and some exercises are also seen as the basis for the growth of certain muscle groups, your knowledge should not be limited to these exercises. For example, if you have started your chest training for a month or longer with a barbell bench press, try starting for a month to 6 weeks with the dumbbell press or bench press in the smith machine (rack in which you can hook the bar).

Change the order of exercises.

A different order of exercises can already give you the feeling that you have done a completely different training. That exercise you start with suddenly becomes much heavier when it’s your third exercise. However, many people train first the larger muscle groups or larger parts of a muscle with compound exercises (for example, squats for legs) before moving on to isolated exercises (such as leg extensions). In that case, it’s easier to find an alternative for the compound exercise than to change the order if you don’t want to deviate from this principle.

Emphasize a different type of exercise execution.

I just mentioned the concentric and eccentric parts of an exercise, also known as positive and negative parts. You can focus, for example, for a while or with a specific exercise on the negative part of an exercise. You can read more about this in the article “Eccentric Training: Positive Results through Negative Training.”

Try a different number of repetitions (“reps”).

Many bodybuilders prefer the pyramid system where fewer repetitions are done per set with increasingly heavier weights. For example, starting with 15, 12, 8, 4-6 repetitions with increasingly heavier weights. Others stick to a fixed number of repetitions. It’s also good to vary in this respect. The higher the number of repetitions, the more you train muscle endurance (15+ repetitions). The lower the number of repetitions, the more you focus on maximal strength (4 to 6 and fewer). In between, you focus on muscle mass. However, to gain more muscle mass, you also benefit from more maximal strength (type IIB muscle fiber) and more endurance (type I muscle fiber). So, it’s useful to also focus on this by adjusting the number of repetitions. For example, for a few weeks or for a certain number of exercises during your training.

Focus not on the number of repetitions

Focus not on the number of repetitions themselves by keeping them in mind during the exercise, but adjust the weight beforehand so that you naturally reach this number when you go to the limit. Many make the mistake of having a number of repetitions in their head and stopping as soon as they reach it, even though more were possible. In that case, you apparently chose the weight too lightly. Then continue until you can’t do more, even if this results in more repetitions. For example, if you wanted to aim for 12 repetitions for muscle mass and stop while you could still do 10, those 12 repetitions have not contributed to muscle mass (weight too light/intensity too low) or muscle endurance (number of repetitions too low). The number of repetitions given as a guideline is based on the percentage of the maximum weight with which you could do one repetition (max 1RM). You should be able to do 12 repetitions with a weight of about 70% max 1RM. If you take a weight of only 40% max 1RM, you will not achieve the goal of muscle growth. You may have misjudged this. No problem, continue until you can’t do more so that you have at least trained your muscle endurance in this set and adjust the weight for the next set. Remember: Once you’ve chosen the weight and start, keep going until you can’t anymore! And sometimes further, but more on that later. A mental trick I sometimes use is to tell myself that the next repetitions really matter when I reach or are at the point of muscle failure. All previous repetitions were just to reach this point where real growth happens.

“Psyching up”: Mentally pumping up

Another trick to motivate yourself to squeeze out those last repetitions is to imagine that at that moment you’re fighting for a gold medal, or imagine another situation in which you are encouraged to deliver your best performance. Sounds crazy? Perhaps, but it works. When scientific research is conducted requiring maximum athletic effort by the subjects, they are almost always verbally encouraged by the researchers. The researchers do this to ensure that the chance of performing the maximum voluntary effort is as high as possible. After all, it makes no sense to test the effect of a substance or exercise if the subjects first exert themselves for 90% and the second test for 95%. The researchers encourage them to come as close as possible to 100%. There are various studies that have shown the added value of verbal encouragement. This applies to both cardio and strength training (1,2). In a study where participants had to do bicep curls with and without encouragement, there was a five percent difference (1). Although cheerleaders are not part of the facilities of an average gym (idea?), you can achieve this effect by imagining the encouragement. If you really have to imagine the cheerleaders of the Dallas Cowboys for this, fine. Arena filled with supporters shouting at you to squeeze out that last repetition? Your name being sung in the Holland House? Also fine. Sounds maybe crazy, but here too, I fall into the cliché: “Mind over matter”. Maybe it’s also because I have too rich of an imagination, but it always works for me. Below you see as a tool the number of repetitions related to the max 1RM as determined by different researchers (3,4,5):

Progressive Overload: Past and Beyond Muscle Failure

Okay, you’re now performing the exercise in the right way, making it as difficult as possible for yourself, and going on until you really can’t do a full, correct repetition anymore. To stimulate more muscle growth even by going further when your muscles seem to have reached their maximum, there are several methods.

