Comment by armcat
1 day ago
I thought it was already well understood/researched that it's not the weights that matter, but effectively taking your sets to muscular failure. While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights" there is practical aspects to this - you don't wand to spend hours at the gym, and doing heavy weights at 5-7 reps is sufficient as long as you are close or at muscular failure.
There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.
Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.
The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.
2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest.
As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.
Boring is subjective though. For some like me the ideal weight gives endorphins where as too much feels like cortisol. Too light is sort of nothing. So I aim for that "yeah I pushed something" feeling. Which isn't failure.
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Perfect form isnt a thing, its all a matter of what joint positions you are adapted to produce or reduce force in. So the problem with form breakdown isnt that the position you end up in is dangerous (no, rounding your back some is not bad), but that you are not prepared for the stress in that position.
Its unfortunate that people say deadlifting "wrong" causes injury, while the evidence does not support it. People should not be turned off from lifting heavy by such statements.
What about longer rest periods? For example if I wait 1hr between sets I can do full weight again without dropping down weights with a 2-5min break. In fact I can get multiple more sets in and significantly increase my total volume if I spread a workout over a day (which is easier with WFH). Any thoughts on this? Is there not enough muscle fatigue with this approach?
Hard to stay warmed up that way. What you’re describing is how people tend to get big without the gym (lifting heavy things through the day) but they also tend be pretty active in between (think farm work).
But as long as you’re not going so hard you risk injury, it might be great overall. Could be really good for your mental state.
You might also be interested in reading about Pavel Tsatsouline's "grease the groove".
Your point about the injury risk going up is valid. That being said going to failure and beyond is extremely effective way to train.
As I mentioned in another comment a possibile way to mitigate the risks is to reduce the load and make the exercise harder and increase the time under load by slowing down the exercise.
Also it's a good idea to swap from a higher risk exercise to a safer one to crank out the last reps. For example from squat to leg press.
I think the total volume idea is more flawed than you realise. Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise, just by decreasing the weight, so your high rep caveat is covering up for quite a lot. This is true mathematically for an Epley style model for example.
> Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise
I’m not sure this is true and it might be the opposite. Lactic acid will build up with light weight while trying to hit a volume number that will make it hard for people to finish.
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>While one might think "I can do 50 reps with low weights"
The caveat is that you need anaerobic training. Low enough weight and it’s cardio, you don’t get giant legs by walking to failure for example.
Has anyone really ever walked to failure on a regular basis? I typically have to stop because of blisters not muscle failure. (The furthest I've done is 12 miles with +10% weight.)
I backpack often (usually 8-13% bodyweight in my pack) and during long summer days I can comfortably push well into the 30 mile per day range if there isn't too much vert to slow my pace down. My feet get sore, brain gets tired, and I run out of daylight well before any sort of muscle failure in my legs. If you aren't used to walking from sunrise to sunset doing so would build muscle, but your time would be better spent on a progressive overload leg routine in a gym.
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I used to persistent hunt to failure, ended up with bulky calves and tibialis.
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Check anybody that has done the AT.
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I don't know. All cyclists I know seem to have massive thighs. And these are amateurs who don't do any kind of strength training, just hours and hours of cycling every week.
There's a difference between the guys who cycle Tour de France vs the ones who go around in the velodrome.
The former group is endurance athletes with skinny legs and the latter group is more focused on maximum power. Similar to marathon runners vs sprinters.
The pro velodrome cyclists do tremendous leg training programs specifically to develop the muscles. It's not the cycling that builds that muscle.
>All cyclists I know seem to have massive thighs.
Yeah uphill cycling or sprints probably go anaerobic at times, you can tell because you need to stop from the muscle burning/refusing to move, rather than going out of breath or general tiredness.
Squat training is a must for cyclists. Heck, there are youtube videos of a German competition (squat as many times as you can with your weight on the bar) with high-level competition (powerlifters, strength athletes, OLY lifters). It was overwhelmingly won by the cyclist.
Well you’re not applying much mechanical tension to the quadriceps when “walking to failure”. This is nowhere near analogous.
Well understood, but not widely known. The myths and superstitions around anything health related are frustratingly durable.
The weight does matter. You will never get bigger if you don't add weight to the bar, and you will never get bigger if you only train at 1% of your 1 rep max, no matter the number of reps. Producing a training stimulus requires placing the muscle under sufficient tension (enough weight) enough times to be at or near failure.
Novelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.
