Weight Training

I currently am working my muscles to failure one day, and doing alternating sets the…

Dan's answer

Dan Wirth, MA, CSCS

Hello, Training to failure is sometimes hard to gage. Does it mean training until you are really fatigued? Does it mean training until you can't lift another rep (positive failure) and then stopping arbitrarily whenever this failure occurs? Or, does it mean training with the use of negative repetitions (done after positive failure is achieved) until even negative failure is reached (no movement at all is possible). You also have to look at the individual motivation level and physical training status to know whether or not they are even capable of achieving this type of intensity. I would venture to say that most people can't and actually don't want to train in the failure zone. You have to have a certain amount of fatigue in order to create a stimulus great enough to elicit an appropriate adaptation signal in your muscles and central nervous system. But this does not mean that the stimulus has to create complete muscular failure. In fact, it's best if most of the time it doesn't. With all of the people I have trained, both athletes and non-athletes, I have found that it is best not to go to complete muscular failure with the use of negative repetitions more than once every three to four weeks. Don't misunderstand what I have just written. I still have these people train hard but with the focus on actually completing the set and rep structure of the program. This way there is a much greater control over the specific volume and intensity parameters of the program that is being administered. This volume and intensity control is important because it provides for a more consistent or predictable recovery and adaptation process. And, this ultimately means that the workout is more precise to the individual allowing progress to be maximized and overtraining or injury to be minimized. You mentioned your concern with "pre-determined" sets in a workout and how if the sets were pre-determined then your muscles would adapt to the workout and therefore stop progressing or growing. This would be true if the pre-determined sets in your workouts were always the same thing. If you always did 3 sets of 10 repetitions then obviously you would be compromising your bodies need for variability. I hope you can see that this is very easy to fix. You simply need to be on a program where the set and rep combinations change (in a pre-determined way!) to offer a great level of variability and new training stimuli for maximizing results. These organized changes in volume and intensity is actually known as "Periodization". Thanks for your great questions, Dan