Should You Train to Failure to Build Muscle?

Available on YouTube too: https://musclelabpodcast.com 

Dr. Wolf and Dr. Pak break down why training to or past failure may be best for growth.

References:
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391667898_Muscular_Adaptations_Following_8_Weeks_of_a_Myoreps_Set_Configuration_Versus_Traditional_Straight-Sets_in_Resistance-Trained_Individuals 
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2024.2321021 
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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Muscle Lab Podcast. I'm Dr.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Pack and I'm Dr. Milo Wolf.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

And today we'll be doing a deep dive into training to failure. Yes, a topic that we are still discussing in great detail in evidence-based circles, and every lifter has many questions. We'll look at the research, we'll give you practical takeaways, and we'll finally answer the big question. Do you need to train to failure or not?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Ooh. This has been a topic of much debate for years now, with advocates of high-intensity training claiming you need to train to failure on all sets to maximize muscle growth. That volume doesn't really matter that much. On the other hand, we've had evidence-based practitioners for a few years now parroting the notion that as long as you train within a few reps of failure, you're probably maximizing stimulus. What's the actual truth? Are you training hard enough to drive growth? Or do you just think you are? Because there might be a difference. Is failure training essential, overrated, or does it depend on who you are? And finally, does failure training allow you to gain more muscle and less time? We'll break down what the research actually says on all these questions. We forgot the main question though.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Is it the most fatiguing thing in the world and will it kill your games?

SPEAKER_00 1:10

We'll cover that as well. So before we can get into training to failure and any applied studies, we always start with a c a segment called From the Lab, where essentially we discuss what are the mechanisms or the muscle physiology underlying some of this stuff. As always, this is just our best guess at this point, given the research, but it's worth understanding how your muscle fibers actually contract, get stimulated, respond to tension, to understand how training to failure manager. So, the first thing we'll kind of discuss is a Henneman's size principle, which is really just an explanation of how your muscle fibers get activated. In order to grow, muscle fibers fundamentally need to experience tension. To experience tension, they need to contract or get to a certain length where they start experiencing passive tension. You can think of your muscle fibers like a rubber band, where the more you stretch them out, the more passive tension they experience. We'll kind of skip passive tension for the purpose of this discussion. Let's focus on active tension, which is mostly related to making sure individual muscle fibers get recruited, activated, and therefore produce tension and experience it, and grow muscles result. To explain how that works, we briefly need to talk about the neuromuscular system, essentially the intersection between your nervous system and your muscles. Your nervous system is the stuff that essentially tells your muscles, hey, we need to contract, we need to lift the weight, we need to move, we need to walk, we need to cycle, whatever it might be. I'll kind of do some analogies to describe different components of the neuromuscular system. The first is the central nervous system. You can think of it as the control center of muscle contraction. It's situated in the brain and the spinal cord. That central nervous system fires a signal down the corticospinal tract. That electrical signal is carried via a motor neuron. It's called an action potential, that signal, via a peripheral nerve all the way to a muscle. That then reaches what's called a motor unit. A motor unit is a motor neuron, the nerve that essentially innervates muscle fibers, and all the muscle fibers innervates. That can oftentimes be in the thousands. That motor unit, so motor neuron and all the muscle fibers it innervates, are referred to altogether as one functional motor unit. Then the muscle fiber depolarizes when the action potential or the signal comes in from the central nervous system. Calcium ions flip in, which then allows myosin, the myosin head, to pull an actin, so two different proteins within your muscle, which in turn allows your muscle to contract and actually change length. Now, if there's no resistance, for example, that contraction can occur much more easily, obviously than if you're lifting a weight. But in all cases, that's how muscle contraction occurs. Signal gets sent from the central nervous system down the corticospinal tract, eventually reaches motor units, depolarization occurs, calcium ions flood in, myosin posal actin, and contraction occurs. Where it gets interesting, this is kind of the fundamentals, like this is pretty well established, there's this called the sliding filament theory. There's other theories out there, but this is relatively established, and so the prevailing view for the time being. Where Henneman's size principle comes in is by describing the order in which muscle fibers or motor units get recruited and activated. Specifically, Henneman's size principle states that motor units within a muscle are recruited in an orderly, size-dependent fashion. Different muscle fibers and motor units are of a different size. Specifically, slower twitch muscle fibers are smaller than faster twitch muscle fibers. So you might have heard of type 1 versus type 2 muscle fibers in the past. That just refers to being slower twitch versus faster twitch. Generally speaking, the faster twitch a muscle fiber is, and it's not as binary as type 1, type 2. There's other classifications that might have components of both in different fibers, but generally, the faster twitch a muscle fiber is, the bigger it is. What Hanneman's size principle tells us is that the faster twitch larger muscle fibers get recruited later. First, we recruit the more efficient, slower twitch muscle fibers, but can oftentimes go for minutes or hours before tapping out. And only when the force production requirements or fatigue have reached a high threshold are the largest motor units in muscle bodies recruited. Now, I mentioned two components, force production and fatigue. Those are the two variables that can influence how muscle fibers get recruited. When it comes to force production, that's pretty straightforward. The heavier the weight, the more motor units will need to be activated from a get-go in a set. So if you're lifting 90% of your max, let's say you're squatting 400 pounds, and your max is say 450, right? From the first rep in that set, because force production requirements are quite high, you will be recruiting and activating the biggest muscle fibers you have available. Just because you need an all-hands-on-like approach. With a set of 30, for example, say you're squatting 200 pounds instead, because that load just isn't that heavy for you, you can afford to just use your smaller, slower twitch muscle fibers to get those first few reps. However, as that set progresses, let's say you get to rep 20, 25, by that point, the slower twitch muscle fibers and even some of the faster twitch muscle fibers have gotten fatigued. And so you'll need to recruit the fibers you previously hadn't been using in order to keep lifting the leak. And so whether you're lifting a really high weight and from the get-go, you're activating all muscle fibers, or you're going close to failure, in both cases, you're activating all muscle fibers. And that's important when it comes to training to failure. Because that suggests that one of the reasons training to failure might be important, or at least training close to failure, is because you get to the point in a set where all the muscle fibers that you have in a muscle are being activated, produce tension, experience tension, and as a result, down the line, grow muscle. That's kind of why training close to failure might be important. There is one potential mitigating factor. So, yes, you probably need to go close to failure to activate all muscle fibers. That can be achieved by just doing a super heavy weight, which could only really rep out for like five reps, anyways. Because then on rep one, you're four reps away from failure ready, you're pretty close to failure. Or you could pick a lighter load and just do more reps and eventually get there as well. You know, many roads lead to Rome, sort of thing. However, one way you can get closer. One way you can increase force production requirements without lifting heavier is by lifting more explosively. So one thing a lot of power lifters or strength trainees focus on is moving the load as quickly as possible. So when they start a rep, they really think lift the weight as explosively as possible, try to explode the weight, move it as quickly as possible, minimize the time taken for the concentric or lifting phase. What that does essentially, and this is a very uh simple explanation, but force equals mass times acceleration, as uh a great philosopher once said. We heard it here first, people. If you're taking a given load, say you're 100 pounds on met, and you move it slowly on the way up, you're not accelerating that weight very much. But if you're moving it as fast as possible, you're increasing the acceleration, you're increasing how much force you're producing. And so one way to potentially recruit more muscle fibers earlier into a set, even with theoretically lower force production requirements, is by just being more explosive. Because that increases force production requirements earlier into the set, even with a lighter weight. So that's where that can be a potential mitigating factor of that relationship between, oh, lightweights don't recruit all muscle fibers from the start-up set. Being explosive might just be a way to circumvent that issue, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Does that all make sense? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So lift explosively and that take kick takes care of everything?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Not quite. Because if you're just lifting explosively, one, you can do like one rep and not get close to failure and not get much tension on that set in total. Um, but there might be something to train to failure even beyond that. So I do think that there's value as an aside in training explosively. I think it helps you train closer to failure by being able to tell, all right, I really tried to move the weight as quickly as possible, but I was unable to. That suggests that you were actually close to failure. Whereas if you're always moving in slowly, you can't really tell if you're just being slow or if you're actually close to failure and unable to lift it fast.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

