The Case AGAINST Failure Training

But is it really that simple? Does going to failure actually reduce the things that need to be worried about? Or is it all just smoke-and-mirrors? 

Let’s now turn to my friends over at the PubMed Collective to let their side of the story breathe a little: 

We’ve established that training to failure has some pretty undeniable benefits if our goals revolve in any way around being the biggest and strongest we can be. But we need to put these benefits in perspective and weigh the downsides as well. 

Without a doubt, the argument against failure with the most validity is that it carries a poor risk-versus-reward. In other words, taking sets to failure will most definitely create a larger stimulus (as we’ve established in the previous section) but it will also increase the chance of injury. There are going to be multiple underlying reasons why this occurs, from the muscular to the neural to the random, but it’s unarguable that more bad shit tends to happen with proximity to failure. Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to be an effect that scales along with effective reps. The instance of injury seems to act more exponentially once technical failure has been achieved rather than scaling logarithmically. Basically, shit gets dangerous when you get close to failure. And sometimes the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. 

This risk is present with every exercise, from Barbell Squats to Biceps Curls. But there are clearly certain movements that have an outsized associated risk when taken to failure. To demonstrate this point, I like to use Barbell Goodmornings as an example. Would you feel comfortable taking a GM to failure? What about spotting your training partner as they do? What about prescribing it to an in-person client? What about a remote client? You can see how this chain of risk gets more fragile the further extended it gets. Personally, I wouldn’t even be confident taking a set of GMs to failure myself much less recommending that a client do so. There are just too many things that can go wrong even for the technically-proficient athlete. And once we establish a variation like the Barbell Goodmorning on one side of this risk continuum, it’s not hard to start placing other movements along it as well. Would we say that a Barbell RDL is a good candidate for failure? What about Bench Press? Pull-Ups? Leg Curls? You get the point…Not every movement even meets the pre-requisites to be considered to be taken to failure—Which immediatel;y calls into question blanket recommendations and context-less statements like “Every set should be taken to failure”.  

Though not as acutely destructive or detrimental as suffering an injury, the silent effects associated with unchecked fatigue accumulation can be just as damaging over the long term. And consistently training to failure is an easy way to compound a ton of central and peripheral fatigue rapidly! When properly managed, this actually tends to not be too much of a problem. Eating sufficient calories, getting restful sleep, and balancing the increased intensity against related training variables (i.e. volume) allows for some leeway with a failure-centric approach. But if there is anything I’ve learned about gym rats, it’s that they’re really bad at eating enough food, getting enough sleep, and balancing their training. So expecting anything in the way of moderation or oversight or pragmatism is probably going to be expecting too much. And for these reasons, it’s often better to plan accordingly for fatigue mismanagement. Allowing unrestrained (or worse, unsupervised) failure training is like holding a beach ball underwater—you can’t keep it submerged and under control forever. 

As a point for failure, I mentioned that the objective end-point is much easier to hit compared to the floating target that comes with trying to adhere to a specific sub-max intensity. But that wasn’t exactly the whole story…Failure can only be objective for those who know what to look and feel for. And the reality is that MANY trainees have no clue what failure actually is. If you don’t believe me, just tell someone to go to failure on Leg Press with a load that would be about their 20 rep max. You’ll quickly see how distorted most peoples’ views of their own training intensity are. I’ve even had new clients send me videos of their “failure” sets that wouldn’t even qualify for a working set by any reasonable measure! The target of failure isn’t enough for most without any prior reference. It’s not enough to program “AMRAP” and expect it to actually be carried out as intended. For some, this is a fixable problem once real failure is experienced. For others, they will never be able to consistently push themselves that hard. And rather than expecting people to develop innate masochistic personality traits overnight, sometimes it’s easier and more effective to modify the program around the individual instead of vice versa. 

While the above points certainly weaken the FOR case, it is the intrinsically unsustainable nature of failure that ultimately provides the final stamp of disapproval on the argument. We can all agree that sporadically training like a lunatic can be beneficial (even if accidentally), but there is a reason why the motivation to push that hard tends to ebb and flow: our bodies aren’t designed to be redlined for long durations of time. Evolutionarily, we’re optimized for bursts of high-intensity effort and output followed by periods of recovery and rest. As overplayed as the analogy is, it’s useful to think about the parallels between our ancestors hunting big game followed by their enjoying the spoils of a successful conquest—kind of like a sprint. Or conversely, we’re also pretty good at doing a LOT of low-to-moderate intensity work as long as it stays below a specific threshold. For this, we can imagine those same ancestors tracking a herd of potential food across the Serengeti for multiple days—this is more akin to a marathon. However, what we’re not very good at is maintaining a sprint for any significant amount of time. High intensity demands a correspondingly high amount of recovery in humans (at least, until we evolve into our meta-human, machine-augmented form). 

Wrapping back around to how these biological and physiological restrictions impact our ability to get really jacked, consider that taking every set to failure poses the exact same unrealistic and impossible expectations on our bodies as sustaining an all-out sprint across the grasslands after a very determined-to-live wildebeest. We can max our systems out for a short burst then rest, or we can maintain a moderate effort for longer durations. But we can’t do both—it’s literally science. And attempting to outsmart science doesn’t seem very smart to me. 

In summary, training to failure results in:
1. Poor risk-versus-reward ratio
2. Fatigue accumulation
3. Subjectivity of “failure”
4. Lack of sustainability
5. Potential for diminishing returns