TRAIN TO FAILURE

IF you train with me, you are all too familiar with the term going to failure, or failure in the gym is success. I have practiced the ethic of going to failure as a means of muscle stimulation for decades. This means that you cannot perform another rep within that set of determined reps. This style is difficult and uncomfortable, yet I staunchly stand by this preferred method. Over the years the concept of going to failure has fallen victim to misapplication, misunderstanding, and improper logic. But used properly “failure” can serve as a useful tool in guiding progress and building muscle. How else would one know when to stop repping out the exercise that you are performing? If you pick a random number of reps accompanied by a random weight then you might randomly increase muscle and strength. The number of reps I perform for an exercise does in fact change because I always want to confuse the muscle, but I try to set the weight so that I will fail or at least struggle to finish. If I didn’t quite set the correct weight and reached the desired rep count without difficulty then I will add more weight (progressive overload). This overload principle accompanied by failure tears down muscle tissue (mitochondria) This is precisely what you are trying to achieve when you workout. Oh by the way, this tearing down of the muscle also causes soreness the next day or two (known as DOMS {delayed onset muscle soreness}). Embrace the soreness!!You have failed successfully!?!?! Now accompany this with good nutrition, and your body will rebuild and actually make stronger all muscle fibers that you tore down. This is my way of training and I’m sure many others like me, but like everything else in this modern digital fat, lazy world things change for the easier. God forbid you should go out of your comfort zone. I mean why should we make training difficult???????????? If you don’t want to be sore, if you don’t want to be challenged, if you don’t want to grow, if you don’t want to find out who you really are then don’t train with me!