The concept of training to failure is a simple one but it becomes more complicated when one looks at some of the factors that affect your ability to activate all your fibres inside a muscle or group of muscles.

The traditional method for measuring muscle ability was contained in what was called the “one rep max” or how much weight the muscle could lift once. But lets not get too confused on that for the moment. Lets look at practical application. If you are attempting 10 repetitions of say dumbbell curls, then on rep one you activate only a percentage of the fibres in the bicep to perform the rep. But as you get rep no 10 you need to activate all of the muscle fibres to complete the rep because of fatigue. Once you have activated all the fibres you should, in theory be unable to perform another rep. This will cue the muscle to grow stronger because it did not cope with the task you gave it.

The problem now arises with “one rep max”. It assumes you can activate all the muscle fibres on the first rep, and if you can’t do the one rep, how does one account for the fatigue while trying? Luckily you don’t have to worry about it, but know that you should not assess your strengths using it.

The other important factor that affects training to failure is what I call mental failure. This can be broken down further into neuromuscular failure and actual mental failure. Actual mental failure happens when the muscle can still do more but the head has decided it’s had enough. As you can imagine getting all your fibres to activate require a high level of intensity and this means pain. Pushing your body further is directly linked to pushing your mental limits of mind over matter.

Neuromuscular failure has to do with the brains ability to send the necessary information to the muscle. This happens along what is called neuromuscular pathways. The best way to understand these is to imagine you are right handed. When you try to write with your left hand, the thing appears stupid. You are telling it what to do with your brain, but your hand struggles to get the movements right. If you kept at it you will eventually write as well with the left hand as with the right. You can also refer to it as co-ordination and that is nothing more that the ability to control the muscle with your brain along a pathway.

The developments of these pathways are dependent on their need and your activity. It should be easy to see that if you are a novice weight trainer your brain may have all the intentions of activating 100% of the fibres in a muscle, but your neuromuscular pathways has simply not been developed to achieve this. This represents another aspect of training and development. The more your train the better your ability becomes to train to failure. You can now see how lifting weights develops muscular and mental systems.

Progression

The ability to affect change in the anaerobic fibres depends on their perception of what is needed to perform the task.
The body likes to maintain the status quo that deals mostly with the minimum requirements to perform a task. Unless the body feels the need to get stronger, it will stay where it is and if at all possible reduce its abilities.

Let’s illustrate this with our dumbbell exercise from before. Lets assume you lift a 10-kilogram dumbbell for 10 repetitions, and you achieve failure on rep 11. The body views this as an incentive to change so it grows in anticipation of doing 11 reps with 10 kilograms. If we apply the principal of progression, the next time dumbbell meets bicep, we ask it to do 10 repetitions with 12 kilograms. Once again we have failure on rep 11. The process repeats and the concept of progression is applied.

If we had asked the same from the body as on the first workout, the body will have no incentive to grow stronger and perhaps a little incentive to grow weaker. This process will later show the importance of keeping track of your weights and repetitions and you will see how it will help you maintain progression in your training.

Weights and Repetitions

As illustrated above the weights you use and the repetitions you do forms the basis for progression. The importance here is to mange the increase in weight as you progress. If you increase the weights by too much you could end up reducing the progression and if you don’t increase the weights enough you could cause the body to slip backward.

On most of the small body parts you will find that a 1 to 2 kilogram increase can help achieve a steady progression curve. On larger muscle groups anything from 5 to 15 kilograms can get results. There really is no right or wrong here but rather you will need to experiment.

It is also important to note that as you get stronger and the weights get heavier you will need to asses carefully how much added weight you add, typically the heavier the weights you lift, the less you add on each time.

This is where the amount of repetitions you perform with those weights becomes an important guideline and indicator. On smaller muscle groups you can work around 6 to 12 repetitions and on larger muscle groups use between 12 and 20 reps as a guideline. This adds the dimension of using repetitions inside the progression equation to maintain growth.

If you for example managed only 8 reps on the biceps curls, you will still use the 10 kilograms weight but keep pushing your muscles to do more reps. The process now revolves around hitting your target repetitions and then increasing the weight. If you at first don’t hit the target reps with the new weights, then the repetitions become the cue for increasing weight. Eventually you are always progressing by either doing your target reps or increasing the weight.

Another potentially helpful way to calculate progression is something I stumbled on by chance while totaling a training sheet in Excel. If you total up all repetition you performed in your workout and you multiply that by the total of weights you lifted, you arrive at a interesting figure that represents the amount of weight you moved in total for the workout. In simple terms if you leg-pressed 100 kilograms for 20 reps then you moved in total: 100 x 20 = 2000 kilograms or two tons! You can se how effective weight training is when you perform this exercise for your entire workout. It often quite amazing how much weight you moved in one workout and highlights how much energy is used in such a short time.