I'm actively stopping myself from making more jokes.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Hey. Um, so that's kind of the concept, broadly speaking. Well, like physiologically, on how muscle fibers get recruited, why training closer to failure might help you stimulate more growth by stimulating more muscle fibers. But we do also have empirical research. Yeah. So going back a few years, previous meta-analyses and system microviews had largely dichotomized training in being either failure or non-failure. So all the meta-analyses by Gurdjick and colleagues, for example, or following colleagues, had essentially said, all right, we're going to work with all studies that have either had one group trained to failure or not to failure. And that's kind of how they analyzed that problem. The issue with that and defining failure or how close to failure you train that way, is that it really depends how close to failure you go. We're turning a continuous variable, which differs between, say, five or some attack versus one. That effect might be completely different into a binary variable. We're dichotomizing a continuous variable, which isn't helpful, and that's a shift we've seen in exercise science over the years, is redefining different variables to make sure we're interpreting them correctly. Because what you're asking Random isn't should I train to failure or not, oftentimes, it's actually how close to failure should I go. Because there can be a huge difference between, say, stopping a shit. Let's say 10 reps of shy failure versus two failure. Much like with training volume, as we discussed in the previous episode. Yeah. So high volume versus moderate volume doesn't really tell you what you want to know. Um and that's where this most recent meta-regression by Robinson and colleagues comes in. It is the largest meta-analysis on the topic yet. There are definitely limitations, and we'll get to those a bit later, but it is worth noting it's the largest. We have 26 studies on proximity to failure, as we call it, and muscle growth. We haven't really defined proximity to failure yet. We're gonna just kind of talk about failure and how it might impact things. Proximity to failure is best thought of as just repetitions in attack. So it's sometimes referred to as repetitions in reserve. Sometimes people use RPE or rating of perceived exertion to quantify it. But that's mostly used in strength trading circles and is kind of a an unnecessarily convoluted tool for most people, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much R A R, but in reverse. Yeah, it does. The only minor comment there is that for people interested in strength, it adds the point five where you're like, oh, I didn't have another rev, but I had more load.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

That's true. I do think it adds more complexity than we needed for most people, though. That's on average. Um so that's how it's quantified. And so this meta-analysis, they basically took all the studies available where groups trained closer or farther from failure and plotted them out. And they tried to see what was the best fit of the data. Was it a linear relationship? Was it a different sort of functional form that explained that relationship between proximity to failure, expressed in repetitions and reserve, so how many more reps could you have done before hitting failure, and hypertrophy. And in exploring different functional forms, they basically found a linear regression was best suited to the data. Meaning that the closer a set is taken to failure, linearly the more growth it causes. For every extra rep you inch closer to failure, you get linearly more growth. So going from five reps in attack to four reps in the attack gives you the same extra growth as going from one rep in the tag to failure. And that's really cool, because we'll get to the coaching corner later. That's the segment of the episode where we discuss practical applications or experiences as coaches and lifters. But it's really cool in the sense that it's a variable you're able to push with no real extra time commitment and get linearly more growth, which is really cool. They did also look at strength, which we'll keep brief because it's the muscle lab, not the strength lab. Get with it. And who cares the most, right? Exactly. They did include 55 studies, so even quite a bit more data than for hypertrophy. And they effectively found that the relationship between proximity to failure and strength was pretty flat. Going closer to failure when load was equated, which is important and we'll get back to that in a moment, didn't lead to rare strength gains. What does that mean? Well, when studies compared, say, doing a set of five with 300 pounds with two reps in attack, to doing, say, a set of seven with 300 pounds to failure, so they didn't increase the weight, they just did more reps. That didn't lead to more strength gains. Going closer to failure didn't increase strength gains. Where it gets a bit interesting is that usually you could also go closer to failure and add weight to the bar instead, instead of just doing more reps. And we know that going heavier for maximum strength, so one-of-max type of outcome, does seem to lead to good outcomes. So purely going closer to failure for the sake of going closer to failure is not a good idea for strength. Because there is research generally showing that going closer to failure is a bit more fatiguing. So from a bang for buck perspective, not getting any extra strength gains, but getting more fatigue seemed like a bad trade-off. Yeah, for sure. The caveat there is we know, and this is uh there's a meta regression by Swinton and colleagues. Actually, maybe even just Swinton, because I think he didn't know his own. Yeah, it might be. Shut up, Paul Swinton. Yeah. Um, where he looked at dozens of studies and tried to quantify the relationship between how heavy you go, so percentage of your one-lift max, and different outcomes. So strength, speed, sprint, jump, and something else kind of in a power probably. And with strength, there was very much a relationship between how heavy you go and how much of a strength gain you see. So if you're saying, all right, I'm gonna go closer to failure, and instead of doing my single at RP6, so four excellent tank, and actually going to RP9 and lift an extra 50 pounds, that set might give you greater strength gains. Not because you went closer to failure, though, because you lifted heavier. So prioritizing load over effort is really what you should be taking away from this. Yeah. So a set of one at RP7 is gonna be more effective than a set of one, a set of three at RP7, for example, because you're way heavy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Does that make sense? Yeah. Minor caveat that the authors mentioned as well was that um going close to failure with heavy loads, the every blue moon, might there might be something to that from um, you know, getting better at maxing out because you eventually, when you max out, if you've never actually tried to do that before, been close to the point where the bar really slows down, might be a different feeling. More data pending, but overall the idea that as a power lifter or a strength half league, you need to be grinding reps to see strength gains doesn't seem to hold up, which is good.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

No, absolutely. And we'll get more to that in the uh coach's corner segment. But I do think there is something to at least occasionally practicing a heavy lift close to failure as well. But for kind of combining the two. So we kind of discussed for the most part so far what happens when you go closer to failure. One thing we haven't discussed is what happens when you go beyond it. Because when you're training in the gym, sure, you could go to failure and the set, but you could also go beyond it in some capacity. And there's different types of past failure training. We'll go through each one, kind of way down the research briefly, to paint a picture of whether or not there might be a benefit of going past failure.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

You want to give a quick definition of failure? Because that's something we also didn't do.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

That is fair.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I kind of assumed everyone listening would be a base lifter or very failure-pilled, as you'll find out later. But yeah, so in the literature, traditionally we have seen many definitions of failure. The two most uh notable ones are volitional failure and momentary failure. Volitional failure essentially states that the lifter stops the set when they deem that they have no more reps left, but without attempting another rep and then essentially verifying that they're uh to failure. We define failure as momentary failure, the point where somebody fails a rep despite attempting to complete that rep. And that's how we define failure in all of our studies, and that's how we define failure when we talk about failure in this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

