What Does Training to Failure Really Mean? - Bradley Steiner (2010)

Masahiko Kimura

Just What “Does Training to Failure”

Really Mean in Weight Training?

The late Arthur Jones is the brilliant innovator who developed the Nautilus exercise machines. These machines, in our opinion, represent the only significant advance in progressive resistance training since the development of the plate loading barbell.

In Jones’ early writings he introduced the concept of “training to failure”. This approach to training is key to understanding how Nautilus machines are to be correctly utilized. Additionally, it is key to understanding how resistance training in ANY form, using plate-loaded barbells and dumbbells, cables, pulley devices, etc., ought to ideally be employed.

We have noted often that this idea of training to failure is incorrectly understood.

Many believe that training to failure means training to the point of actual exhaustion, strain, or collapse. Or, that it simply means working out until you have done so much exercise for each body part that further training is simply impossible.

None of that is true.

“Training to failure” is hardly the overburdening, endlessly time-consuming, grueling, all day affair in the gym that some have assumed it to be. To the contrary, training to failure (or, put in terms that had been used before that one came into use, by men like Peary Rader, simply means: “Training very hard on a normal exercise program, but working each exercise sufficiently to achieve proper overloading of the working muscle.”)

Here’s an example of how it works:

Let’s take the two-hands barbell curl, merely as an example. Select a weight that you feel will enable you to do a strict (but effortful) set of 8 repetitions. Now try to do 10 reps with that weight. Perhaps you’ll find yourself almost able to complete the 9^th rep; or possibly the 10^th.

Try.   Continue your effort – strict and correct as you possibly can, performance -wise – until you find yourself genuinely unable to move the bar. The weight simply falls back to the starting position, and that is it.

You’ve just worked to “failure.” Do no more of that exercise today. You’ve done plenty IF you truly pushed it to a genuinely unpassable limit of repetitions.

Not really “straining” at all. Just hard work.

Really, the same kind of work that long before Arthur Jones invented the Nautilus machines, men like Peary Rader emphasized in their courses.

Now, if you’ve endeavored to train like that on a program of 15 exercises, doing between 4 and 6 sets per exercise, that would not only be impossible – it would indeed be straining and overworking to an inordinate degree.

Is a single set really enough? Yes, IF you do it as described. Personally, we do not always or even usually train that hard. We modify it. We push, but we require two or three sets in our workouts (of between six and 10 exercises, only) that we push hard, but not always to failure. When we do go to failure we do it on the last set (which, we admit probably results in our over-training).

Is training to failure dangerous? No, absolutely not, if done as we described – which is how we understand Jones and those who have followed his training advocates teach. It isn’t dangerous because you do only that which you are capable of doing, and then, after trying hard to do a little more, you simply stop when the muscles being worked tell you that presently they have done all they are able to do.

Training to failure is really the most efficient and reliable way to employ the proven overload method of training, which is the heart and soul of ALL progressive resistance exercise, and always has been.

Will this enable me to build a magazine-cover physique? Only if you have the proper genetics for such a physique. Otherwise, you are in the same category as 99.5% of the world is in, you’ll simply be able to attain your own genetic limit (drugs) in strength (response to drugs) and muscular development (ability to tolerate drugs). Magazine cover, right?

Not a bad deal, eh. Over the years we have found that, for building up, and assuming an attitude that is sufficiently amenable to training to failure, that is indeed the best approach. It saves tons of time, requires relatively few exercises, and produces the greatest all-round benefits.

You DO NOT need Nautilus machines to train this way. Nautilus simply provides the most efficient approach to employing this method with several conventional exercises that – juxtaposed to the Nautilus machines that duplicate their basic action – are not quite as effective in working the muscles being trained.

Once you are advanced and have built up, we personally favor a three day per week lifetime program in which a LIGHT, MEDIUM, and HEAVY training day each week is undertaken. On days when you are not up to a heavy day do another medium day.

The real and healthy activity of bodybuilding as it was practiced during the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s has vanished. It has, sadly, gone underground. The mainstream activity that passes itself off as “bodybuilding” today is so unhealthy, ridiculous, and immersed in perversion and nonsense that it sickens anyone who truly loves that which we used to refer to as the Iron Game.

But real bodybuilding is nonetheless alive and well, if not in the mainstream. We remain ardently in support of that wonderful activity, and we hope that by explaining relevant aspects of it to those who read our material we can contribute to their appreciation of what it offers, and to their benefit in following on the path that it provides.

If you dislike the term “training to failure” then substitute “training hard” – for in essence it really means the same thing, when the terms are properly understood.

Have no reluctance to train hard,
hard muscles will be the result.

Enjoy Your Lifting!