As weightlifters, we often times want to know the best strategies to grow in the gym.
People often look for a certain workout or exercise plan that’s the KEY to growing big in the gym.
But the truth is, there is no workout plan that’s the key to looking good.
Sure, having a good workout routine certainly helps and is essential to your progress.
But you can be doing the best workouts in the world and still be making little progress. Why? Because in order to grow big, you need to be training intensely.
Simply put, if you’re not working hard enough and training intensely enough, you’re not going to see as much progress as you should be seeing.
However, telling you you need to train intensely isn’t very descriptive and might not mean much to you.
In this post, I’m going to cover everything I know about training to failure.
What it means to train to failure
Training to failure means that you train to the point of, well, failure.
This means training to the point of when your muscles physically cannot do anymore reps. When you’re pushing and pushing trying to get one final rep in, but your muscles feel like they’ve locked.
It’s when you struggle to complete the last rep of your set, if you even complete it at all.
This is what true failure is and it seems simple. Go until you can’t do anymore.
However, it becomes tricky when our minds come into play. Our minds like to protect our bodies and keep us comfortable.
As a result, our minds want to tell us to stop long before we’ve actually reached failure.
As a result, as soon as we start to feel a burn from an exercise, our breathing gets hard, and the set gets challenging, our minds start screaming at us to stop. This is the most tricky part to overcome.
Learning how to stop listening to your mind is a tough habit to beat. The goal is to not let your mind tell you when to stop, let your muscles tell you.
Why you should train to failure
As someone who lifts weights, you might’ve heard that the last reps are the ones that count the most.
This is 100% true. Yes the reps before your last ones still matter, but the final reps cause the most potential for muscle growth.
The last two or three reps of your workout are the ones that will stimulate the most muscle growth from your set. These are the reps that will cause the most tears in your muscles and do the most damage.
When you really think about it, training to failure makes sense. If you know that the last few reps have the most potential to cause muscle growth, wouldn’t you want these to be the most challenging reps?
Doesn’t it make sense to want to push as hard as you can on the final reps, knowing that this is the sweet spot to grow muscle?
How to be safe when training to failure
Lifting weights on it’s own can be pretty dangerous if you’re not careful. It’s important to learn how to prevent injuries when you’re working out.
However, lifting weights becomes even more dangerous when you start training to failure.
Because you’re training until your muscles have no more strength left, you want to make sure you’re being extremely careful when practicing training to failure.
There are certain strategies you can implement to help yourself train as safely as possible.
Strategies to train safely
1. Find a spotter
Having a spotter allows you to have someone to help lift the weight off of you if you fail a rep or to help you push through a rep in order to safely and fully complete one last rep.
Tips to find a spotter
1. Ask a friend
If you bring a friend to the gym with you, then you’re set. You can ask them to be your spotter.
However, I believe most people workout alone so chances are you don’t have someone there with you.
2. Ask someone else working out
If this is the case, then you can ask anyone else in the gym. Find someone who seems approachable and ask if they could be your spotter.
Chances are, they’ll most likely say yes since most people don’t mind being someone else’s spotter.
Just remember, never walk up to someone while their actively working out and interrupt their set. You want to ask them to help you with your workout, you don’t want to ruin theirs.
3. Ask an employee
Finally, if you don’t have anyone with you and you can’t find someone to approach in the gym, then you can ask a staff member.
Most gym staff are happy to spot you and know how to do it. Additionally, most gyms even have signs on the wall encouraging people to practice safe lifting and ask a staff member to be a spotter.
2. Use safeties
If there’s no one around who can spot you or you don’t want someone to spot you, another option is to use safeties.
Safeties are the bars that you can put on the side of a squat rack to catch the bar if you fail.
This will allow you to fail your exercise safely and comfortably.
3. Have a plan to fail
When you’re training to the point of failure, you have to expect yourself to fail. Because of this, you want to have a plan to fail.
You need to have a plan for how and where you’re going to drop the weights so you don’t injure yourself or anyone around you.
Make sure you safely know the common strategies for how to fail certain exercises like bench and squats. This might be throwing the bar back or rolling the weights off to the side.