What about volitional failure? I mentioned it. Oh, perfect. Um yeah, so that's defining failure. So what happens if you say fail a rep and then keep training past that point? There are different forms, and I'll kind of list them off and then go into each one. The first is stretch partials. Why is it going past tailure? Well, by doing partial reps in the bottom position of the lift, oftentimes you're doing more reps in a given weight than you'd be able to if you try to full-range of motion. Yep. At least for media exercise. For media exercise, the hardest point is in the shortened position, and so oftentimes if say you're doing lat tall downs, yeah. You might be able to do 180 pounds for 10 reps with a full range of motion before you hit momentary failure. If you just did partials on the other hand, you would be doing substantially more reps with 180 pounds, because the lift is easier in the top or stretch position of the movement. The second type of research that applies here is drop sets. It's a bit more intuitive here. Let's say you hit failure with 200 pounds on squats. Instead of just stopping with set and taking two minutes of rest, you would drop the wave at 20%, aka around 40 pounds, and repeat ascent. So you've shifted the goalpost or the threshold of failure from momentary failure at 200 pounds to momentary failure at 160 pounds. And then you do that again, and you shift the goalpost again to momentary failure at 120 pounds or what have you. You're constantly redefining what failure means. And you're doing that essentially in one big set. So you could already do like, oh, rest pause or whatever else is going past failure as well, but it's worth noting drop sets are quite direct in the sense that you don't take rest between sets. It's essentially just one big set past failure in a way. The next one would be stretch supersets, where kind of, as we discussed before, you would do a full-range of motion set. And when you hit full range of motion momentary failure, you would then do partials after failure until you can't do another partial. Another one which has received less research is same muscle group supersets. So, for example, doing a cable pushdown into a push-up. So you would hit failure with a given weight on pushdowns, and then without rest, do the push-ups. And essentially you're switching to an exercise on which, for example, your triceps are able to do more reps past quote-unquote failure on that first exercise. And then finally, you could also argue that higher reps, so a set of say 20 or 30 reps, is a form of past failure training. Because on the same exercise, if you're say using 100 pounds or 200 pounds, in both cases, you would start a set, let's say you're fully fresh, you just came into the gym. You would, in the case of using 200 pounds, end this set when you can't lift 200 pounds anymore. So for example, let's say it's 80% of your max, you've seen a drop-off in your force production capabilities from 100% down to 80%, or just below 80%. And then you can't lift 80% anymore, you end the set. But if you used 100 pounds, and let's say in this case that would be 40% of your max, you would go all the way from 100% down to 40% or just below 40% of your force production capabilities. And so if you compare those two, in one case you're ending the set on the same exercise, same conditions, after not being able to lift 80% versus 40%. So you've gone past that 80% threshold in the case of the higher upset. So you could argue that higher upsets are on principle past failure training relative to you know heavier weight. So it's worth noting that to kind of paint a full picture of what training past failure might be. So let's break those down one by one without having to define them. First, stretch partials. And I'll not give a study by study breakdown here, because we have like nine at this point. And that's comparing stretch partials to a four-ange of motion. And again, stretch partials are kind of a full past follow training way. Those generally show the same or greater growth. And that's very, very consistent. So I would say just under half of all those nine studies shows the same growth roughly, and just over half of those nine studies shows more growth from stretch partials. That provides some credence to the idea that past failure training on a set per set basis, because again, these studies kind of match for sets, provides more stimulus. We can go now into is it the scratch? Is it training past failure? It's probably both, but it's worth noting that this body of research provides support to this idea. The second body of research would be the dropset research. So we have a meta-analysis by Coleman and colleagues, which had five studies, all of which compared traditional training to drop set training. So in a traditional group, they would do, say, three sets, and in the dropset group, typically they would do like one set and then four drops. And in this meta-analysis, they found that the dropset group spent 30 to 70% less time training, but had the same muscle growth. So that suggests that on a set per set basis, there probably is something to in past value. Because otherwise, I don't think the dropset group would be able to match the hypertrophy scene by doing more traditional sets not to failure. Because even if you compare the volume load, oftentimes in These studies, I don't think they were similar. So by doing a drop set, they might have gotten, say, 20 or 30 reps across five sets, whereas a traditional set group they might have gotten more than that. So if you look at it like on a per rep basis, those reps might have been more efficient in the drop set conditional average, which again suggests those reps past failure might be a bit more hypertrophic compared to just training to failure. Next, we have stretched supersets. And this is a relatively new area of research. I was involved in two other studies in this area of three. So we had two studies by Larson and colleagues, which I was included in, and we had one study by Golie colleagues, which is very recent. First, we conducted eh, I'm not going to go into too much depth here because I think that's uh probably overkill. We compared first stretched supersets, so going past failure with partials, to just a four-range emotion set in the calf race. And we found around 40% more growth with stretched supersets. Again, you could already stretch, but it's worth loading. The second study we had, we also conducted, was this time comparing stretched supersets to just stretch partials. So in this case, equating for point of failure. In both conditions, the set was ended when they couldn't do another partial rep, or they gave up relational failure or momentary failure, whichever came first, essentially. And in this study, we saw about 40% more growth with partials, which suggests that, you know, the first study suggested going past failure is important, and the second study suggests the stretch is also important. And the final study we have by Goldie and colleagues actually compared traditional trading just a four-anger motion failure to stretch supersets. But in the stretch superset group, they did half the sets. So two to three sets of stretch supersets, past failure, versus five to six sets, or four to six sets of four-anger motion just to failure. And they saw the same growth. That suggests, and this is only one study, so we're only making rough inferences here, that each set past failure could be, in this case, around twice as efficient. You get twice the stimulus per set. Now it's worth noting our first study on the topic found around 40% difference. So it might be a smaller effect than twice, but it's worth noting there probably is an effect of going past failure in this context. Does that make sense? Uh-huh. Yeah, for sure. Next we have same muscle group supersets. There is no direct research on this per se, but pre-exhausting kind of falls under the same umbrella. Yeah. I would already.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

With a slight caveat that because it's like single joint before multi-joined, maybe something, something there.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Yeah, typically they do measure the muscle groups used in the single joint exercise. Yeah. So in many of these, it's kind of like the light extension that he'll hang rest. So they measure the quad. But effectively, in this research, as I mentioned, you take an isolation movement to failure, and then without rest, you do compound movement. So you're shifting the goalpost to failure again from what it was purely an isolation exercise to what is in a compound exercise. So we have three studies here. The first by Trinidad and colleagues looked at either doing three sets of leg press on its own, traditionally, versus doing one set of leg extensions, then immediately doing a set of leg press, and then doing two more sets of leg press. So in this case, what the astute listener might have noticed is that the pre-exhaust condition did one extra set. So one extra set of leg extensions as opposed to the other group that just did three sets of leg press. And they saw the same growth of quads and maybe a tiny difference in favor of the pre-exhaust condition at one site. But again, this is with the caveat of it not being well in equated, which is a big thing. Because even just doing one extra set of leg press might have allowed the pre-exhaust group to come out ahead without necessarily meaning that going past value was more effective. The second study was one done by our supervisors for our PhD, Fisher and colleagues. Shout out. They looked at pre-exhausting, they did peck flies before chest presses, leg extensions before leg pressing, and pullovers into pull downs with no rest, or they did them all separately, so like traditional rest times. This time the number of sets were equated, but with less rest, obviously, in the pre-exhaust condition. So they had less rest in the way, and they went past value. That's kind of the difference. And in this study, they just looked at factory mass, some not a very precise or direct measurement of a hypertrophy, but they saw the same changes in factory mass with both protocols, which does again suggest maybe there's a little bit of extra sauce to pass failure training. And finally, we have the most recent study on Topic by Herman and colleagues, which we were involved in. We looked at pre-exhausting the quads and the hamstrings. In the pre-exhaust group, we did light extensions right before squats and light curls right before RDLs. In the traditional group, they did them all separately. Measuring hypertrophy of the quads and hamstrings favored the traditional condition, with a 74% chance that the traditional condition saw greater hypertrophic outcomes than the pre-exhaust conditions, or would see on average. But the difference was modest, and the pre-exhaust group did save around 36% of time off their sessions. So I would say the pre-exhaust literature is a bit less compelling. And it's a bit more mixed and a bit smaller than most of the other bodies of research. And finally, we have higher reps. Like I mentioned earlier, higher rep training can be considered a form of past failure training compared to low rep training. We have quite a bit of research here, and I'll have the consensus which was summarized in a paper titled Loading Recommendations Something Something Something by Brad Schoenfeld. I only ever title or Google the first few words of a paper. Loading. Yeah. Loading recommendations. Loading down arrow, enter. That's all you need, maybe. As Brad Schoenfeld said on how to find them on the internet, Google me. Shout out, Brad Schoenfeld. Shout out Brad Schoenfeld. The consensus there across at least a dozen studies or two, because I remember looking at it myself and finding that there were around 12 studies looking at sets of under three to kind of like the more traditional rep range. So there's at least like a dozen or two studies on the topic. Um sets of four reps all the way to about 50 reps seem similar for using hypertrophy. And yet higher reps involve going past failure rather than low reps. So I think kind of summarizing that whole shebang, shebang as they say yes, there seems to be something potentially a bit more hypertrophic going past failure. There's not as much research, and you kind of have to draw upon different bodies of research with different confounders in place to paint that picture. But there is at least a potential for going past failure to be beneficial. Especially if you're looking at, say, the stretch partials research, the stretch superset research, and I would argue the drop set research as well. Now, we could also discuss failure emphasis training, which differs from past failure training in the sense that you're not really going past failure. You're just ensuring more of your training occurs close to failure. So for example, instead of say, okay, doing four sets of 20, let's say you're a proponent of the effect of the reps theory, which we'll get back to later. Um you might argue only the last five reps before failure really are really matter.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

And that's what I was going to ask you about. We've heard a lot about the effective reps model and the fact that the last five reps are the only ones that matter.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

That's probably not true. I mean, even the Robinson meta-regression kind of dispels that notion. Exactly. In the sense that even sets more than five failure, five reps like failure seem to induce meaningful hypertrophy. It may be true in a in a vacuum almost. What I mean by that is reps closer to failure or beyond failure are a bit more efficient on a per-rep basis. Yep. I hear that. And I think there's some truth to that claim. But a strict interpretation of the effective reps theory is reductionist. Yep. And simply not true. So a failure emphasis training might be beneficial in that regard. You're essentially doing more reps that are more efficient. The idea is, as opposed to say doing four sets of 20, where only the last five reps matter, for argument's sake, now you only get 20 effective reps. Because you do four sets, five effective reps per set to failure, 20 effective reps. If instead you said, all right, well, let me use a technique that allows me to only do reps, or mostly do reps that are close to failure, you might be able to accumulate 30, 40, 50 effective reps in that same timeframe, potentially see my approach. Kind of like one technique I think is the most relevant. And that's myoreps. I think myoreps are a technique that many people discuss in the industry, especially in the science-based space. Especially in our effort chambers, yep. But unfortunately, it does lack research. And that's why we haven't included it in MyAdapt yet.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

I was about to say that. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Uh we've got many requests in MyAdapt for Myreps, which kind of would fit given the name of the app as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

That's true. And I think that's why the technique is so popular. It has a cool name, MyAREPs.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

