Should you Train To Failure To Build Muscle? (7 Studies)
Should you train to failure for muscle growth? -- Find The Full Story On My Channel.
Training to muscular failure is a concept introduced during the 1940s by the physician Thomas L. DeLorme, who at that time published a series of articles advocating the use of this method for rehabilitation purposes. Long after that, iconic bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger popularized this practice. The basic idea behind this belief is that training to failure provides an additional benefit in building muscle compared with stopping each set before reaching failure.
Today many bodybuilders and trainers swear by this practice and of found scientific proof of their beliefs in 3 studies (Goto et al, 2005; Mortarelli et al., 2017, and Karsten et al., 2021) that found the training to failure to be superior for muscle growth than not training to failure.
However, a closer look at these studies shows that things are not that simple. You see in these studies, investigators compared failure sets with sets that had 3 to 6 reps in reserve (RIR). Reps in reserve or RIR, is a scale on which you can estimate how many reps to failure are left at the end of each set. For example, a set with 2RIR means that the set stopped 2 repetitions before failure.
In the three studies I mentioned, the non-failure trials were stopping at 3 to 6 repetitions before failure (aka 3-6 RIR). This is a much lower training intensity than what is commonly advised by fitness professionals. Most of the coaches and trainers advise their trainees to get close to failure with at least 3 to 1 repetitions. So seeing in these studies that they compared failure sets with 3-6 RIR sets was a bit strange.
However, when training to failure was compared with non-failure sets with 3 or fewer RIR, 4 studies (Sampson et al., 2016, Helms et al., 2018, Nobrega et al., 2018, and Lacerda et al., 2020) found no differences between them. So training to failure or 3-1 reps close to failure (aka 1-3 RIR) didn’t produce differences in muscle growth.
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References:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26049...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28713...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15947...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16794...
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28965...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27787...
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25809...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29189...
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