Strength training needs to be a foundational component of your health and fitness if you want to live longer and live a better quality of life. And if you’ve been following us for a while you’ve likely heard us say that to get results with strength training you need to work hard.

But how hard? Is there a TOO HARD? Does training to failure limit your results.

We are seeing a surge in research around the details of load and intensity required to optimize strength gains. And just to be clear, we are talking about strength training here, NOT cardiovascular fitness. So don’t be tempted to confuse this discussion on strength training to failure with high intensity interval training, HIIT, (although there might be some generalizations which would also apply!).

We know that if you lift to failure, that is until you have to drop the weight because you can’t keep going, that it doesn’t matter how heavy the weight is you will get stronger. Even a single set to failure was found to be sufficient.  For more info on single sets to failure check out our previous blog titled “get stronger in 13 minutes“.

This is exciting if you are limited for time, have joints that are sensitive to heavy loads or just want a simple strength gain strategy.

But should you always train this way? Should all your strength training sessions be structured around lifting to failure?

In short no.  It takes longer to recover from workout’s where training to failure occurred. This can pose a significant issue if your soreness post training to failure is limiting your ability to do life’s normal day to day activities. It’s an even bigger problem for athletes, who have a rigorous training and competition schedule to adhere to. In general, recovery from training to failure is a real problem.

Approximately a year ago some researchers at East Tennessee State University found performance outcomes such as maximum force production, rate of force development and vertical jump are reduced with repetitive maximum training versus submaximal training.

This is seemingly counterintuitive, right? Why would I push myself to the limits in a training session if it impedes my ability to run faster and jump higher (if that’s important to you). Former SST Strength Coach, now Strength coach at Brock University Dave Scott-McDowell used to preach this message to his athletes. Training to failure reduces your athletic potential.

Recently, from the same data set, the same East Tennessee State University researchers showed what is happening inside skeletal muscle tissue when training to failure vs “leaving some in the tank”.

In summary the study took 15 well trained volunteers and gave them a work-out 3 times a week for 10 weeks. One group was a “relative intensity” group and one group was a train to failure group. Participants in the train to failure group were assigned a weight with the goal of failing somewhere between the 8^th to 12^th rep in the 3^rd set. Weights were adjusted higher or lower each workout to achieve the goal. The relative intensity group was tested on the upper limit of what they could do for 3 sets of 10 reps and then assigned a percentage, such as 85 percent or 70 percent to determine the weight they used.

Muscle biopsy and ultrasound data showed the train to failure group had less increases in overall muscle size, size of individual muscle fibres and presence of several key signals for muscle growth.

It appears that muscular adaptations to submaximal training were superior to training to failure.

Of additional interest in this study, the submaximal group used a combination of heavy and light training sessions. 2 training sessions a week were heavy training sessions (85% 1 RM) and one was easier (70% 1 RM).

The take home here isn’t that you need to be complicating your workouts by calculating percentages of your 1RM and going exactly at 85% 2 times a week and 70% once a week. If you want to get into that level of detail, by all means go ahead, you will get stronger. But we know there are lots of ways to get stronger.

The take home is that if recovery is important to you, you shouldn’t be consistently lifting to failure. You still need to work hard, but maxing out every session is counterproductive.

Instead mix it up. Have strength training days where you go to failure and plan for some extra recovery time. Have some training days where either you back off the weight a little bit or you leave some reps in the tank. On those days you should feel like you worked hard, but could have pushed harder. And maybe most importantly have some scheduled days where you take it easy.