Do You Need to Lift to Failure?
Reps in reserve, motivation through wearables, and your monthly recommendations.
The Rundown
Do You Need to Lift to Failure? In the world of weight lifting, old school wisdom says you need to push each set to failure, meaning you literally can’t complete one more rep, to see strength gains. A new study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise suggests that training to failure isn’t necessary for most people. It found that getting close to failure produces similar strength gains.
Researchers from City University of New York Lehman College put 34 men and 8 women through an eight-week full-body training program. One group completed all their sets to failure while the other group stopped short of failure. Specifically, this group was instructed to continue each set until they felt they had two repetitions in reserve, meaning they could do two more complete reps before failing on the next one.
The volunteers were all experienced lifters and the protocol was two workouts a week, with each consisting of one set of nine different exercises. Each workout took about 30 minutes total.
The four tests of strength were bench press, squat, CMJ (countermovement jump or squatting down then jumping as high as possible in a single motion), and AMRAP (as many reps as possible) on a leg-extension machine lifting 60% of body weight.
Bench press, squat and AMRAP increased with no significant difference between groups. Power (CMJ) however, increased more in the group that trained to failure.
For muscle size, things were different. In most, but not all cases, lifting to failure produced bigger gains in mass.
The takeaway? If your training goal is aesthetic or you’re lifting for a bodybuilding competition, lifting to failure makes sense. But if you want muscle and strength and the ability to recover for the next workout, keeping a rep or two in reserve is a solid strategy.
(Note: Estimating reps in reserve can be inexact. The researchers sometimes asked the participants to continue after they had estimated they had two reps left. The estimates were pretty good and got better over the eight weeks of the study but these were experienced lifters. If you’ve never trained to failure before, it’s a good idea to try it so you have an internal benchmark before you switch to reps in reserve).
Wearable Motivation. Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Birmingham found that using wearables, such as a smartwatch, make people seven times more likely to stay active.
The study focused specifically on adults recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and involved 125 people between age 40 and 75 from the UK and Canada. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to use wearable technology to support personalized activity plans.
Compared to the control group, those who wore a smartwatch were ten times more likely to start working out regularly, seven times more likely to still be active after six months and three times more likely to remain active one year later, even after support stopped. At the end of the program, more than 50% of the smartwatch group were meeting recommended activity levels compared to only 17% of the control group.
The researchers note that similar benefits have been observed in studies of the general population but caution that fitness trackers are most effective when used purposefully. They suggest planning exactly when and how you’ll move, using reminders or calendar prompts to build a regular routine, monitoring your activity to stay motivated and accountable, celebrating with small rewards, and sharing your progress, which can boost commitment.
The tracker, they stress, is a tool, not a solution. It won’t change behavior on its own. Its value lies in how it supports your goals and helps you build lasting habits.
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