IS TRAINING TILL MUSCLE FAILURE NECESSARY

Failure occurs during the lifting phase of a repetition when the muscles can't produce sufficient force to continue to move the weight upward. But critics and supporters of training to failure often phrase their argument in non-anatomical terms, as if your stance on failure goes to the very heart of who you are as an athlete, or even a person.

 

 

Failure comes in two ways: muscular and mechanical. Muscular failure is when you absolutely cannot lift the weight anymore and is employed in low volume/high intensity programs (typically.) Mechanical failure is when you start to slow down and/or lose form and is used in high volume programs, especially if you train alone and do not want to risk injury.

 

It has been established that training to failure increases lactic acid production more than non-failure training, and greater increases in lactic acid in muscle are critical for muscle growth, because they trigger increases in intramuscular growth factors.

A second benefit to training to failure is that, near the end of a set, all of your smaller muscle fibers become fatigued. Faced with the continued challenge of lifting a heavy weight, your nervous system is forced to use your body's larger fast-twitch muscle fibers.
 

The only problem with this approach is that once you have taxed the nervous system on a set to failure, you develop "central fatigue." Once your nervous system is fatigued, all following sets will be performed at a much lower capacity. You're setting yourself up for injury if you go to failure too often, especially with high volume/heavy weight. It's why you never see people who are natural (important part of this statement) who are elites that go to failure because it's dangerous and will lead to injury eventually (because if you do high reps, heavy weight and heavy volume, you'll burn yourself out and injure yourself because of form breakdown).

 

While failure may be a powerful tool in a bodybuilder's training regimen, it comes with a significant cost. The take-home message is that athletes need to be aware that this tool is taxing, and it shouldn't be treated lightly. If you're going train to failure, do so strategically and appropriately in a training program.

 

Failure occurs unassisted, but there are ways, such as forced reps and dropsets, to push past even that threshold. To perform a forced rep, a trainee reaches failure and then receives assistance from a training partner to continue the set. Dropsets, on the other hand, don't necessarily require a training partner. You just continue an exercise with a lower weight after hitting failure at a higher one. In either case, your body feels these techniques even more intensely than failure, for both better and worse.

The benefits of forced reps and drop sets are similar to failure training: greater metabolic stress, more lactic acid, and more muscle fiber recruitment. However, both techniques cause far greater central fatigue than normal failure training