What is muscle failure
Muscle failure is state, in which a person cannot complete a repetition with a given weight and in full amplitude. It occurs as a result of fatigue – central or peripheral.
When the central nervous system (CNS) gets tired, the excitability of motor neurons, the nerve cells that send signals to muscles to contract, decreases. Muscle failure can also cause local or peripheral fatigue. In this case, the muscle fibers themselves become tired, for example, the products of anaerobic metabolism accumulate in them and interfere with their work.
Approaches to muscle failure can indeed be useful, but not for everyone and only under certain conditions.
When is it worth training to failure?
If you are an experienced athlete and want to increase your strength
Untrained beginner muscles get the right incentive for growth somewhere for 3–5 repetitions to failure. Then a plateau occurs and greater stimulus does not increase hypertrophy.
By training to failure, you are simply wasting your energy, tiring your nervous system and increasing the risk of injury, which is especially true for beginners who are unfamiliar with proper technique.
But for trained athletes, it makes sense to perform “point-blank” approaches. This technique forces the trained muscles activate more fibers and provides faster growth in force.
If you want to build muscle at home by lifting light weights
When you perform an exercise at high intensity, 80-100% of your one-repetition maximum (1RM), the body immediately tenses all muscle fibers to lift that heavy weight. But when you work with less serious weights, 30–50% of 1R, in the first repetitions only part of the muscle fibers are activated.
Therefore, low intensity does not lead to significant muscle hypertrophy: some of the fibers that are left without work will not receive a stimulus for growth and will not increase in size.
Training to muscle failure will help increase hypertrophy when working with light equipment. As fatigue accumulates, the body will have to connect more and more fibers to continue moving. So in the last reps before failure, all muscle fibers will work. They will receive the necessary load and will grow the same way. effectivelyas if you were lifting a heavy weight.
However, this is only suitable for developing muscle mass. To build strength, you still have to work at high intensity.
If you don’t train very often
Recovery is an important part of the training process. Loads provide a stimulus for growth, but hypertrophy itself occurs during the rest period. Therefore, in order for muscles to grow, it is important to give your body enough time to recover, otherwise at least part of your efforts will be wasted. Training to failure slows recovery for 24–48 hours.
This means that point-blank approaches will not suit you if you train a muscle group every other day: they simply will not have time to recover.
Another thing is splits, in which each muscle group is loaded 1-2 times a week. With this regimen, you will have time to recover and benefit from training to failure.
In addition, it is worth paying attention to another factor that slows down recovery – age. The older we get, the slower the body recovers, so it is better for older people not to use approaches to failure.
If working to failure suits you, you still shouldn’t use it in every workout and in every exercise: this is fraught with overtraining and injuries. There are several rules that will help you use the technique correctly and receive only benefits.
How to ensure that training to failure brings only benefits
Use the method for simple movements
At the beginning of the article, we said that fatigue of the central nervous system reduces the excitability of motor neurons, as a result of which the command to contract simply does not reach some fibers. In this case, part of the muscle remains unused, the fibers do not experience mechanical stress and do not receive a stimulus for growth.
Therefore, we must try to keep the nervous system fresh for as long as possible.
Training to muscle failure puts a lot of stress on the central nervous system, so you should not use this technique in exercises that already put a serious strain on the nervous system, namely:
- In the explosive elements of weightlifting: snatch and clean and jerk, deadlifts with explosion.
- In complex gymnastics: exercises on the rings and horizontal bar, complex types of pull-ups, inversion lifts, handstand push-ups.
- In multi-joint movements with free weights: deadlifts and bent-over rows, bench and standing presses, squats, lunges and others.
And this applies to all people, including experienced athletes. In one research Trained men performed compound compound movements to muscle failure and, after 10 weeks, had gained less muscle mass than those who did reserve sets.
To failure you can do:
- Single-joint movements with free weights: dumbbell biceps curls, triceps extensions, shoulder flyes.
- Single-joint exercises on simulators: leg bending and extension, calf raises to pump up the calves.
Such movements are less exhausting to the central nervous system, since only one muscle group works in them. When using approaches to failure, the load on the nervous system will be adequate and will not lead to overwork and a decline in performance.
Maintain proper technique
If the technique breaks down during the approach, the exercise becomes dangerous and can lead to muscle damage or other injury. Therefore, it is especially important to correctly recognize when muscle failure occurs.
Failure is when you can’t do a single rep with proper technique.
That is, if for the next dumbbell curl you swing your whole body or do 10 pull-ups with a jerk and a skew to one side, failure has already occurred. Stop on time.
Do not use constantly
It’s best to alternate sets to failure with your regular workouts. For example, you can do four sets with a reserve, and the last one is “point-blank”. This way you will protect the nervous system from overload and at the same time ensure that all muscle fibers are activated.
It is advisable to take into account periodization. For example, you can include sets to failure during peak periods and forget about this technique during recovery training.
What else is useful to know about training? 🧐