It does. It sounds very scientific. Funnily enough, when it was first established, it was pretty much just based on like Hanneman's size principle. And it didn't really have any direct research. Now though. Well, now we have one study in uh eight people. You heard that right. Eight people, so four people per group. That's all we need. That's all we need. Especially if they're quite big. It's not published either. It's uh a thesis. Yeah, I think it was accepted for publication. No, no, you're thinking of the raw one. There's different studies. There's the poster that was then sold. I'll give a full account. Blasted. We have a poster by Bradshaw and colleagues, which hasn't been published yet, I don't believe. Really? I looked at it for it years ago. I looked for it again recently when preparing this episode. Still doesn't matter. So those findings were pretty similar to the other one. So I kind of focus on the other one, which I actually have read in some detail because it was available as a dissertation uh for the PhD of Antenna Schwartz. Okay. Shout out. Well Schwartz and John. Schwartz. Um Shatad. Shatat. Yeah, gut. Um The study by Schwartz and colleagues looked at eight people, so four people per group, I believe. Where the Myreps group effectively allowed people to train for about two-thirds only in terms of duration of the workout compared to the traditional group. They equated for reps. So if the traditional group performed, say three sets of ten for 30 reps total, the Myreps group would kind of equate for that by doing the same number of reps at the same lead. And obviously using that approach allowed them to save time. And they saw the same growth using circumferences and lean body mass.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

A few big caveats here. Number one, four people per group. I can't begin to describe how few that is. It's um It's one more than three and one less than five. There we go. It's basically, and this is unfortunate, and this is no slide on the authors at all. Yeah, obviously. Uh, because I know how to stations go, we're going through a process ourselves. It's not always easy. It's recruitment in general is difficult. But with a study with that sample size, just on a pure mathematical level, calculating statistical power, the likelihood that if there is a true effect, you'll find it, and the likelihood that if there is a true effect, you'll miss it, or false positive, false negative, etc. It's basically equivalent to me to there not be any. Yeah. That's how I see the study. It's a pilot study. Yeah, which is basically in this context, hypertrophy, I think, like unfortunately can't inform our practices very much. 100%. The other study by Bradshaw and colleagues, which is only available currently as a poster, regrettably, has similar findings, I believe. Because all I was able to find was the poster. And the poster seemed to suggest less time taken. Yeah, yeah. Same hypertrophy. So that's kind of all we have on Lyo reps. To me, it does again suggest that the reps close to failure are a bit more hypertrophic. The study by Schwartz and colleagues is kind of uh less informative in that regard because they created for reps with a study by Bradshaw and colleagues on Altushala. And every time you say Bradshaw, I'm like, you're about to say Bradshaw failed.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

Yes. Um I did hear that there is uh another study in review on MyReps with similar findings, obviously. Is it not the Bradshaw one? I don't think so. I think it's a new one. But more as it stands, it seems that MyReps may be a you know time-efficient uh technique, rather than you could also argue that they're less time efficient than dropsets, for example.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Because dropsets appear to save 50 to 70 percent time.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

You essentially do just one big set.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

I think it's again the name and the fact that dropsets have existed for such a long time, and there's a perception of hype. Impractic impracticability. Is that a word? Practicality. Impracticality.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

Practicability, I think, is also a word, but for something else.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

I'm so you can make it up. I can make it up. That's how this works.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Um so the notion of failure emphasis training, like Maya reps, is essentially you do a set to failure, you briefly rest, just enough to get some more reps, and you go again. And the idea is that you've recruited all the motor units during that set, and just by resting a little bit, when you restart the next set, you're pretty much getting all the motor units involved from get-go. Yeah. Because fatigue is set in already, and you're not restarting a set from a fresh state, let's say. Um it's worth noting that I kind of focus now on the studies on my reps as the kind of two only studies we really have. But summarizing the whole body of research of failure emphasis training, of rest pause cluster sets as well, which are different techniques that I would say are related but not equivalent to myreps. There have been two meta-analyses, one by UK, which equated for volume in the studies. So they only included studies that had volume equated for, and one by Davies et al. in 2021, looking at the effects of these techniques, rest pulse, cluster sets, anything else that was available on failure emphasis, essentially. And they found that they didn't lead to any different growth. So what I would say overall is going past failure seems to have some merit. Trading closer to failure seems to be more efficient on a per rep basis than just training close to failure. Whether individual techniques past like dropsets or maybe stretch supersets have a lot of merit at this stage, I wouldn't say is very clear. And that's why we haven't built my reps or rest pause or cluster sets into my redep, for example. Because we only really focus on what's actually evidence-based. Yeah. So that you're not wasting your time in the gym and you can just train effectively and efficiently.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

People have already commented, but let me mention this, that the definition of my reps is uh varies depending on where you look at. So you define it now as uh sort of rest pause. Yeah, more or less. But then the more common definition in some circles is different, but there's no research on that definition. So and it it's quite complicated as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Yeah, I would say the most of these techniques from a hypertrophic standpoint follow a similar rationale. Yeah. So that's why I'm happy to lump that into one. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to or you to do that too. You could uh you could argue that no, no, this has a special sauce on this basis. There's uh there's no evidence for that sauce, unfortunately. It's the uh the weak sauce, as they call it weak. Um so that's all the research on training to failure versus not trained failure, trained past failure, what have you. One big discussion is to be had about uh fatigue. The big F word. I think this discussion was most recently prompted by a study by Rafal and colleagues. Essentially, they looked at training quads and training lift crews. With one leg, I believe, they did all sets to failure. So they did um leg extensions first, leg extensions first? Who was it leg cross first? Leg crush first. Legs first. They leg press first, the leg extensions. In the failure condition, the participants observed more growth in the vast lateralis and a bit less growth in the rectus femoris than in the condition where they kept one to two reps on the tack. Now, why might that be? Well, previous findings by our own lab, Shallot Ryan Burke, found alongside other studies that leg press tends to favor hypertrophy of the vast muscles or the vast eye muscles. So the vast lateralis, the vastus medialis, and the vast medius, the three hezical quads that you can kind of see most easily near knee. However, the leg extension or knee extension isolation exercises like the leg extension, tissue squats, etc., probably bias a bit more towards the rectus femoris. By isolating knee extension, you're able to actually have it contract and lengthen effectively. So the idea, to be clear, the hypertrophy between conditions here was relatively similar. But there was potentially a slight edge to vastis hypertrophy in the vast lateral hypertrophy in the submaxim in the failure group, sorry, failure condition, and slightly more hypertrophy the rest of Morris in the submaximal condition. What that suggests is that staying a bit shy of failure earlier into the workout allowed participants in the submaximal condition to have more stimulus come from the leg extension later on. In other words, going too close to failure too early could burn you out a little bit later into the workout and result in less stimulus from later exercises, later sets, and what have you. That's kind of the interpretation there. That kind of hinges on the idea or that interpretation that going closer to failure is more fatiguing. And there is a basis for this, at least on a snapshot level. So we have a meta-analysis by Vier and colleagues, looking at all the studies of training farther or closer to failure on various morphers of muscle damage. The kind of very summary version is there is more fatigue by training to failure. And this seemed to be true across a variety of kind of like metrics and outcomes. And this was true even when the volume equated. So even when both a non-failure condition and the failure condition did the same number of reps with the same weight, but the failure condition achieved that by going to failure more often, the failure condition saw more fatigue. There is a caveat, which we'll get to in the coaching corner. This is only on a snapshot level. So many of these studies that look at this sort of thing, what they do is they take, say, beginner lifters or train lifters, and they say, hey, you're gonna have to come into the lab three times. One time you're gonna come in, we're gonna show you how it looks, you know, what the equipment is, what you're gonna do, and that's called a familiarization session. That the next two sessions are typically a randomized, counterbalanced set of sessions where once they come in and do the session to failure, and then they measure a bunch of fatigue metrics about them afterwards, in the next 24, 48, 72 hours, whatever it might be. And then in the other session, they come back in and they do the non-failure condition. And again, they measure the exact same things. They randomize the order so there's no impact of order, they randomize everything. But that's kind of the extent of how it's generally looked upon when it comes to failure and fatigue. That means that when it comes to how you train the gym, you train to failure or close to failure or past failure, week in, week out, for years or maybe even decades. Do you still see substantially more failure after, say, a year of training to failure versus just the first few times? Substantially more fatigue, you mean? Yeah. We don't really know. There has been one study, I believe, by Robinson and colleagues, which seemed to suggest that in relatively trained lifters, when comparing training quite so maximally, so about four to six reps in reserve versus, I believe, one to three reps in reserve taking the last set to failure versus one to three reps in reserve versus always to failure in the big three in the squad bench deadlift. And this is a preprint at this stage, I believe. Over time, some of the fatigue markers did seem to attenuate from training to failure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of the best research I would say we have at this stage looking at that question, which is just one study. But I think that is more of an open question people realize. And I think that the question of whether you should go to failure is a bit more nuanced than just, oh, it's more fatiguing or it's not enough to. Specifically, we can talk about volume versus proximity to failure. Which one should you prioritize? There's been a lot of discourse online about, oh, intensities came. Yep. I used to think volumes came, but now actually intensities came. The realities both seem quite important. Yep. So in our first episode on volume, we estimated that about 25% of the hypertrophy observed could be attributed to differences in training volume. Training to failure, I wouldn't be surprised if it had a similar impact on how much hypertrophy observed. Volume, we can think of as the dosage almost. And I think training closer or follow-up and failure is a very similar thing to that. It's kind of a quality. So you can think of it as quantity and quantity. And ideally you'd have both. There's no reason why you have to prioritize one over the other. Exactly. And we'll get more to the fatigue discussion in the coaching quantum section. Yeah. But I do think that tends to be a bit oversold. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 43:07

