To gain muscle mass, you need to excel at the quality of your exercises
Optimizing muscle mass gains is an important goal for strength training enthusiasts. The question often arises as to how far you should go to achieve maximum results. A new study from Florida Atlantic University sheds light on the impact of exercise on muscle failure.
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Training until one can no longer perform another repetition has long been a subject of debate. However, no previous meta-analysis has determined whether the distance to failure in the number of remaining repetitions is linearly related to muscle strength and size.
Previous research has confirmed that training to the limit of one’s ability, rather than constantly pushing oneself to failure, is essential for muscle growth. A new analysis compiled data from 55 studies to evaluate how training to the limit affects muscle growth and strength. The results, published in the journal Sports Medicine, show that training to the limit has no clear effect on strength gains, but does significantly promote muscle hypertrophy. This is likely because intense training increases the mechanical tension of muscle fibers, which is a key determinant of muscle growth.
Researcher Michael Zourdos notes that hypertrophy is greater when training is close to failure, regardless of the adjusted training volume. For strength, this proximity is not critical. Recommendations advise stopping 3-5 reps before failure to increase strength and 0-5 reps before failure to increase hypertrophy.
Previous research has shown that training to failure will not hurt your gains and your muscles will still grow, but the risk of injury and overtraining is increased.
For strength development, it is more important to focus on heavier loads, but not to work to exhaustion. This makes sense in that training to exhaustion can be very challenging for the body and is harder to recover from in subsequent sets.
The study highlights that training close to failure improves the accuracy of counting the remaining reps, positively influencing the choice of load and therefore muscle growth. However, this type of training can be difficult to recover from and may impair results in the long term.
These results offer avenues for future research and provide valuable insights for coaches on the impact of muscle failure. However, the exact relationship between training close to failure and strength gains requires further investigation in larger studies.
“Based on this meta-analysis, we can suggest that it is possible to use a range of different programming methods, tailored to our own needs, to achieve different training goals. Perhaps this is further encouragement to not stress over the minutiae of ideal rep counts and set ranges and instead focus on training hard and intensely, which may lead to loss of results,” the study authors conclude.