They mostly cycle for health (injury prevention) and sanity (not to do the same damn thing).
> bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus
Some will, many won’t. It’s clearly not necessary.
There's also the risk of injury.
At very low reps and high weight, particularly for highly coordinated motions (squats, dips, pull-ups, Pulver press back-extensions), there's a much higher chance for injury due to insufficient support at one or more positions within the entire range of concentric and eccentric efforts by all activated muscles. We all have, at the very least, minor intrinsic asymmetries that need explicit addressing.
There's also intra-set recovery. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, your endo-neuro-muscular system "adapts best" where there is a refractory period for a reset-to-quiescence between exertions.
There is real truth to "muscle memory" and the exclusive way to achieve that (and avoid injury) is through a sufficient amount of well-formed repetitions. The only way to achieve those repetitions is by using a resistance that's sufficiently low.
Asymmetry is normal and you cannot address it (outside of repeatability of movement, aiming for no form degradation during high load).
As long as your movement does not degrade horribly, asymmetry is fine.
Even before strength training, your one arm is dominant, more precise. But this has an effect on your leg as well.
Doing unilateral work will never change that asymmetry. As you get stronger, due to drastically different activations of the nervous system between the sides, you will get slightly different adaptations.
Looking at powerlifters, most of them have visibly different sizes of hip, leg musculature between sides. They even have drastic flexibility differences where one hip goes deeper, or the musculature makes the barbell sit skewed on the back.
To be clear, by "addressing" I did mean altering form and training to lessen the risk of injury due to asymmetry. FWIW, I wear a heal-cup in my right shoe and do additional rotator cuff warm-ups to due minor leg asymmetry and an old injury.
Even Smolov has clear discrepancies in the way his feet are positioned.
Brad Schoenfeld Has been on this body of work for a long time, and he is "Mr. Hypertrophy" in the field. So yes
Fifty is excessive but you’re better-served doing 12-20 reps more than fewer, heavier reps if you’re pushing hypertrophy and already well-trained.
This article claims that's false, that 8-12 at higher weight leads to the same result as 20+ at lower weights.
The research is studying young untrained men. Everyone puts on muscle at mach chicken when untrained.
That matches what I've been told by various personal trainers. 6-8 reps if focusing on strength, ~12 for all round, and 16-18 for size/endurance. Do three sets, weight should be enough that the last couple of reps on the first set are a bit of a struggle. Subsequent sets just push through as far as you can.
This is a common myth that came out of nowhere and has been debunked.
1-5 reps for strength. 5-30 reps for hypertrophy.
Your trainers clearly never read Starting Strength.
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Training to failure for me personally only brought injury and set back my progress by weeks.
If you were a newbie just getting started.. the ligaments and tendons take much longer to strengthen than the muscle. So the muscles getting stronger will outpace the connective tissue.
Second potential issue is too much training vrt recovery.
A good way to add safety margin when training to failure is to reduce the weights and slow down the exercise and increase the time under load.
For example bench press, do 5s down (eccentric), 5s pause (isometric) and then (optionally) 5s press (concentric). Your weights will go way down because this exercise will be so hard. But the stress on the joints and ligaments will be reduced.
What about the old gym adage "training to failure is failing to train" - is there any physiological basis for this, or is it mental, or just a myth?
That’s a Pl/Oly mindset rather than a BB/hypertrophy mindset. Totally valid advice in the right context.
Long story short, failed reps get much more risky and problematic as the weight you’re lifting approaches your 1RM.
Exactly this. When I was in my best shape my deadlift and squat were in/on the way to 2.5-3x my body weight. You don’t want to fail that without a lot of help and safeties.
Note for the uninitiated: That figure is not even impressive or competitive with competition lifters. This is just “guy who put in the time and work” numbers.
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It holds true, but with some caveats.
Generally training to failure is completely fine for say a set of tricep extensions. Generally safe.
However, training to failure on compound lifts like a deadlift or benchpress, or involving sensitive muscles like a shoulder press, isn't.
Technique generally suffers at the point of failure. Making a habit of doing thousands of repetitions in the next decade at the point where technique fails, on an exercise that can mess up your back permanently, or your shoulders, is bad advice.
For these exercises it's better to stop 2 reps short of failure. This is more safe. Also it requires moderate recovery getting you back in the gym quicker, meaning you can compound more incremental improvements in a given training period (say 5 years).
Even then, some still cautiously go to failure to keep an understanding of what their failure point really is. You could go for a PR once or twice a month for example and go to failure, with a proper warmup, spotter etc. But purely for hypertrophy there's not really a point, this is more for strength training.