And we we did um well Herman and Al, we had the honor of being involved in that study. It wasn't volume versus failure, but it was failure versus non-failure in low volume training, where training to failure did lead to a bit more growth. Uh, but it wasn't a day and night difference. But it's worth noting that the group that didn't trade failure still trained at two reps in reserve.

SPEAKER_00 43:27

For sure. And it's worth noting that was in a very low void protocol where you would kind of expect that if there were to be a difference, okay, you're going to be closer to failure, well, like six sets for the week. That difference is going to be a large versus like 20 cents multi failure versus 20 cents true failure. Exactly. Um the final thing to mention from the research, from the lab, rather, is um how do you actually tell when you're close to failure? Yeah. Well, there's kind of a few a few things we need to discuss. One, you never really know. You never really really know. A philosophy podcast. How no, it's true, it's true. It's true. So you can give a set your absolute best effort. Unless you die. Did you really reach failure? Like you could argue, oh you're injured. Hey, you could have just still pushed another one. Like, do you really know?

SPEAKER_01 44:22

This is true, true hardcore listening. No, but uh just explain what you mean to the audience now.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

It's uh it's difficult to explain, but you're only as strong as your willpower or your motivation are, or as strong as you tell yourself in a way as well. Yeah. So if for example you end a set and you're like, oh, I couldn't have got another rep. And you try, but you're like, ah, I didn't get it. Did you really try artists? Can you tell after the fact? Because there's always a recall bias in one boat. There's not really a true way of, like, even in the research, we don't have a way to really determine whether failure has to fully verify. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

We can assume that if you are being, you know, honest, you did legit go to failure, but we don't know what 100% say. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

You can never truly know. So that's the one caveat I would give, and I think that applies to some lifters especially. 100%. And we've seen that in practice. We've seen that in practice. Some great actors. Yes, some great actors. Golden globe type shit. Um there's some more information here, and some more uh practically useful information than uh we never really know. Yeah. One of those pieces of information comes from Halper and colleagues, and that was a study we were actually involved in. In our study, we perform an analysis and meta-regression on training to failure and accuracy and training and telling how close to failure we are. So we found a few interesting things. One on average across all the studies, where researchers have participants come in and they ask them, all right, let's have you do a set. And then at various points throughout the set to failure, we'll ask you, how many more reps do you think you have? They then compare those predictions throughout the set to how many more reps they actually end up doing to tell how accurate their predictions throughout the set are at different points. So for example, let's say we're a set of 12 of 12. I ask you six reps in, hey, how many more you got? And you tell me four. Like, all right, let's let's write it out, see how many more you get. And then you get to nine. I'm like, yeah, how many more you got? And say two. And let's see here. And then by the end of the setting can tell you, okay, you're at 12. So initially you're off by two reps, and then you're off the one rep at the end. So we have studies looking at that exact concept across different rep ranges, different approximates to failure, everything. And basically a few things were cool. One, on average, across all these studies, lifters were off in their predictions by less than one rep. And specifically, that direction was they underestimated themselves by roughly one rep. So if they thought they could do 10 reps with a given weight, they could actually do a lot. So that's actually a pretty small gap, which is great. Importantly, that is in the context of a lab, where people are actually pushing you and being supervised, you don't want to disappoint researchers, et cetera. So my assumption is that that level of accuracy is kind of like a rosy estimate of what you would see in the real world training on your own. The second cool thing was how rep range impacted this. Specifically, lifters seemed to be pretty accurate, around like one rep underestimation, maybe even a bit less. Up until around 12 reps percent. But above 12 reps, it seemed like their predictions got way worse. They started underestimating themselves by more and more. To the point that when in these studies they were doing 20, 25, 30 reps, oftentimes participants underestimate themselves by like five reps. And at that, at that point, if you think you're at failure, but you're actually five reps away from failure, that starts to present a real issue from a training stimulus perspective. That you wouldn't have at say a set of eight, because you're only one employee. So, with that in mind, I think there's a few things we can kind of give as recommendations for how to tell how close to failure you are. One, you should probably perform, if you're just the average person, most of your training in a pretty heavy rep range for hypertrophy. Specifically below our 12 reps. And that's actually what we do in MyODapt. Especially if you're someone who doesn't have much time to train, we heavily prioritize you training in the 5 to 10 rep range. Because that's the rep range where it's easiest for you to tell that you're actually close to failure. Sure, now if you're training for 10, 12 hours a week. Is there a potential benefit to adding in more higher rep ranges? Fiber type differences or what have you? Certainly. But that's a relatively, you know, small benefit. Indeed. Compared to the benefit of just training to failure consistently. So it's kind of like having your ducks in a row. You first start with the big rocks, which ducks turn into rocks still more than ducks, rocks, rocks. You first start with the big rocks of actually training close to failure, and then you can worry about the minutiae of mixing different rep ranges for maximizing hypertrophy. And that's because I'm here how MADAP works as well. We prioritize high effort work first, and then if a user has plenty of time to train, then we start speculating higher rep ranges for different fiber types of.

SPEAKER_02 48:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:55

So that's number one. Make most of your training happen in that heavy rep range. Number two is try and be explosive, going back to our discussion earlier, and pay attention to how fast you can lift the weight. Honestly, my recommendation as a coach, as a lifter, is to always lift explosively unless you have like an injury or pain that stops you from doing it for hypertrophy. The reason is simple. Probably the best predictor of how close to failure you are, like an objective standpoint, that we can actually measure, is if you're being explosive, what's the velocity of the bar or the machine throughout the concentric or lifting phase? The more fatigue you get, the slower your reps get. And that relationship expresses itself most openly, most clearly when you're trying to be explosive. Yeah. And so you can use bar speed or how fast you're able to lift the weight when trying to be explosive as a really, really solid indication of how close to failure you are. And my recommendation is to have the last few reps, if you're actually trying to go to failure, spend at least two to five seconds on the concentric phase. Get to the sticking point, spend at least two to three seconds at that sticking point trying to complete the rep, visualizing yourself completing the rep. And if you're unable to, fine. You're a loser. It is what it is. But I think that's the the most evidence-based way you can actually tell. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

And uh that comes back to potentially avoiding very slow training unless there's a reason, an injury or something. Because you can trick yourself, especially if you're not an experienced lifter or somebody who's been training to failure a lot. Things can get, you know, if you're doing high reps and then the discomfort kicks in and you're intentionally slowing things down. We, as we'll as we're gonna touch in a second, we've seen that before.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

The final point I wanted to mention when it comes to telling how close to failure you are, especially with higher rep training, ignore how it feels. We've seen from the research, and there's been a few studies on this now, that higher upsets cause more discomfort, more effort. People don't like it as much. It promots more nausea, everything else. And it makes sense because fundamentally, higher upsets all us being equal, higher energy burn, more metabolic demands, more cardiorespiratory stress, all that stuff happens. Higher upsets just feel more difficult, more challenging. If you focus on how much your quads burn during leg extensions, or CC squats for higher ups, chances are you're gonna tap out before you reach failure. Yeah. If instead you just focus on performance, getting explosive, and how fast you're able to lift rather than oh my quads feel like they're on fire, that tends to help in my experience. 100%. Speaking of experience, that wraps up, I think, the research aspect of this. So we'll move into the coaching corner. First. Where we detail our experiences as coaches, lifters, and kind of give some practical tips that go beyond just, hey, here's what's more effective based on the research.

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Indeed. So as um as a lifter growing up as a bro, training to failure and beyond failure was sort of the default. That was how all training was, with a training partner helping you beyond failure because you know you've got one more, or even starting the set at failure at the very uh beginning of my lifting career. And that's something that I I still do. Every set is done. Well, I trade to failure, I don't start the set at failure, but uh I trained beyond failure, and failure is defined as the point where no partial length and partials, because they were referred to as stretched partials before. And I was like, okay, are we rebranding here? We are actually stretched partials. Is it more general friendly?

