I have been doing weight training for a long time, with some minimal instruction from personal trainers. I have always been told to perform reps to failure–until I cannot complete another rep maintaining form. My son is now in a high school fitness class taught by a highly qualified strength training coach. He tells them to perform a number of reps that is about three fewer than what would take them to failure. I asked him about that last night and he said that the only people who should be doing reps to failure are professional athletes. Otherwise it’s too much stress on the central nervous system and too much risk of injury. (FTR I have never had an injury doing weightlifting.)
To failure or not: Your thoughts?
Also, what is the best way to structure a series of sets? I had one trainer suggest that you should increase the weight after each set, allowing muscles to warm up as the weight ramps up. I have heard another trainer advise starting with your heaviest weight so that the muscle is worked hardest while it still has the most energy available, then ramp down to continue the sets. Then I hear about “pyramid sets” where you ramp up to the max, then back down, for a total of maybe 4-5 sets.
What is the relative wisdom of each of these approaches?
As far as training to failure goes, it depends on your goals. If you want muscle growth, you need to balance training to failure against your need to recover. If you are strong enough, it is easy to overtax your recovery systems. It also depends on your age - I find I cannot train to failure more than once a week or so for any given muscle group without overtraining.
For strength, your son’s coach is correct - you do not train to failure when trying to build strength. “Leave one or two in the tank to grow on”. Again, this is for recovery, plus you never want to practice missing a lift. For strength you want relatively high numbers of sets, heavy weight, and low reps (1-5 reps). 10 sets of 3 with 85-90% of your 5 rep maximum is a common regimen for strength.
Whatever works for you and for your goals. Ramping up is probably best for strength, ramping down for muscle growth, pyramiding up is an attempt at both - the “pump set” after your heaviest set is supposed to flush the muscle with fluid for growth and stimulate the releast of human growth hormone.
Personally I do one light and one medium set to warm up and then 3-5 heavy sets with a constant weight. But the light and medium sets are very quick - I don’t want to burn myself out warming up.
There’s very little in the world of resistance training that is scientifically settled, and a lot depends on your goals.
The important variables seem to be intensity (i.e., number of reps times weight of each rep), number of reps per set, length of rest periods between sets, exercise selection, and most of all progressive loading (increasing the weight a little each workout or periodically). Rep schemes and how hard to push on that last rep probably aren’t major factors.
I don’t think there’s really much evidence that going to failure matters, unless that’s necessary for you to push yourself to 90% or 95%. If you have the experience and discipline to push up to but not to failure, that probably is marginally safer. But it definitely is important to push yourself hard, especially if you’re training for strength.
Similarly, there’s not much evidence about set structure except that warm-up sets are probably good. They get blood flowing and give you an opportunity to practice good form before the weight goes on (or realize that you have a rock in your shoe!). But as for whether to do work sets then drop sets, or pyramid–there’s not much evidence to go on.
What works best depends on the person and… warning: scientifically unverified personal opinion ahead… that person willingness/ability/desire to suffer.
I’ve spent most of my life in the gym. Tried everything. Still trying new things as they come along. Best results I ever got, and still get, is going to failure on most sets. I’ve heard (but can’t be sure how common this is) that the current training philosophy is that going to failure every time is ‘for professionals only’. That’s BS. Stopping short of exhaustion is probably something being advised out of an abundance of caution.
Train at the effort level you find suits you best. If you’re not achieving your goals, you’re probably under training. If you’re finding you’re suffering repeated injuries, you’re probably overdoing it.
Personally I side more with the coach. I dunno about leaving three in the tank, I usually leave one or two, but if you constantly go to failure you are setting yourself up for injury. Also, I remember reading something an article or something comparing two groups of trained people, one going to failure and the other not - the group going to failure didn’t have as much strength gains as the other. Of course, this was several years ago, so take that with a grain of salt.
All this aside, I will occasionally train to failure as a means of growth. It’s not something that I do often.
This all depends on your goals, your workout program, and how your body personally responds. I tend to do a percentage based workout (5/3/1), so every month some of my lifts will go up by 5 or 10 pounds - but my primary focus is strength.
Some programs have you do a set weight (starting strength, strong lifts, Icecream fitness) after you warm up (so 5 sets of the same weight and every workout you increase by 5 or 10 pounds). Some programs are based off percentages.
As others have said, it depends significantly on your goals. Personally, I generally prefer working out to failure, but not on every set. From my experience, the most essential difference between working out to failure or not is maintaining form. So often, people who work out to failure will sacrifice form somewhat in order to get that extra rep, and improper form and switching loads around is what tends to cause injury. Even still, if I were to aim for something less than failure, I feel that about three less than failure is probably too far off, for most of my work outs, if I were to stop that soon, I don’t think I’d feel very satisfied.
