The old-school training mindset is when you go into the gym, you need to be prepared to absolutely crush yourself during every workout to see progress.
I’m here to tell you to stop.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against hard work. If you have your sights set on getting stronger and building muscle, you should absolutely be prepared to push yourself and work hard in the gym.
But pushing yourself to the point of failure is something to keep in your back pocket as a tool that can be used occasionally.
So why is this?
Well, in my opinion it centers around three concepts:
- Progress
- Recovery
- Safety
Progress
First off, you want to be able to progress in what you’re doing in the gym. If you’re pressing using 50-pound dumbbells, eventually you want to work your way towards using 55’s, then 60’s, and so on.
This really applies to just about every exercise. If you are blasting yourself with AMRAPS (as many reps as possible) for each and every set, you’re not going to be able to progress.
You’d be better off with a more structured training program with prescribed set/rep schemes that trend in the direction of progress. Otherwise, you’re just throwing around weight to throw around weight, and you’re going to find that progress plateaus quickly.
Oftentimes, you’ll see a fitness celebrity or a workout program promote doing reps to failure. It looks intense, and it certainly gets results in the short term. That’s why these concepts or programs “work,” in theory.
BUT, the problem is for most people this training style does not promote sustainable progress over time. Incorporating things like AMRAPS are a great tool for quick progress, but it’s not going to lead to long-term progress.
Recovery
A large part of the reason progress over time is not sustainable when constantly training to failure is because we just simply cannot recover from the volume of training that style of training promotes.
Put more simply, we can only recover from a certain amount of reps and sets each workout.
How many sets and reps can we recover from? The tricky thing is, there isn’t a set number. The answer to this question is going to be different to each and every person based on their training experience, lifestyle, genetics, and more.
A good place to start is with the training volume landmarks by Renaissance Periodization. Those will give you an idea of where to start and where to progress with your training in terms of what we can recover from and how much training is simply too much.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re all very different and can handle different amounts of training. Your “average joe” most likely just cannot handle training each body part to failure every week, for weeks on end. A big reason for that is most people don’t have good lifestyle habits in place to support that level of training.
By lifestyle habits, I mean most people aren’t eating enough protein or calories, they aren’t hydrating appropriately, nor are they getting adequate sleep on a daily basis.
It’s just too much for our bodies to handle on a regular basis.
Safety
Finally, we need to think about safety. This is mostly applied to more novice lifters, but it can apply to everyone in some way, shape, or form.
Constantly training to failure means you’re pushing your body to its absolute limit on a regular basis. There’s a heightened risk of a muscle pull, strain, tear, etc. when training like this.
It just might not be worth it to train this way, given the potential for injury. Again, I can’t stress enough that a properly structured program with progression built it is going to be your best bet to not only achieve progress, but in this case to also stay safe.
How Can We Apply Training to Failure?
After breaking all of that down, it might sound like I’m advocating against training to failure completely, under any circumstances.
That’s actually not true. I think training to failure can be an effective tool to use occasionally.
Figuring out the situations in which training to failure makes sense is key.
I’ve mentioned a few times that we all need properly structured programming. That program should have built-in progress. Accompanying that progress, training to failure (or AMRAPS) can be a tool to determine progress.
With some of my clients, I’ll use AMRAPS on a given exercise to determine if we can go up in weight from week to week. If a client is routinely smashing a certain exercise with relative ease, we might do an AMRAP on it to see just how many reps he or she can get. That could lead us to possibly increase the weight or volume for future training sessions.
I also think we can have programmed blocks of training where we’re training to failure regularly — this is called overreaching. However, that’s for a specified amount of time, and then we eventually should bring the volume back down.
By now, you should get the picture.
We should not regularly train to failure. As the title of this article says, it’s training to fail.
However, we can use it as a tool within a properly structured program.
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Have questions about training, AMRAPS, or setting up a program? Contact me, and let’s talk about if coaching might be for you!
Thanks for reading!
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CGF