SPEAKER_00 52:34

Is that's why I'm saying it, and stretched supersets as well. Fair enough. Partially for uh partially good for alliteration purposes or assonance. I don't really get the difference.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

These are words that bowels everyone knows, including myself. Um, but yeah, the failure is defined as the point where no more stretched partials are possible in my training. In practice, I think that training to failure are training to failure is one of the things uh most people struggle with versus training volume. I don't think people struggle to get obviously, yes, uh 30, 40 sets, whatever. I think most people are able to get 20, 15, 10 to 20 sets easily, but in practice, they struggle with going to failure, not because they're unable to, uh, but because one, they're not in lab conditions, as we mentioned, where you have somebody there actively pushing you. Plus, based on the literature, uh, and that's um uh meta-analysis by Stiladal, which we had the honor of being involved in, where people self-select loads, they select loads that are roughly equivalent to 50% of their one RM, which leads to sets of 20 plus reps. And as we just said, going above 12 reps makes it difficult to determine whether you're at failure. Then they go by feel, which you said don't do, and then they find themselves in a position where they're like, yeah, that was a hard set, it burned, I I'm gassed out, so I'm training to failure, but in reality, they're not. Um, and I have found that some exercises seem to be easier or harder to train to failure, uh, namely, you know, machine-based exercises and upper body stuff versus RDLs.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

Absolutely. So, one thing that I think you alluded to, but it's worth noting, is what I call YOLO maxing exercises sometimes is nice. Every time. What I mean by that is to really check yourself and see am I actually pushing this hard enough? Sometimes just go heavier than you really think you should, and see if you're not able to do like more reps than you thought. Yes. That occasional audit can be really helpful, especially if lifters are kind of chronically underwood. Yep. So saying, alright, you've done deadlifts with 200 pounds for 10 weeks straight now, even though I've requested uh top the weight as a coach. Slap on 220 and do an am rep.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

Switch to chest press to avoid the comments. Yeah, muscle confusion. No, no, switch to the exam being chess press versus deadlift so people will cry that ah, you're gonna get injured on deadlift.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

That's a whole other uh cattle worms. So we don't open. I mean open, whatever. No, no, no. Chest press. Let's say you're doing 200 pounds on chest press, and you usually always do 10 reps, and uh you never really increase the weight because you never really feel like you can. Try doing 220. Maybe a first rep feels heavy, but maybe you actually get 8 or 9 reps, and you're like, ah, maybe I should have been doing more allow. Yes. That sort of like slightly um aggressive progression every now and then to see whether or not you're actually close to failure can help. I'll also have to call you out. You mentioned you stop the set and you can't do another partial. That's rookie shit.

SPEAKER_01 55:41

Ah, okay. Well, listen. A bit beyond that, a bit beyond that. No, no, that's just not enough. It's just not enough.

SPEAKER_00 55:47

I grind until I can't move the thing. There we go. Now we're talking. That's true, that's true. That's true. This is kind of a more extended stretch superset, and it's how I train for every movement ever, literally. Unless it's genuinely unsafe, I can bench it on my own and with a barbell and don't have safeties or whatever. Who benches and who trains? In 2026. I mean everybody train. So leave it be. Um but I think that's a more extended way of doing a stretch superset, which might make you a bit more stimulus, whether it's because you're going even closer or even further past failure, or whether you're spending more time on the stretch. Either way, I think that's if you're trying to maximize stimulus per set and you're not concerned about fatigue, which as we'll discuss later, you may not need to be, that can be a really efficient way of training. And in general, one thing I want to hammer hole when it comes to this research on training to failure, or training past failure with stretch supersets, draw upsets, pre-exhaust, same muscle supersets, whatever. All of those are really time-efficient options. They will make your workouts more challenging on average. So when it comes to increasing training density, how many reps do you have a given unit of time, or training closer to failure of these techniques? They do seem to increase training exertion as well. So people reported their sessions become more challenging in the studies. We actually measure this sometimes. In one of our study with Hermann and colleagues in the pre-exhaust study, we saw, well, pre-exhaust, the Burke study actually. The Burke study on antagonistic period supersets, which is kind of slightly different. Um, that did lead to an increase in training effort, for example. But in general, studies that involve, or protocols that involve get training closer to the failure with higher density, those things will make your sessions more difficult. But it can't be understated how much more time efficient this makes your sessions. Compare that to training volume, where one, the relationship isn't linear. The closer you go, or the more sets you do, the more the returns get diminishing. So there's actually a discrepancy between how much time it takes, which is linear for every additional set you do, you spend linearly more time than the gen, but you get diminishing returns at the same time. So you kind of get worse bang for buck as you do more and more sets. Compare that to train to failure, where every single rep you go closer to the failure, you seem to get more hypertrophy. And likewise there's some research suggesting that going past failure might have a similar relationship. It seems like really nailing down and focusing on quality, aka training to failure, etc., is one of the best things the average lifter can do. 100%. Now I'd say as a coach, just kind of riffing off that. When it comes to training, I think maybe the biggest thing I do is help lifters train closer to failure. Same. Like exercise electron, optimizing, sure, that's nice. I can be extra stretch here, a bit of extra stretch there, you know, like better loadability, a bit more volume cost a week, whatever it might be. But for most lifters, it's just helping them train closer to failure. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 58:37

I agree. I have the exact same experience. And I think also the training to failure and taking everything to that point is a great uh way to make sure that, hey, you've left no stones unturned as far as that exercise uh goes. And at the same time, um, a great way to have progress on autopilot. If you're taking every set of failure, you know you're getting the most stimulus you can get from that exercise, and you will eventually either do more reps or have to up the load to stay within a certain rep base.

unknown 59:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:08

That's not to say that I will always push clients or my adapt always pushes people to always train true failure or past failure. Yeah, yeah. There are cases where adding volume might make sense. Yeah. If you're someone who has a ton of time to train and you're not time constrained at all, but you have two hours to train every single day and you're chill. You might be in a position where adding volume is the more rational thing to do. Or if you're already training super close to failure or past failure, or you don't like training to failure, volume can be a good thing to add. But in the vast majority of lifters' cases, like I would say 95 plus percent of people have some sort of cap on how much they can train to the time. Training closer to failure is kind of the lever you're on a pull. Both the volume and the effort or approximate to failure lever give you more growth, it seems like, pretty reliably. They just are best used in different circumstances. One additional way we can make training to failure more efficient is drop set plus past failure. So you can kind of combine some of these techniques to arrive at a form of training that is very, very time efficient. I'll give you an example, which we'll probably do in like an hour from now after filming this episode. We'll go on the chest press machine, which is stack loaded, we'll do a set to failure, typically of like four to ten reps, just so that the overall drop set we're about to do doesn't turn into a marathon three-minute effort. We do a set of four to ten, we hit failure. When we hit four major motion failure, we extend the set with partials. When we can't do another partial, we keep going anyways. When we just hold the weight at the bottom for at least a few seconds or push as hard as we can. Then we react. Then we drop the weight by 20%, immediately perform the same thing again. Drop the weight by 20%, immediately do the same thing again, etc. etc. We've seen that drop sets can give you the same stimulus as traditional training in 50 to 70% less time. What if you add in stretch supersets like we were doing now? Chances are it's even more time efficient. So you might be saving in 60-80% time. Who knows you? At the very least what we can say is that it's a very time-efficient way of training, based on the research. And that's how we train much of the time. Either with supersets, like a chess press in a row, the drop set, and that's what we're focusing on building this update from iAdapt, including supersets and drop sets. And that's coming soon-ish. TM. TLZ is a good one.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:25

Yeah, I mean, this is the third episode, so that's Hey.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

Who knows? Maybe it'll be out. Maybe it will be out. We're working on it day and night. And when it comes out, it'll be glorious.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:34

Yes, indeed. Put uh just a little asterisk here, because it we've been now failure peeled. Like it sounds as if we're like, hey, train to failure beyond failure until you are a big failure. What if some people are like, hey, I want to train at two reps in reserve, I'm very good at training at two reps in reserve. I want to keep all my training there for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:56