Cheating and half repetitions

I didn’t say for nothing: “until you really can’t do a full, correct repetition” anymore. When you can’t do this anymore, you can still further engage your muscles by doing incomplete or half repetitions or by doing “incorrect repetitions” by, for example, “cheating”. The latter is what ego lifters and swing monkeys often do from the first repetition when they train with weights that are much too heavy. For example, by throwing the upper body backward during biceps curls and in a way bringing the arm under the dumbbell instead of the dumbbell above the arm. These kinds of “bad” techniques are crap when you start using them directly to be able to use as heavy weights as possible. However, they are fine when you use them to, when you can no longer do “good” repetitions, still squeeze out a few more repetitions. The same applies to “half repetitions” where you only do the part of the exercise that still works and repeat it several times.

Forced repetitions

Depending on your terminology, you can already call the above examples forced repetitions. Forced repetitions are exactly what the word says: Ways to force a few more repetitions. For some, this only means helping by a friend to give just that little bit extra that you were short for a few extra repetitions. However, you can also help yourself with the hand, arm, or leg that you didn’t use during the exercise (when you were training one arm or leg at a time).

Accelerated repetitions

Another form of forced repetitions are the accelerated repetitions, although I haven’t come across this term anywhere yet (patent pending;). I mentioned above that you give more attention to the eccentric part of an exercise by slowly lowering a weight, in about three seconds. When you can’t do repetitions in this way, you usually can do a few repetitions where you don’t lower the weight slowly, but faster. This makes the exercise less energy-consuming, allowing you to do a few more repetitions. So, you also see clearly how easy you made it for yourself all that time if you always let the weight drop quickly! However, pay attention. This often doesn’t work with weights with which you can only do a few repetitions. For example, if you can only squat three or four times with a certain weight, you may lack so much energy for that fifth repetition that it also doesn’t work anymore when you do it in the faster, easier way. And precisely with heavy weights, you don’t want to find out in the wrong way or at the wrong time (when you’re folded under the barbell).

Dropsets

A good way to go beyond failure is to continue immediately with another exercise for the same muscle group or immediately continue with a lower weight. The latter is a so-called drop set. With a drop set, you continue until you can’t anymore and then immediately lower the weight and continue until muscle failure. Then lower the weight again etc. Usually, this is repeated four or five times, but this varies. There is also no fixed guideline for how much you lower the weight. Personally, I try to estimate the new weight so that I can still do at least 4 to 6 repetitions. This way, you can eventually with great effort and a lot of groaning lift a “baby dumbbell” of only a few kilos that you could normally lift with your pinky. Of course, this happens just when the prettiest girl in the gym walks by and looks at you with a look of “wimp”. Actually, a drop set is similar to the forced repetition where you are helped. After all, the weight is made lighter in forced repetitions by being helped (or helping yourself with a free arm or leg). The difference lies in the number of times the weight is lowered and therefore the number of extra repetitions that can be done. With a drop set, you often do more than twenty extra repetitions, with forced repetitions, these are often “only” two to four.

Supersets, trisets, and giantsets

With super-, tri-, and giant sets, after doing a set of an exercise, you immediately move on to another exercise for the same muscle group. Because you attack the muscle(s) with a different exercise, the emphasis of the load lies just differently, allowing you (and because you had a very short rest during the transition to the other exercise) to perform the other exercise while you had already reached the point of failure. Superset and giant set are often used interchangeably, so here is the correct terminology:

• Superset: Two exercises directly after each other
• Triset: Three exercises directly after each other
• Giant set: Four or more exercises directly after each other

Pre-Exhaust

When you do a compound exercise like bench press, often the supporting muscles such as triceps and shoulders get fatigued earlier than the muscle group you’re actually training at that moment, the chest. Compound exercises are popular (and rightly so) because they teach your body to work the right muscles together to perform a movement efficiently.