Generally people that say they train to failure mean 2 reps in reserve. Training to absolute failure on all muscles is very rare and generally advised against.
True. Generally, the more isolated the exercise and the smaller the muscle the "safer" it is to train-to-failure at a higher duty-cycle.
Put another way, you can do crunches to failure every single day, but you'll want to keep some reps in the tank for squats and you'll want to plan on at least 12-24 hours of recovery between squat sessions.
not an expert, 2 years of serious lifting, but this is probably a good adage for the average person from my current understanding
training to failure puts you at higher risk of injury and there are diminishing returns as you approach your 1 rep max and/or failure
hypertrophy can happen with more reps or more weight
strength gains are usually just focused on progressive overload
though, of course, hypertrophy will happen either way and contributes to increased strength, but this seems to be further confirmation that you can gain muscle size either way
It's definitely way more nuanced than that. You have to approach exhaustion to get the body to eventually build strength. But you need to carefully time your rests/deloads and handle plateaus with more volume.
i definitely agree it is more nuanced! might not have communicated it well that in the context of untrained people and beginners that these guidelines will work for quite a while and most of the nuance applies much more once you get past the easy beginner gains
for example, if someone new starts with low weight to work on proper technique and form, and adds weight each week they will continue to both get stronger and to gain muscle
i'd imagine the average person who is casually lifting might not even get to this point and could easily spend a couple of years before really hitting a spot where the nuance is more important
Where could I find more information on proper set timing?
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I’ve never heard that, it’s usually the opposite- people do strip sets and the like to reach failure
Failure also taxes your nervous system and joints which don’t take as kindly to stimulus as muscles do and take longer to recover (or accumulate damage in case of joints)
Not being able to do a rep with proper form is the definition of failure.
How about making muscles fail by stretching them under load?
Depending on what you mean by "fail" and "stretching", that sounds a lot like eccentric training [0] (a.k.a. "negatives"). It's effective but notorious for causing delayed onset muscle soreness.
I trained myself to do pull-ups using this method, repeatedly lowering myself in a controlled motion from the top position while I was too weak to actually pull myself up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentric_training
akshually theres quite some interesting data on this. it has been shown that stretching alone can indeed produce hypertrophy (in birds and humans), but the required protocols are so intense that you wont want to do them (i think its hours in incredibly uncomfortable positions), so dynamic exercise still wins.
One would also expect it not to do as much for strenght, since adaptations are somewhat specific to the training.
There has been a lot of "long length training/partials" information/research in the past couple of years. A very useful information, you should research more (or ask more specific questions).
thats a different thing tho. the term "stretch mediated hypertrophy" is used loosely in many places and i think originally refers to really just hypertrophy caused by the stretch. iirc the lengthened partial gains are not thought to be caused by this mechanism.
Sounds like a great way to injure yourself, also would only work for eccentric motion
To me it doesn't sound much different than "taking your sets to muscular failure".
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> Loads for each set were adjusted to ensure that volitional fatigue was reached within 8–12 and 20–25 repetitions for the HL and LL limbs, respectively
I would argue both categories of the study are about low reps. I don't see how the body would tell the difference between 12 and 25 reps. If you said between 5 and 500, like it has to meaningfully take much longer, otherwise why would doing something so similar have any meaningful difference?
The way I think about it is that nature mostly reacts to order of magnitude changes. 12 to 25 is the same thing.
Like why not make a study to see if its more nutritious to eat dinner in 15 or 20 minutes?
This is spoken like you've never done any reps at all?
There's not much difference in hitting max at 12 and at 25, from anecdotal experience. The study corroborated that as well, even though with small n.
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I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do. Although typically I max out at 8 before adding more weight.
Of course you would personally notice. But the parent was talking about the effect on muscles. And it has been long estsblished that 5-30 reps (perhaps even highter) will cause the same hypertrophy.
Obviously, for practical reasons the optimal range for each exercise will vary. For squat 5-10 is definitely better than 10-20 let alone 20-30. For DB side raises highter reps would feel better than the lower rep range.
> I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do.
To be clear, the implication is that 12 and 25 have different weights so they tire you the same amount. Do you think it would be a very strongly felt difference in that situation? What would the difference feel like?
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You consciously notice of course, like what kind of argument is that. The point is the stimulus is the same for the body unless you change it by orders of magnitude, the study agrees that this is the same also.