To Fail or Not to Fail…

…That is the Question

     With all respect to Hamlet, and his creator Shakespeare, the question on the minds of most lifters and bodybuilders isn’t whether or not life is preferable to death (or vice versa) but whether or not we should spend our training lives reaching momentary muscular failure.  Or not.

     When I first started writing for IronMan magazine over 30 years ago, a lot of their more popular writers—such as Steve Holman, Richard A. Winnett, and Clarence Bass, not to mention Mike Mentzer—were decidedly in the training-to-failure camp, albeit with limited sets to mitigate that supposed entity known as “overtraining.”  But you also had writers that came out around that time, such as Charles Poliquin, who recommended much more voluminous workouts programs but still believed in taking the majority of sets to muscular failure.  And on the flip side of that, within a few years you had other writers that came to prominence such as Charles Staley and Pavel Tsatsouline who recommended never training to muscular failure.  Like ever.

     The million dollar question, of course, is who’s correct?  I think the answer is both.  But I haven’t always felt this way.

     If you read my early writings for IronMan magazine and MuscleMag International—I used to write quite a bit for those magazines in the ‘90s and the early years of this century—then you would have assumed I was most decidedly a training-to-failure sort of guy.  And I was.

     I began writing for IronMan and MuscleMag when I was 19 years old. I had devoured those magazines for years—ever since I first picked up a weight at the age of 14 or 15 when my father bought me for, I think, a birthday gift, an old DP set. My early training inspirations were writers such as Stuart McRobert, Bradley Steiner, the aforementioned Steve Holman, and then, not long after that, guys such as Greg Zulak and Gene Mozee. The first set of writers recommended brief, ultra-intense workouts. Zulak and Mozee tended to recommend a lot of volume. By the time I was 19—and at the time when I first put pen to paper for IronMan—I had come to use an amalgam of the various writers above. I trained using a lot of intensity—almost every set to failure—but I also did plenty of volume, and generally trained my muscles about once every 5 to 7 days. (At the time, such infrequent training was just becoming popular—it’s now the very common norm.)

     Being young, I thrived on such training. I also had the perfect lifestyle to allow such training to work. I worked as a freelance writer, a personal trainer, and taught some weight training classes at a local college—which means that the only really stressful stuff I did all week were my actual workouts. I also had enough time to eat 6 to 8 meals a day, consuming somewhere between 1 to 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight, and between 3,500 to 4,000 calories daily. I was lean and pretty big—only 5'6" but my weight fluctuated between 205 to 215 pounds, although I did once get up to 230 pounds with a little supplemental “help.”

     I thought my style of training at the time was the ultimate. I trained so hard that very few people wanted to train with me and my workout partner Dusty (may his memory be eternal, as we say in the Orthodox Church). That fact made both of us proud, though Dusty was, perhaps, just a little bit, how should I say this, crazy.  But sometimes you need to be more than just a little unhinged to excel at something, bodybuilding definitely included.

     But was such ultra-intense training really the best way to train?

     Around 1996 or ‘97, I discovered the writings of two important people—Brooks Kubik (he of  "Dinosaur Training" fame) and (even more importantly) Bill Starr. Starr had always written stuff for IronMan, but for some reason I had ignored him until then. Like a lot of readers of that magazine back then (and I’m sure lifters now even more so), I thought that Starr was too "old-school", that his methods were outdated.

     I also discovered powerlifting around this time, and fell head-over-heels in love with the sport. Long story short: I switched over to more frequent workouts, lost a lot of weight to compete in the 181-pound division in powerlifting, stopped training to failure, started experimenting with workouts that were essentially a combination of Bill Starr, Kubik, and Louie Simmons' methods, and got a hell of a lot stronger than I had ever been before.  (It must also be noted that I eventually came to use primarily “Russian” methods of training, but that wasn’t until I was already a fairly successful powerlifter, years after I had discovered the previously mentioned guys.)

     I also started to write even more articles for IronMan—sometime during the late '90s it was not uncommon for me to have an article in almost every issue for a few years—along with a lot of articles for MuscleMag International.  Because of my exposure to Simmons, Staley, and Bill Starr, I rarely ever recommended training to failure—instead I relied on volume and frequency to elicit gains in both myself, the lifters that I trained, and the readers of my work.

     So where do I stand now on this issue?  I do think that training to failure has its place.  But rarely would I recommend making it the cornerstone of your training program(s).  I think, by and large, it should be done for one or two sets at the end of training a bodypart or at the end of a training session if you’re lifting with more full-body programs.  For instance, if you’re following a basic, full-body program that has you squatting, pressing stuff overhead, doing heavy pulls, and dragging or carrying an assortment of heavy implements or objects, then it’s a good idea, on average, to add a “finisher” or two at the end of each session.  One set of heavy 20-rep breathing squats or one or two sets of farmer walks, sandbag carries, or sled drags would work nicely.

     Never live in the realm of absolutes.  I would be wary of any trainer/writer/influencer who says you should never train to failure or that you should always train as hard-as-possible at each and every workout session.  As I’ve written elsewhere, training should be both/and and NOT either/or.  But I suppose, no matter how often I or others write about it, to fail or not to fail might always be the question.  Ultimately, it’s one you have to decide for yourself.