However, for muscle mass, you want to specifically target, in this example, the chest muscles as heavy as possible. Therefore, after the compound exercise(s), you often do isolated exercises that eliminate as many other muscle groups as possible. With pre-exhaust, you reverse this and do them directly after each other (as a superset). For example, you first do flyes and then bench press. Due to the flyes, the chest muscles are already fatigued so that during bench press, the chest muscles are trained to failure and give up earlier than shoulders and triceps.

For legs, for example, you can follow leg extensions with squats (both for quadriceps, see image) or leg curls with deadlifts (for the hamstrings). For triceps, you can do pressdowns followed by dips.

Personal Differences: Athletes and Couch Potatoes

The difference between what your body does during a workout and what it could do varies from person to person, from day to day, and from muscle group to muscle group. A significant difference between athletes and non-athletes often lies in the fact that many athletes have learned at a young age to push themselves until they’re tired and then keep going. This is a principle that many non-athletes often don’t understand. They often enter the gym in middle age because father time, the mirror, and hundreds of unanswered messages on dating sites force them to do something about their figure. Once in the gym, they don’t understand why the results aren’t coming while they’re diligently “dieting”. Besides not having a clue about nutrition and starting on these rubbish diets, a large part of the problem lies in the fact that they start with a handicap and have never learned to push themselves which makes it difficult to catch up. Besides the lack of the right mindset, they often also have a disadvantage because they have accumulated extra fat cells in their youth that will never disappear (but can get smaller) and have not laid a foundation for strength training.

“Why Run When I Can Walk?”, “Why Take the Stairs When There Is an Elevator?”

One person has learned to go to the extreme, while for another, this is an unknown, almost unnatural concept. I’ve had colleagues who didn’t understand why I trained so often and heavily and was constantly concerned about my diet while I didn’t understand why they waited two minutes for the elevator for one floor instead of taking the stairs (but keep complaining that “they could lose some weight”). Many bodybuilders have a sports background and know what it’s like to train hard and heavy and keep going when you’re exhausted. In our youth, we often had a coach who encouraged us to keep going and to run the fastest lap around the football field or to do that killer/suicide run one more time during basketball training. In the gym, you have to push yourself. This doesn’t mean that without a sports background, you can’t build muscle mass or become a bodybuilder. However, you will have to work harder for this than someone who has played sports their whole youth knows how to push themselves to the extreme and has less fat to lose. I know plenty of examples of people who have never played sports, walk into the gym, immediately get addicted, and work harder than anyone else. And that’s a good thing because due to the handicap, they also have to do more, even when the desired result has already been achieved (fat comes back faster in their case). If you have such a sports disadvantage but still want to become that muscular Adonis, you just have to “flip that switch”. Or as Nike says: “Just do it, bitch”

Summary: Is It Worth Training to Muscle Failure?

• To grow in muscle mass, you must give your muscles more load than they can handle at that moment.
• To be able to do this, mentally you must be able to push yourself physically to the extreme.
• For muscle growth, the relative load on the muscles is more important than the weight moved. In other words, intensity and weight are not always synonymous.
• Continue to vary your training methods to keep your muscles stimulated.
• Go beyond the point of failure by using techniques such as forced repetitions, cheating, drop sets, super-, tri-, and giant sets, accelerated repetitions, and half repetitions.
• Regardless of background, anyone can successfully build muscle mass. However, the later you learn to push yourself athletically, the harder it becomes to achieve the desired results later in life.

References

1. McNair et al. Verbal encouragement: effects on maximum effort voluntary muscle: action. Br J Sports Med. 1996 September; 30(3): 243–245. PMCID: PMC1332340
2. Andreacci et al. The effects of frequency of encouragement on performance during maximal exercise testing. J Sports Sci. 2002 Apr;20(4):345-52.
3. Brzycki, Matt (1998). A Practical Approach To Strength Training. McGraw-Hill.
4. Baechle TR, Earle RW, Wathen D (2000). Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, 2: 395-425.
5. dos Remedios R (2007) Men’s Health Power Training, Rodale Inc. 23.
6. Alexandra M. Coates, Anthony V. Incognito, Jeremy D. Seed, Connor J. Doherty, Philip J. Millar, Jamie F. Burr. Three Weeks of Overload Training Increases Resting Muscle Sympathetic Activity. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2018; 50 (5): 928 DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000001514