Training to Failure
This blog post will discuss the applicability of training to failure, and describe tools that you can easily apply to training to help you progress, using proximity to failure as a method of progression.
It starts with a necessary definition of Absolute vs Technical failure
Technical failure is a breakdown in technique such as positioning or tempo. This means you can still do reps past technical failure - although not often advised which will be discussed, for this newsletter this will be the key term that we use to measure failure.
Absolute failure is the point where we can no longer perform the movement regardless of technique, this may occur more frequently in isolated movements, if it happens in a compound movement you need to be able to spot or bail effectively for it to be safe… we’ve all heard the bench press stories.
Where and when these types of failure occur will be different based on freshness, psychological arousal, stimulants and at what stage of the session you are performing the exercise which makes using load alone a difficult predictor of when you might hit or exceed technical failure.
What are you training for & application
What you are training for is a key question when deciding how hard to push, and what technical failure actually looks like in the context of the quality you are developing.
Below describes our thoughts on how close to failure you should be for various qualities, along with what failure might look like...
1. Speed/Rate of force development
Essentially this describes how quickly you can produce force, essential for various sports and movements such as striking, sprinting, jumping and dynamic gymnastics skills.
Quite simply you have reached technical failure here if you slow down. Hence why there are accounts of sprinters resting 10+ minutes between reps, in order to replenish creatine-phosphate stores and sprint just as fast again.
Unless the emphasis here is on building co-ordination to allow more force in less time, in the right direction you will train up to technical failure most of the time here, as the gains to be had here will be when you're moving as fast as possible.
2. Strength
Although there are various forms of strength, here we’ll define strength as moving a heavy object, quite slowly - think heavy deadlift, squat or weighted pull up.
Contrary to popular opinion, strength does not need to be trained at or above failure to be developed to its fullest (Grgic et al., 2022)
Instead, being a few reps short of failure, whilst hitting adequate repetitions stimulates high motor unit recruitment (electrical impulse sent from CNS to working muscles) in order to stimulate strength adaptations.
Worth noting, training to failure was not at a detriment, so it becomes a choice where you train close to, or at failure - Therefore our recommendation here would be to train to failure irregularly in a handful of sessions across the month to stay psychologically comfortable expressing one's full effort whilst not wasting adaptive capacity that can be induced by hitting failure, instead sparing it for other exercises or training sessions.
3. Hypertrophy
This can be described as an increase in the cross sectional area of a muscle or muscle fibre, the larger the increase the more hypertrophy has occurred.
Once again training to failure does not seem to be necessary for gains, even in experienced athletes, but can be used conservatively such as in the last set (AMRAP set) or in a periodised cycle to manage the stimulus to fatigue ratio (Schoenfeld et al., 2021).
Similar to strength we recommend training to failure irregularly here, especially for compound exercises, either multiple times in a month or for a selection of reps for primary exercises, you can get away with more failure based training for isolated or machine exercises but it may not give you an advantage over staying a few reps short.
4. Local muscular endurance
This is a muscle's ability to keep contracting at a submaximal intensity for a period of time, typically longer than 30 seconds, seen in endurance sports such as rowing, running or swimming. You can train a muscle to failure when seeking developing muscular endurance, due to the lower potency of the stimulus, however once again progressively increasing volume load (total reps at a given intensity) may be a more important priority than training to failure itself.
Muscular endurance can be developed through practicing the mode of endurance itself, with other training providing a useful stimulus for parts of the body that are not stimulated to the same degree during the endurance training, but may help to maintain good efficiency and reduce risk of injury. We don’t feel that training to failure or not is worth too much discussion here as such exercises would normally come at the later part of a session where training to failure may be stunted by psychological factors, and not cause a strong enough stimulus to effect the following training days.
5. Testing
Testing can be used to measure progress of certain qualities, and compare effects to previous scores or to others scores in order to establish the impact of a training program. If using RPE/RIR methods effectively (Discussed in next section) testing can become a little redundant as you can regularly predict fluctuations in your performance, however we do see merit to testing seasonally in order to break up the monotony of training and provide psychological stimulation.
Testing should be completed to technical failure on all but endurance tests where absolute failure can be reached.
6. Competing
Competition is where you let your hair down, the constraints of technique and effort regulation disappear and you see what you’re made of. If you train with discipline and prepare tactically and psychologically you should be able to outperform your training-self in competition, to us that is a sign of a good competitor.
So of course you can push to absolute failure so long as it fits your strategy for the competition and is safe for you to do so at that time.
Tools to control effort
RPE & Rep accumulation
This brings us to the most crucial piece of this discussion; how to monitor, prescribe and control effort.
We use RPE to prescribe what effort to apply to a given exercise and session, this stands for Rate of Perceived exertion and is essentially telling you how close you should be to technical failure (See table below).
Quite simply if you are at 10 RPE you can do no more reps, 9 you can squeeze out 1, 8 then 2.. Etc etc. The exception comes from rate of force development (RFD) where you move as fast as possible, if you slow down, lose position etc then you stop, and either wait a few breaths before doing a few more or take a complete rest of 2+ minutes.
This works hand in hand with our previously discussed rep accumulation method, where we set a number of reps to accumulate, instead of prescribing sets. This allows each set you do to adhere to the RPE set without the constraints of a predetermined number of reps per set that may not reflect your ability for that given day.
Finally in terms of monitoring, you should record the reps per set and load used in order to track your performance over time. If for example you do 5 reps with 100kg @RPE 9 on a front squat on a day, and then 10 reps @RPE 7 at the same weight 3 months later you have made considerable strength gains.
Research & Round up
We hope these thoughts on training to failure help your training process and bring a greater awareness to your effort and techincal ability.
Below there is a handful of papers you can take a look at if you want to explore this topic further.