As for how you should structure your sets. I’m a big fan of pyramids, going from lower weight higher rep to higher weight lower rep. I like it because it allows for a balance between both of those and provides some warm up before getting into the heavier weight. Then again, my goals are about maintenance, I’m happy with my strength, mass, and body composition. If I wanted to get stronger, I’d focus more on heavier sets.
There are some exercises where I do start at high weight and work down, after a set or two of lighter weight to warm up, but these tend to be muscles where my goal is about improving muscular stamina. Like core, for instance, I’ll start with more resistance and as I reach exhaustion, I’ll drop some weight and keep going. Experientially, it’s a much different feel to than the other way around.
Way back in high school, my football coach use to personally spot me and make me do at least three forced reps at the end of each set (usually three-five sets total for each exercise, not counting a light warm up set).
I think I gained about 15 lbs over 2-3 months. I was sixteen years old and probably had naturally high levels of testosterone and GH from the tail end of puberty and the soreness was usually gone by the end of the next day.
How did you know I was a slacker? He had an interesting comment that I had all the tools to play DI football except for upper body strength–but colleges didn’t recruit for that because “they’ll lock you in the weight room and make you strong”.
Yeah, but these were forced reps after failure (usually 8-10 reps), where he would give me just enough help to finish the rep. I was wondering what the current thinking was on doing these.
I was his best prospect and he was a “no pain, no gain” kinda guy. He told me that forced reps resulted in the biggest gains because you’re forcing your muscles to work as had as they possibly can because you’re already past the point of failure on your own.
FWIW the American College of Sports Medicine Guideline is more about discussing what percent of 1 RM to do and varying the number of reps (and exercises) than lifting to failure per se.
The more cogent point is that for a novice almost any program with good form will work. The advanced lifter will do more lifting at a higher percent of 1 RM. Most in High School are novices and better to minimize injury risk by lieaving some in the bank while emphasizing perfect form over all.
Personally I am convinced by those who argue that any lifting to failure should be saved for the last set of the day. But heck any heavy weight low rep set is going to be lifting to near failure.
Pyramids and forced reps have been mentioned … what do y’all think is the place of dropped sets (reverse pyramids)? That is lifting to almost to failure heavy and then dropping weight for a few more until near failure, then dropping a bit more weight?
Form is important, form breaks down at high reps, therefore training to failure is not ideal. Besides, if you’re trying to get measurably stronger, “AMRAP” gets in the way. Keep the sets and reps consistent, and aim for incremental increases in the weight on the bar. Fatigue and soreness are not your friends. Consistent improvement and plenty of recovery are.
That way you can measure improvement: Yesterday I squatted 275 for 3 sets of 5 reps. Today I squatted 280 for 3 sets of 5 reps. But if yesterday I squatted 275 10 times, and today I squat 280 6 times, did I get stronger? How the hell do I know?
Keep it consistent. Sets of five work really well to get people strong so I’d suggest starting there. (Also, those are the “work sets”. Don’t forget to throw a few warm up sets in there first.)
There’s no point in going as hard as you can today if you have to take it easy on your next few sessions while you recover. Leave some gas in your tank and come back in a couple days refreshed. Lift more later.
This is the classic “rookie mistake” committed by those eager to jump-start their lifting routines. They start at 110%, wake up unable to move the next day or three, say “fuck this shit” and quit.
Assuming that coach is teaching a novice class the following from that statement is most applicable:
For a novice meta-analyses show that averaging 60% of 1 RM is associated with greatest strength increases and “technique is paramount.” Doing that for 8 to 12 reps is the basic model and Experienced lifters may need to go to 80% of 1RM to make much progress. Increase the load by 2 to 10% (lower for small muscle mass exercises, larger for large muscle mass exercises), they say, when the person can perform one to two reps over the desired range on two consecutive sessions. Not sure if that implies those sets are to near failure or not though.
Again, their take for the intermediate and advanced strength focused lifter, FWIW , is not to keep it so consistent: “using a variety of training loads is most conducive to maximizing strength.” Vary between sets that range from 1 to 12 reps in a periodized fashion with an eventual emphasis on heavier sets.In particular they seem to be fans of “undulating periodization” - rotating either systematically or randomly between 3 to 5 RM, 8 to 10 RM, and 12 to 15 RM load sets.
Note that there are slightly different recommendations to maximize hypertrophy. Hypertrophy, strength, and power are not all equally well served by the same approaches and are different things.
Probably though QuickSilver has nailed it the best. The guideline goes into detail about what the science is but the science is not so deep and it is reasonable to trump that with personal actual experience of what works for you. The emphasis at a High School fitness level without doubt is on mastery of perfect form; you do not need to risk injury or overtraining to see huge benefits there.
