You’ve heard it articulated in numerous ways “Keep going until you’ve got nothing left… continue to failure… stop when you can’t move”. The suggestion is to exercise until you’ve reached your limit and are completely exhausted. Many of us feel that this is our way of giving 100% worth of our efforts and we all believe that hard work equals results right? Just work even harder and your results will follow…right? Wrong.

Exercising until failure is something that should be done infrequently and is well known to do far more damage than good. For the purpose of this article, we will focus on resistance training (weight training), however the principles apply to cardiovascular training as well. Our body’s are limited in every way. There is only a certain amount of weight you can lift, a certain amount of repetitions you can complete, a certain duration for which you can exercise and so on and so forth. When we exercise to failure, we overload our muscles with resistance and resistance is meant to cause damage to our muscle tissue – this is how we strengthen or grow , we recover from that minor damage (micro tears) and our body adapts. However, much in the same way that we are limited in terms of capacity for doing actual work, our body is limited in what it can repair properly. When we workout to failure, we enter what you might regard as a “heavy damage” zone whereby we have forced ourselves to do as much work as possible and are in a situation where we “fail” on the final repetitions. This is done infrequently for a variety of reasons and  can be beneficial when part of a properly administered.

Unfortunately, the world is littered with workout plans that were thrown together by a magazine editor under the name of some aspiring “pro trainer” or athlete. Often times, the workouts you read in magazines or online are actually put forth by professional trainers and sadly, the majority of “Pro trainers” are just throwing something out that “sounds” great but doesn’t work properly. When you come across a program that encourage “failure” training – just keep going.

If you want to think of it in practical terms then think of this. In what other facet of life does overloading yourself or working until failure help out? Our minds get flustered when we take in too much information, so that kind overload isn’t helpful. Our stomach’s hurt if we eat too much so that doesn’t help either. Even if you overdo it with sleep, you tend to feel dull and unfocused. These examples are all different components of your body reacting poorly to an absolute overload – your muscles are no different. We load them tension and we apply an optimal amount – which by the way should be different person to person depending on their specific goals.

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Tags: build muscle, burn fat, eat well, exercise, exhaustion, healthy fitness, post workout hygiene, post workout nutrition, work to failure, workout, workout structure