Us strength and conditioning coaches are like the grunts of the military. We prefer to be in the trenches writing programs, running them, testing them, and then rewriting them. It’s a boring life but the simplicity is what makes it addicting for most of us.
Aside from eating crayons, snorting protein powder, and dead lifting all the time, we do like to read every now and again. We have to rely on the academics and the physiologists to research what is happening at a molecular level inside the body to truly appreciate what is going on with the programs that we are writing.
Our job is to take the research and use it as an aid to direct our coaching. We don’t take the research as being definitive. Or in other words, if one study points to one thing, it doesn’t mean that it’s true across the board.
More times than not, n does not equal 1. And it’s up to us to take this mixture of research and practicality, and formulate what we do on a daily basis.
Should we train till failure?
This is a very common question in our industry, and I think it’s a very good question. But I think it’s important to define what failure is.
If we have an athlete doing hang cleans and they fail, that’s not a metabolic issue. That’s more of a technique, coordination, or balance issue. Or in other words, we can label this as structural failure.
If you’re bench pressing and you’re trying to do as many reps as you can, and on your last rep you push and push and push as hard as you can and you don’t achieve that final rep, that would be more of a metabolic failure or a muscular failure.
Research tells us that we do not need to train to failure to get stronger. In fact, the crazy Russians 40-50 years ago figured out that staying within 75-85% of your one rep max is going to yield you probably the best training results.
We know that mechanical tension will improve strength. We also know that coordination and posture will improve strength as well. The effectiveness of a particular exercise is predicated upon how well it’s performed. So, improving an athlete’s posture when lifting will not only make them a better athlete, but will make them or allow them to be able to move more weight.
Population Matters
In regards to adult training, we try very hard to keep our failed reps at a minimum. We know when a brand new person walks through our doors, that sub-maximal weights are going to get them super strong, and some studies suggest that as low as 60% of their one rep max can be used to increase their strength. But for us, it’s more of a psychological tool. If we can get beginners into the gym exercising successfully with minimal setbacks, minimal failed reps, that is going to increase their confidence, and that’s going to lead into a good culture at the gym, and is going to want people to come back for more.
For our athletes, it’s going to depend on their level of play and how long they’ve been in the weight room. With our young kids, failure is going to happen more often than with our professional athletes. And more times than not, at those younger ages, failure comes from a mechanical issue as opposed to a metabolic or muscle issue. Kids are still growing, center of gravity is all over the place, so they exhibit what we call the “wiggles” in the gym. And much like our adults, we can get kids really strong at the beginning using very sub-maximal weight ranges. At the end of the day, we still want the kids to be able to move to the best of their ability.
For our professional athletes, it’s a little bit different. Failure in the weight room is few, far, and in between. That’s because our training shifts focus. We are less hyperfocused on improving absolute strength and are more focused on neurological adaptation with velocity-based approaches. At that point, we are really trying to hone in on mechanics and how well that individual moves, and we don’t need maximal weights to achieve this.
Your top-end Olympic weightlifters will go months without missing a rep. That’s because they are chasing technical mastery, and each set or each rep that they do correctly is only going to build their power and overall strength. They know that that doesn’t come with missing rep after rep.
Again, do I think complete mastery of exercise is viable for most people? No. I think you need to get people moving well enough to get the most out of the exercise and to keep them safe.
Brain Gainz
I do believe that there is a time when failure is appropriate.
Oftentimes, I will pick simple exercises that can be performed to failure that are going to allow that person to stay as safe as possible. Push-ups, bicep curls, tricep extensions, etc. – mainly anything single joint.
And I think, especially with our athletes, it’s important to push these kids from time to time. Not necessarily because of the metabolic things that are happening to the muscle, but for mental toughness. We want our athletes to be able to still push through being uncomfortable, and we don’t want them just to give up or quit when things slightly get uncomfortable for them.
Example programming
As I said in the former, I rarely prescribe specific weights for our adults and athletes. The main reason is to get those numbers, you have to do one-rep, two-rep, or three-rep maxes. I think for adult populations, that’s all risk and very minimal reward. I would even say that for our athletes as well, because we’re training athletes to make them available to their team, not become weight room warriors.
Let’s say your first exercise for the day is back squats, and you had 4 sets of 3 reps planned. You worked up to 300 pounds on your heaviest set, using the following progression:
Set 1: 45×8
Set 2: 135×5
Set 3: 185×3
Set 4: 225×3
Set 5: 275×3
Set 6: 295×3
Set 7: 300×3
So 300 pounds is going to be your max for the day. You did it for three reps with perfect form. Any more weight than that, you’re going to have to compromise on form, and we don’t want that.
For easy math, we want to find out what 90% of that 300 is. This 90% of that 3RM is still a pretty high threshold for training. We do the calculation and find that 270 pounds is 90% of 300. So realistically, our last 3 sets that we’ve done at 275, 295, and 300 are all above that 90% threshold. A cool way to get stronger is just knowing that we can do another set anywhere from 270 to 300 pounds.
For your fourth set, all you need to do is pick a weight that falls between the 270 and 300 pounds. By the next week, this 90-100% range may have shifted up by 5-10 pounds, and that is where we have to accommodate. Next week, we may be able to hit 305-310 pounds for 3. Then, our 90% threshold will shift yet again, and we can drop down and hit our last set at a lower weight and still get stronger.
We accomplish all of this by using submaximal weights and we’re not grinding through our workouts.
Closing
There is a time to grind out reps and there’s a time to stay submaximal. I know the research says that if you grind reps over and over again, that’s going to fry your nervous system. I think you need to train like this in a very prolonged period of time for that to happen. But even without your nervous system taking huge hits, you’re still not going to get as strong as you possibly can as if you were to work in those lower weight thresholds.
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