Whatever it may be, just be sure to have the plan beforehand, before you actually fail.
4. Make sure your surroundings are clear
The gym can become a crowded place of people lifting heavy objects. Because of this, you want to be extremely aware of your surroundings.
This becomes extremely critical when you’re training to failure and most likely planning on dropping the weights after your set.
Scope out the area, pay attention to who’s around you, and make sure you have enough space to safely perform your set.
5. Make sure you implement enough rest
Because rest is so important for women who lift weights, it’s extremely important that you implement enough rest days into your routine.
Especially after you ramp up your training intensity, your muscles are going to need a lot more time to recover.
Try to give yourself as many rest days as you think your body needs, never train when you’re sore, and rest enough between each set.
If you’re not resting enough between sets, you wont be able to push as hard during the next set. If you’re training to complete failure, it’s recommended you rest at least 3-5 minutes between each set.
This gives you adequate time to recover before your next set.
How to train to failure
Now that we’ve covered everything there is to know about training to failure, we can get into how to actually start training to failure.
Don’t focus so much on the number of reps
The whole meaning of training to failure is that you train until your muscles fail. When you can’t do any more reps.
The best way to practice training to failure is to practice training until you can’t do anymore reps.
This means you have to abandon the idea of training until you hit a certain number of reps. Stop deciding when you hit a certain number that your set is done. Because it’s not anymore.
It’s no longer oh I hit 12 or 10 or 15 reps or whatever it may be and then my set is done.
No, you need to stop focusing so much on the number of reps you’ve done and focus more on how many more you can do.
Know your goals and your reps
Going along with my last point, you don’t need to stop when you hit a certain number of reps anymore. However, this doesn’t mean you should stop counting your reps.
It’s important to keep counting your reps to know which rep you’re hitting failure at. Depending on what your goals are, you should be hitting failure at a different rep number.
For example, if your goals are to train for strength, then you should hit failure in the 3-6 rep range.
If your goal is to train for hypertrophy, then you should hit it in the 8-12 rep range.
And if you’re goal is to train for endurance, then you should hit it in the 15+ rep range.
If you can’t hit failure, train as close to it as you can
When you’re first starting off, it’s most likely going to be extremely hard for you to actually train to failure.
It’s tough to overcome your old habits and your mind telling you your set is done as soon as it gets too hard.
Believe me, I’ve been practicing this for a few months now and it’s still hard for me to get it down during my workouts.
The main strategy that’s been helping me get closer and closer to failure is to train each set as close to failure as I can. This means I’m not hitting true failure yet, but it’s certainly a lot closer than I ever was in the past.
It becomes a constant cycle of each exercise telling myself I can do one more, or two more, or three more when I feel like I can’t.
The goal is to progressively get closer and closer and learn how to push yourself a little more each workout.
Keep your reps slow and controlled
As with any workout you do, your form is extremely important. Just because we’re training more intensely now doesn’t mean that form and time under tension go out the window.
I used to think that because I was training to failure I couldn’t focus on time under tension since my muscles would be so tired. But this was completely wrong.
Time under tension is still essential even when training to failure. And it’s still completely do-able, I just reach failure sooner because of it.
Implement partial reps or drop sets
Partial reps are a great way to get yourself closer and closer to failure.
What this means is that after you think you hit failure and you know you can’t do anymore full reps, you start doing partial reps.
This is an amazing way to train and really allows you to push yourself beyond what you thought was possible.
Once you hit failure, start doing as many half reps, then quarter reps, and smaller and smaller reps until you can’t move your muscles anymore.
Another option is to implement drop sets. This means that once you hit failure on your top weight, then you drop the weight down a little until you hit failure on the next weight, and so on and so on.
You keep dropping the weight and hitting failure about 2 or 3 times.
Keep practicing
When you’re practicing training to failure, you need to just keep practicing.
It’s going to take time, and a long time, to unlearn old habits and learn new ones. And that’s completely okay.
Weightlifting is a journey and you’re always going to be progressing and learning. All we care about is progress and every set when you’re able to push yourself a little harder than the last, that’s progress!
More posts on women’s weightlifting:
8 Exercises you need to grow bigger legs