Unpopular Opinion: Training to Failure is a Wasted Effort

When people find out that I’m a personal trainer, they’re often surprised to find that I don’t really watch sports. When the Super Bowl is on, I’m typically joking around with all the other stragglers at the party since I usually don’t even know who’s playing until the week of the game.

This past weekend though, I knew it would be momentous, and my wife’s favorite team is the Knicks so we watched it. While it was on in the earlier quarter though I was scrolling through my phone on YouTube and caught this bit of, well an opinion from a fitness influencer.

“Stop deadlifting, it is an absolute wasted effort”

His reasoning is when trying to build muscle it’s not a good exercise because it’s dangerous when you are training close to failure.

Well yeah, but that’s if you are training close to failure, which is actually NOT a great way to train.

Here’s why. Though training close to failure has been studied heavily and shown to produce a growth stimulus, it’s not absolutely necessary and can even be counter productive. Trying to force yourself through limits invites injury and that’s true for just about every exercise, not just the deadlift. It also signals to your body after a few weeks to put the breaks on in fear of hurting itself.

A better way to train is to progressively overload the muscles with some of the things that are associated with building muscle (ie mechanical tension, and the pump) without training close to failure. Think of it this way, progressive overload is the mother of strength training and muscle building. Progressive overload in it’s simplest term means adding more than before.

Is it easier to add to something that you can barely do?

OR…

… is it easier to add to something you can do without issue?

And if you can add to it without issue, you can moonwalk past your previous capabilities casually and as that happens your body grants you the gains and does it safer.

As an example, I have a woman who started with me 7 weeks ago.

In that time, with the bench press she did 56 reps in 10mins with a weight that was 5lbs heavier than what she could originally do for just 1 rep (I’d guess she could now do somewhere between 8 and 15 reps in a row if asked, that’s the rep range associated with muscle development).

She wouldn’t have been able to put up those numbers without having gained muscle. With Romanian deadlifts she did 6 sets of 6 with a weight heavier than her starting max and she is set to take her squat and do 2 sets of 15 reps with a weight heavier than her starting 1 rep max. Just to put it into perspective the calculated max on her squat (which is considered the top exercise for building muscle) is 50lbs heavier than it was 7 weeks ago when she started. Her deadlift is 20 something pounds heaver.

Those gains wouldn’t have been possible if we tried to force her through her limits. We did it by deliberately avoiding failure though a carefully restrained method that works quickly and sustainably across multiple exercises simultaneously that has her casually stroll past her previous limits without her even realizing it till I told her.

And just in time for her trip to Aruba. Boom!

Deadlifting isn’t a wasted effort, trying to force the limits is.

Now if you want fast and sustainable results, don’t force the limit. Stay within the limit in order to expand the limit. It’s a bit more strategic than go hard or go home bro but the good news is you don’t have to figure this out for yourself. I do it for you and I offer a free trial so you can see if its right for you. Just send me a text at 973 476 5328 and introduce yourself. Easy right?

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Eric Moss is a personal trainer in Boonton and moonlights as a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, and motivational speaker. In the tradition of the strength performers more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a live show and travels across the country doing presentations on goal achievement for conferences, corporations, associations, nonprofits, and government entities as well as for schools and universities. His personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville, Kinnelon, Pine Brook, Butler, and Parsippany New Jersey.