Do You Have to Train to Failure to see Growth?

I think this is one of the most asked and misunderstood questions in the entire fitness industry outside of the realm of nutrition. You know you’ve seen it if you’ve ever been into a populated gym. Guys and girls training hard, grunting, even yelling in some cases in order to force their muscles into failure. So many of these people believe that this kind of training is the way to maximize muscle growth potential. And while I for one love training to failure and do believe that in the right circumstance it is needed, it does have its time and place. So that begs the question, does training to absolute failure lead to muscle growth? Unfortunately the answer is not that straight-forward.

There are three different mechanisms for muscle growth. The first of which is muscle tension. Which basically means in order to produce muscle growth, you have to apply a load of stress greater than what your body or muscles had previously adapted too. How do you do this? The main way is to lift progressively heavier weights. I covered this aspect a bit more in depth in my article titled, “Why a Progressive Overload is Necessary for Hypertrophy“, so feel free to go check that out! The second is muscle damage. Which sounds weird to say, but in order for muscle to grow, you must cause muscle damage to release inflammatory molecules and immune system cells that activate satellite cells to jump into action. The last mechanism is metabolic stress. Metabolic stress causes cell swelling around the muscle, which helps to contribute to muscle growth without necessarily increasing the size of the muscle cells. In other words you force blood into your muscle in order to actively increase the muscle cell size.

So now that our mechanisms for growth are out of the way, failure or no failure?

Jeff Nippard, who is a renown training and nutrition expert argues that training to failure can definitely help with muscle growth, but should be used sparingly. Most muscle growth occurs during rest, sleep, and very very little occurs during the actual workout itself. When training to failure your body needs a significantly longer time to recover. So if you are constantly training to failure without the proper recovery, the growth will not show.

In order to maximize muscle growth you have to implement those three mechanisms of growth, all while maximizing recovery through food and rest. We recommend sticking to a progressive overload kind of style, where roughly every 4-6 weeks you will be hitting your peek weight and training to failure. During those periods where you are not hitting absolute failure, utilize enough weight to cause metabolic stress and muscle damage, and consistently train to where mentally you feel like you have one maybe two more repetitions until failure. This is the point where you can maximize growth whilst maintaining your recovery.

In conclusion, training to failure has its place, but should be used in a way that still allows your body to recover. This means training to a rate of perceived exertion where you leave one to two repetitions in the tank, and lowering the weight from the absolute max that you know you can lift. Focus on causing metabolic stress, muscle damage, and keeping muscle tension during the entirety of the lift.