So one thing I kind of uh flew over earlier. I mentioned the Robinson regression had some limitations. When you take data from a variety of studies with a variety of differences between studies, and you kind of just plop all the data points onto a graph, and then you're like, okay, what line best predicts this these data points or best minimizes residuals? You make certain assumptions and you do lose some nuance. You try and perform an analysis that is practically interpretable at the risk of creating some potentially inaccurate conclusions. Because, like even uh, you know, you would have to draw an extremely overfitted line to really perfectly explain it. So you kind of have to make an assumption, okay, maybe it's linear or maybe it has a breakpoint somewhere or whatever. There is a chance that there's some degree of threshold effect. Where once you train to say two reps in reserve, you get most of your hypertrophy. Maybe those extra two reps can do a bit more, and then two reps in everything in reserve, for example, is a threshold past which your set is effective by and large, and you don't really have to worry about it anymore. That's what previous meta-analyses by refallowing colleagues and by gurdjicking colleagues, I believe, had found. Um I personally suspect that was mostly because of how they operationalized, failure versus non-failure, not because there's something like, oh, once you hit two-refs on reserve, you're good. That doesn't really make sense to me. Um I think it might also somewhat represent an overfitting of Henneman size principle. Where like, oh, by fire's in the tank, you recruited all muscle fibers, therefore that set is effective now to certified effective. But in reality, I think there is probably a bit more benefit to be had by, you know, continuous. So I would say that it's possible that once you hit like trips on the tank or something, that set is pretty effective. The issue with someone saying, oh, I only want to train to trips and reserve and call it there, is you will probably have to do more sets to make up for it. So it only really makes sense if you came to me like, look, I want to do it maximizes growth, but I don't want to do that. I'd be like, okay, well, we're gonna have to spend more time in the gym now. Yeah. It's feasible, but I would say it's non-advisable for most people in most cases. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:13

Yeah, I agree. And I I would just advise people to nothing and either training to failure or not to failure. Take as a rough heuristic, like 50% of your sets on a given exercise to failure, and you can leave one or two reps in reserve on some other sets. But look, this is me now being Mr. Caveats, Mr. Everybody needs to be happy, uh, people pleaser. For the majority of you out there, and for the majority of exercises, obviously, yes, if it feels bad, if you're injured, whatever, don't do it. Take everything to failure, it's not gonna hurt you. Um, and you will get very used to it very quickly. And from a soreness and overall fatigue perspective, you'll be covered, as Milo will touch on right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:59

Not quite, right? Not quite now. Because first, I want to tell you what we actually recommend, I would say. Fair enough. And this is exactly what we built to my adapt. So I would say there's kind of two routes when it comes to training to failure, approximately to failure. The first route is inching closer to failure with every set. And that goes back to the Rafal study we mentioned, where it did seem like potentially going too close to failure too early into a workout compromised hypertrophy stimulus later into the session because you went into it more fatigued, more burnt out, didn't get the same effect. What you would do in this case is say, all right, I'm doing chest press in my workout today for my first exercise for chest. You would start at say two reps in the tank on your first set. So and they say, Well, you can't, well, you can do about two more reps. And then with each set, go closer and closer to failure. And by the last set, or last set or two, go all the way to failure. Try rep at failure. That I think is a decent approach if you have plenty of time to train. And it's the default approach in MyAdupt. Just because if there is a benefit to be had from some failure training and also maintaining good performance across the workout, that's kind of the best of both worlds. The second approach, which is also enabled by adapt, is simply disabling repetitions of the Zerbol together. Instead of measuring how close to failure you are or trying to prevent excessive fatigue, which is somewhat preliminary as an effect. Like we only have a couple studies looking at this sort of stuff. You could just say, all right, overall look, the relationship between training failure and hypertrophy is very well established. I'm just going to train the failure always. Or train past failure like we do. I think that's a valid way to train, and that's exactly why it's a bad about. I think those two approaches, one for the motion served lifter who's a bit more worried about fatigue, or who doesn't buy into training past failure quite as much, um, or who wants to make sure that later into a session they're still getting a lot of the effectiveness out of their exercises. I think that's the correct approach. Especially if you have plenty of time to train. For most other people, and I'd say even for most people probably, just training to failure consistently is the best thing you can do. So those are the two approaches. Um and yeah, that's what I would recommend.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:12

Nice. Awesome. Hey, you train to failure all the time. That's simple as it needs to be. There was also just very, very briefly, there was a study where they progressed from um four reps in reserve to one rep in reserve versus staying constantly at one rep in reserve, and they saw the same gains over, I think, six, uh 12 weeks.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:31

Yeah, there's been a couple studies like that now. Um I'm not sure what that means per se. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting as an alternative way of structuring your training. Yeah. But I don't think we can necessarily say, based on like two or three studies, and I think in total, that it's like more effective.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:49

Yeah, yeah. I would I would say it's just a reassuring tap on the back that, uh, okay, you you know, you were ill and you had a couple of weeks where you're further away from failure. It's not the end of the day. And there are still effective reps there.

unknown 1:08:01

Cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:01

There's a couple more things we want to touch on from a coaching perspective. One is recovery. We mentioned how on average, at least on a snapshot level, training closer to failure seems more fatiguing. And that leads many people, like our coaching clients, oftentimes, people use Mad Apt, to get worried about recovery. You know, they get sore. Or they think, okay, well, I'm pushing sets up and I'm also training close to failure. What's gonna happen now? I think there's a few things to keep in mind. One, your body is very good at getting used to things. Yes. So we've discussed the repeated bound effect in episode one. So I'll just quickly walk over it. Um walk through it, walk over it, whatever. Walk over it. Walk over it. Step on that rebound effect. Um repeated bound, whatever. Rebound bound effect, breaks, low cars. We're uh stepping on the rebound effect right now. Basically, as you expose your body to the same stress over and over again, your body gets used to it, and it doesn't get as fatigued anymore. That sort of thing. The end. Rebound effect, maybe. Aka repeated bound effect. Um what that means is after a year of training to failure with high volumes and gradually building it up, there's a good chance recovery is not really an issue for you. More importantly, a very simple thing you can pay attention to is your performance in the gym. If your performance in the gym is consistent or improving each week, despite you getting closer to failure, you know, maybe starting to experiment with training past failure, recovery is just not an issue for you. Yep. And you can probably do more and benefit from it. What we see in the research when it comes to training the failure, training past failure, training voy, the people who train the most and train the hardest grow the most. It's pretty much that simple.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:47

That's it. That that goes back to the feels and that goes back to Well, we didn't mention it explicitly, but no SIBOing yourself or creating a narrative that this is really, really going to be fatiguing. Push that away, it will be fine, you'll get used to it. You're not the first one, it's not the end of the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:07

If you want to start experimenting with this stuff, if you're historically trained with reps and reserve, like you know, you start with five ups and reserve or be three ups and reserve, whatever it might be, maybe pick one exercise per week that you'll go to failure with. Yep. And gradually, every week add one more, add one more, add one more. And chances are your body will adapt just fine. What I would also say is that age, training status, etc., do absolutely matter. And your prior training experience can tell you something. Uh-huh. But just make sure you're actually drawing appropriate inference. Yep. So if, for example, you've trained in the past with moderate volumes and multi-failure, and you've had trouble recovering, a performance actually took a hit for a few weeks. If that's a repeatable thing you've seen, it's reliable. You've seen it time and time again. That's worth noting. Yes. If you're 85 years old, highly stressed, obese, sedentary otherwise.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:56

Thank you for listening to this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:58

That was my last year's. Thank you so much. Making the most of it. Um what I will say there, take that into consideration a little bit, but still aim towards progression. Yeah. Because chances are you can do more than you realize, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:12

And sorry, and if your experience with training to failure is the three times you went with your bros and trained beyond failure and YOLO maxed on two exercises and then you were sore for two days, that's likely not the same as you training in a controlled manner to failure consistently over a few weeks and seeing how bad feels. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:30

Now, before I get into the final point, I wanted to mention we didn't touch on cheat reps. Sure. Which are also a way to train past failure in the sense that you're using some momentum to effectively be able to keep ripping out a weight once you're doing it towards the end of a set, where otherwise you would have hit failure. You're incorporating some momentum, swaying your hips, using your knees, whatever it might be, to keep lifting the weight. That's essentially doing additional work even for your biceps, once you're doing curls, that you otherwise wouldn't have done if you just end the set at strict technique full range of motion failure. Now we have one study we were involved in on comparing strict reps to cheat reps by Augustina Dahl. Shout out, for example. Shout out. Which showed similar hypertrophy of the biceps and triceps in the cable pushdown at the bumbbell curl when using strict technique versus cheat technique. That is only one study. Indeed. It also had quote-unquote null findings, meaning both interventions, but the same hypertrophy, at least statistically similar hypertrophy. Personally, I think treat reps can be used, but they're less of a first-line treatment when someone's locked jacked to me. I think other techniques that have more studies, although, and that potentially leverage other forms of hypertrophy mechanisms, let's call them, or stimuli, like the stretch, like stress superset, stretch partials, whatever. Um those are more first-line treatments. I think cheat reps can be used if you really want to dial time efficiency up to 11, because it makes theoretical sense. But I would say it's kind of like, okay, if you really want to push it, you can use them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:02

