Beyond failure: five weider principles that allow you to train past failure, increase workout intensity and accelerate muscle gains

Flex, May, 2002 by Greg Merritt

"Failure is the true test of greatness."

Herman Melville

To succeed in bodybuilding, you must learn how to fail. This is not because most competitors lose, although they do. In a contest with 100 entrants, 99 will go home without the overall trophy. Still, nobody needs to practice for such placings. Nor is it because all humans, with the possible exception of Charlize Theron, will fall short of perfection. Try as we might, we can never ultimately build flawless physiques. This hard truth is part of the beauty of bodybuilding, but not the failure at issue here.

The sort of bodybuilding failure you must learn is the one preordained every time you begin moving a weight, because that moment will always be followed by another when you stop moving it. All sets must end. The key to training success is prolonging the inevitable failure of muscle or failure of will. This feature explains how to keep a set going even when your muscles and mind tell you to stop.

WHY DOES A MUSCLE FAIL?

Let's say you're pumping out a set of barbell curls, certain you can perform a personal best of 10 full reps at that weight. Around the fifth rep, the pain begins -- a light warm ache. You keep going. Six. Seven. The pain increases. Now it's a burning sensation. Still, you tell yourself you can't stop until you get to 10. Eight. It's torture now, but you won't stop. Nine. No stopping, can't stop, got to get that last rep. But you can't.

Your biceps seem to have simply given out.

What happened? It's difficult to say why you didn't get That 10th rep, because there are so many elements involved, starting with your biceps and your brain, but also including your skeletal, circulatory, respiratory and nervous systems. Still, the two most likely scenarios are your muscles (or, more specifically, the Golgi tendon organs) told your brain to stop the movement or your brain told your muscles to stop it. In the first case, a shutdown message was sent to your subconscious as you neared a threshold beyond which you had never passed before. In the latter case, the increasingly painful buildup of lactic acid in your muscles worried you so much that you stopped. In both instances, your mind and body are trying to protect you from injuring yourself.

The first thing you should know is that, in fact, you were probably not very close to injuring yourself. Certainly, there would be a greater chance of trauma during the struggle for that 10th rep than during, say, the fourth rep of the same set. If something is going to give out, it will typically happen when taxed more rather than less. Still, the odds of injury would've been small had you maintained proper form. Your body and your brain were being extra cautious.

The other thing to know is that there is such a thing as true muscle failure. Just as you can't go 100 miles per hour on a riding mower (at least not without some serious modifications), you can't curl 1,000 pounds, and it's not your Golgi tendon organs or lactic acid buildup That's holding you back. Every muscle has a strength threshold. That said, in most cases, your brain shuts down your muscles before they've even approached that threshold. After all, there are stories about slender women, flush with adrenaline, who have hoisted cars to free trapped children. That should be all the proof you need that your body is capable of much more than your mind usually lets it attempt.

SET EXPANSION Failure is that moment when you simply cannot complete another full repetition with strict form. Of course, you should be continuously striving to increase your reps and/or weights over the long term, and there are many factors involved in strength increases, starting with a properly formulated routine and the right diet. At that very moment when you're failing, the key to squeezing out one more rep is almost entirely mental. A training partner can offer encouragement, but you have to will that weight up one more time.

Let's say you can't get one more rep or, better yet, you somehow manage to do one more, but you certainly can't do two more. Eventually, there comes a time when you cannot complete another full rep without cheating, shortening the reps, pausing for a few seconds, decreasing the weight or getting some help. These five approaches are set-expansion techniques, and they can push a set beyond the normal limits of failure. The fact that n set can be extended by changing variables tells you that your muscles were not fully taxed via full reps.

To thoroughly exhaust bodyparts by expanding the set (taking the working muscle past the normal point of failure), you need to incorporate one or more of the Weider Training Principles discussed in sidebar form in this feature. The choice of which technique to utilize is up to you. All but forced reps can be performed alone. Incorporating each of them at various times will provide you with ample variety and thus keep your muscles guessing and growing.

WHEN SHOULD A SET END?

Not every set should go to failure. When pyramiding your sets (going progressively heavier with lower reps each set), your initial higher-rep sets should not be especially intense. Indeed, you may want to focus all of your energy at the top of the pyramid and not go to failure in any of your sets. Potentially dangerous lifts such as bench presses and squats should never go to failure without spotters. If you're training more for rehabilitation or toning than for muscle mass, it's not prudent to test your limits. Barring those exceptions, you should push most sets to failure or near-failure. This is the key to effective weight training. Using these going-past-failure techniques, you overload the muscle with a stress it hasn't previously experienced, so it is forced to grow in size and strength.