What is Failure?
First, you need to understand that we’re talking about muscular failure and what it means. Not when it feels hard and uncomfortable, muscular failure is when you can’t complete another repetition despite giving maximal effort with good form. Once you understand what failure is then you need to experience it for yourself to gauge intensity.
Should You Go to Failure?
If your goal is to build muscle then failure is a tool that you can use to help maximize your muscle gain. Whilst going through muscular failure all the time to build muscle isn’t necessary. Read on to learn more.
5 Scenarios when you should go to failure
#1 When You’ve Never Experienced Failure
You have to experience true failure on each exercise to be able to gauge your intensity level. Most of the time you’ll be working within 2-3 reps of failure, but you won’t know what this feels like if you’ve never reached true failure.
#2 When Using Lighter Weights
Using lighter weights gives less mechanical tension so you have to train at or very close to failure most of the time when using them.
#3 When Using Machines & Isolation Exercises
If you want to go to failure it’s best to do so where you are stable, don’t need a spotter, and use lighter weights. Machines meet the first two criteria and isolation exercises will use lighter weights.
#4 On Your Final Set
Going to failure from your first set will hinder the number of reps you can perform on subsequent sets. This will negatively impact the total number of reps (volume) that you can achieve compared to had you left 2-3 reps in reserve on the preliminary sets.
#5 When You’re Peaking
If you’re following a periodized program and you’re coming towards the end of a block of training then the goal is to overreach or peak before lowering intensity before embarking on a new phase of training.
This is done by building intensity from week to week so as you come into the final weeks of training you may want to take advantage of this and ramp up the intensity by going to failure on each exercise.
Certain exercises are not suited for going to failure for safety reasons and the barbell back squat is a prime example of this. So when it comes to compound exercises with free weights choose wisely