And when you have stretched uh supersets, like stretch supersets are you can apply them to any exercise.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:07

Whereas cheat reps and momentum, provide you on safe exercises, because if you do stretch supersets on a bench press by yourself, like you might Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:15

Okay, sure. And learn how to get out the bar uh under the bar. But um with cheat reps and momentum specifically, the idea that you can cheat on everything is just false. Like you it's very difficult to cheat on a leg press with momentum unless you then start doing Short and Will, there's a way. Use your hands, baby.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:33

You see those uh when you start lifting, you use your hands. Classic. And you you pro you swear you didn't use your hands, but you know you use your hands. You did. So all that to say, this kind of ties into cheat reps nicely as well. Make sure you do this stuff on safe exercises. This is our legal disclaimer for the episode. Indeed. Mostly because safe schmeif. Safe schmeif. But realistically, just pick exercises where if you had failure or you get pinned, you're not gonna die. You don't have to get out.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:57

And that's that's arguably the only safety point.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:01

Like getting pinned? Yeah, like not being able to get out of the exercise. I will say some exercises are a pain, like so machine hip thrusts, for example, I have to go past failure until I can move it anymore. Starting the set from down there, like setting up the machine like in a position where you're not supposed to, is a bit of a pain, but then that's the price you pay for getting dragged. Indeed. And on that, we'll move on to the verdict. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:25

So for most lifters out there, with all the disclaimers that we've thrown your way, take your sets to failure, all your sets to failure, or pass failure. Rewind the episode if you want to hear the disclaimers and all the caveats. And the alternative approach. Yes. For some minority of lifters. Like, yes. If you have a toll of time and you are able to do more volume, you can leave reps in reserve, but also follow the recommendations which mentioned about taking some sets to failure and then progressing closer to failure in a session. So um, so you still should be hitting failure. It shouldn't be um, okay, yeah, I'm doing a ton of volume, I'm just gonna leave two reps in reserve forever, and that's that. Pass failure techniques uh are an amazing way to save time and make more uh make training more effective. And I suspect that the majority of you do want to save time. So drop sets, stretch partials, stretch supersets, and stretch partials still sounds weird. Length and partials slash stretch partials, like the partials are my life. That was AI, by the way, guys. Uh, if you ever thought it was real, um, and stretch supersets in particular. So, yeah, if you are the one or one of the 10 people that have never trained to failure, and you're listening to this, and you're like, okay, I'm sold. They placeboed me. I'm gonna go and take everything to failure. Start slowly, pick a few exercises where you can fail safely, et cetera, et cetera. Start, take those to failure, keep taking them to failure, and slowly make failure your thing. Finally, for strength, you can take it easier.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:58

Yes, that's the good thing here. But the cool takeaway. And for strength, lifting explosively matters even more. Like I mentioned, lifting explosively increases force production. Force production matters for strength because you're actually training for maximum force production. So lift explosively, but feel free to train more submaximally, farther from failure, but still with heavy weights. Now, if you want to apply this, but you're like, eh, this is all a bit complicated. Myoadapt is all the thinking for you. We literally built MyAdapt for this purpose. Taking these research findings and apply them for the average lifter so they can build more muscle in less time without having to overthink and program for themselves. Being able to train anywhere at any time, adapt their training. If they miss anything, it adapts it for them. Specifically, if you're time constrained, myadapt will take your training and make sure that you're training close to failure. If your recovery is worse, it'll have you train a bit farther from failure initially, and then only progress you in training closer to failure if you're recovering well and your performance is going low. Likewise, if you want to train close to failure always, or true failure or past failure, myadapt enables you to do that. All of the most science-based ways to train, the most effective ways to train, are literally built into MyAdapt. And it doesn't get easier to build muscle than with MyAdapt.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:12

Yep. Myadap.com, check it out. It's available on Code Muscle Lab. Uh Code Muscle Lab true for two uh two-week free trial, available on both uh Google Flame and the Apple App Store. And um, allow me to note that MyAdap is not a tracker, it's not a template or AI-based app, and it's supposed to take all of the thinking away from your training. So that was that was what we wanted to do there.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:34

Finally, if uh before we go into the lab report, if you want a handsome bald fella to take care of you, only your train, uh maybe your diet. Drpack.com for all your coaching needs.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:48

And vice versa. If you don't like ball bald ginger people and the intimidate you or you just find them weird and disgusting, which is totally understandable. Milo Wolf, wolfcoaching.com, the best coach.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:00

I'm just looking at you. I'm thinking for viewers rather than listeners. If you're a listener, just get on YouTube. Yeah, indeed. Enough. Enough with uh Spotify or Apple or whatever you're on. Deezer. Title or whatever. Title, yeah. Shout out Jay-Z. Shout out Jay-Z if you're listening. Am I right? I'm looking at Pac right now. I don't see any ginger hair on his head. His hair is looking mighty black.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:24

What about the beard? The beard is looking ginger. The hair is brown.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:30

It looks black right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:31

I'm not gonna lie to you. There ain't no hair left. Unfortunately. Well, unfortunately, I wish it was like I got a shave.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:37

It means you have high testosterone.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:39

Which I don't. Oh well. It's right in the middle. So before we go, our usual segment, the lab report. A study that just dropped my cauler attention, specifically on muscle fiber types. Now, I'm just gonna give the brief spiel because I didn't actually properly read this study yet. I might make a video on this. Um so I'm gonna break it down in full detail on my channel. But this was a systematic review and analysis on the effects of low versus higher rep training for different fiber types. So we discussed early in this episode slower twitch fibers, acid twitch fibers. For a long time, the rationale has kind of gone, okay, well, slower-twitch fibers are best suited to longer duration efforts, take long to fatigue, they have better oxygen transport towards them, they are better, um what's the word? Blood perfused? I don't know what the word is. They're better uh not innervated, what's the equivalent for veins, arteries, better capillarized. There we go. So basically they're just better suited to long-term work or long-duration work, things like, for example, higher upsets. On the other hand, faster twitch fibers can give you a low force production, a lot of power production, but they tend to be acid faster. So for a long time, the years like Mike Isrital, even Brad Truman fell back in the day, would posit or theorize that maybe lower upsets require faster twitch fibers more, and there's a bigger one, so that might be especially beneficial, and higher upsets preferentially grow your slow twitch fibers. For a long time this debate has been ongoing, and I would say it's one of the topics where the science-based sphere has actually been the most split in whether or not it works. And I would say up until recently the consensus was probably like, eh, probably not, or at least not meaningfully so. This most recent systematic regular analysis by Varovic and Larson, two of our collaborators that we often work with, seems to suggest that actually lower upsets might induce slightly preferential hypertrophy of the fast twitch fibers, and higher reps slightly preferential hypertrophy of the slow twitch fibers. What does that mean? Well, one, it slightly strengthens the rationale for doing most of your training in the heavier rep ranges, which is already should already be something you do for other reasons, like train close to failure, like I mentioned. But it might be beneficial in this regard. Again, this is a bit more exploratory, so I'm speculative, so note that. But two, mixing rep ranges probably makes sense. Yep. So again, that's where MADAP does it. It's uh mixing rep ranges to target different fiber types and make sure you get maximum hypertrophy out of different slower and faster twitch fibers. So I'd say that's kind of the takeaway there. Anything you want to add?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:20

I'm uh fully blurred now for some reason there on the camera. Just this last second. Tap on me. Live on air. There we go. Our listeners are highly confused right now. Yes. Uh, but that's why you should go get on YouTube. This is arguably the number one podcast in terms of visuals in the fitness world, evidence-based lifting world. It's the number one. The number one visual number one, just number one. It's not even a podcast. Shout out Ellen Ababarizu. You are with the best music. You're the number one. There's nothing else I want to add. By the time you hear the sepisode, we should have a bunch of cool studies wrapped up. Um, it's this period of the year where there's a lot going on behind the scenes, and then it all drops together. So lots of cool studies.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:05

And if you're hearing this in 2029, a new update from MADA might have just dropped because 2026 and 2026. Super sets are still coming, though. Hey, we're uh This is only a joke. We're actually working really hard, but uh bear with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:17

I'll say this now. Um support smaller companies, up and coming startups, guys. We are using we're not gonna be saying that as an excuse, but like we are up and coming, and we're working day and we've still managed to have the best app on the market 4.7 stars on both on all app stores.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:37

Speaking of reviews, leave reviews and we're we're very much up and we're also very much coming.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:41

Yes, indeed. See you next one.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:43

It's the Muscle Lab.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:45

Peace.