Calm down I don’t mean that you’re actually going to fail. Well, your muscles might, to a certain extent. But YOU won’t be doing any failing anytime soon. Training until muscular failure is just about as intense as it sounds. If your up for the challenge, it’s a great tool to gain muscular endurance and lean muscle mass. The secret is to use this tool correctly. So, in order to get ready to train until failure, I need to give you a quick overview and some pointers.
Who Does That Anyways?
Training to muscular failure is probably more of a bodybuilding tool than anything, but anyone can utilize it. If you were here with me last week I was talking about the most important concept in exercise, called progressive overload.
Basically, lifting until muscular failure is one of the ways in which you can achieve progressive overload by ramping up the intensity of your lift.
To get optimal results it shouldn’t be done everyday. That would be similar to maxing out with the heaviest weight possible everyday. It just doesn’t make sense.
How To Implement It
Safety always comes first, so you always want to make sure that a spotter is available. The spotter’s job is to keep you safe by making sure that you’re using good form, and helping you at the point of failure if you need it.
When I say the word “failure” the image in a lot of minds might be the weights crashing down and almost crushing your head and/or foot of the person next to you…..That’s completely false.
The idea of going until muscular failure is pushing your body to the point where you literally can’t physically do one more repetition while keeping perfect form.
As soon as you’re form starts to go out the window, or you start to cheat and do “forced reps”, your set is officially over.
A good way to start is by getting a warm-up set that you can do pretty easily for about 12-15 reps.
For the first working set, pick a weight that you can do for about 10-12 repetitions. Ideally you want to be hitting the point of failure on the last rep.
In between each set, give yourself at least 2 minutes to rest. You need to recover as much as possible in between each set so you can give max effort every time.
On every following set you can keep increasing the weight, while decreasing the number of reps that you’re expecting to achieve until you hit that failure point.
Careful Now!
We talked about not doing this every day. The reason being is that your muscles will get a pretty good beat down. If you’re training to failure on the same muscle groups constantly, you may risk overtraining. Conversely, to get enough rest in between these types of training sessions, your probably taking too many days off.
Sometimes I use this in a grande finale workout before you know for a fact that you will have a day of rest. Otherwise, the results may backfire on you.
At the end of the day, training to muscular failure is a fantastic tool that can be used in almost any weightlifting program. It’s really effective in attaining progressive overload, which is basically the ultimate goal in order to physically improve. I hope this article helped you get ready to train until failure. If you enjoyed it, please share it on facebook. You might want to also take a look at another way to gain strength using the 5×5.
About Adam Pegg
