Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

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There are a few issues with taking every set to failure, the most important being that it will substantially increase your risk of injury. It sounds great until you consider compounds like the deadlift that can ruin your back if your form is bad, and by definition, going to failure means your form will be imperfect at some point. There are lots of macho powerlifters out there with permanently ruined spines who will probably die earlier than they would have otherwise, due to mobility degradation.

Particularly as you get older you become more injury prone and your recovery time slows down. This necessitates being cautious about how quickly you increase weight and how often you go to failure.

The better goal to target is increasing volume, where volume is defined as Sets x Reps x Weight. The literature doesn't conclusively establish that any one of these is "more important" than the others for hypertrophy. The only real caveat when you follow this rule is that at a certain extreme of low weight / high reps (like 50 reps) you wouldn't actually be doing resistance training anymore, it'd be cardio.

2 reps in reserve is fine and far less painful, but you need to go to actual failure often enough to know where failure is on each set. I’m nerdy enough to suggest rolling a 20 sided die for each set, and on a 1 take it to failure it’s not that complicated and keeps your predictions honest.

As I understand it taking a set near failure works reasonably anywhere between 5 to 30 reps, but 30 well controlled reps with good form * 3+ sets for each muscle group gets really boring.

Boring is subjective though. For some like me the ideal weight gives endorphins where as too much feels like cortisol. Too light is sort of nothing. So I aim for that "yeah I pushed something" feeling. Which isn't failure.

Let’s be realistic, everyone goes through periods when they just don’t want to work out.

So optimal in terms of personal preference is defiantly worth considering alongside optimal in terms of results, but optimal in terms of returns on effort defiantly has a place at some point in our lives.

This is key to recognize. Even when you don’t “feel” it you still go and do your program. But, when you do feel good, you go and push.

Yes guess it depends on your goals. Whether you are doing it for health, vanity, work or competitions will adjust the calculus.

I mean if you're going "until I can't maintain proper form" is there seriously a risk that you're too far from failure to make real progress?

It’s a nuanced topic.

If you actually can’t use proper form that’s already failure of one of the muscles you’re trying to train. However many people resort to improper form well before that point.

Further the risk isn’t just injury, using excessive weights you can’t properly train with can mean failure to provide proper stimulus to a muscle you’re targeting.

What about longer rest periods? For example if I wait 1hr between sets I can do full weight again without dropping down weights with a 2-5min break. In fact I can get multiple more sets in and significantly increase my total volume if I spread a workout over a day (which is easier with WFH). Any thoughts on this? Is there not enough muscle fatigue with this approach?

Hard to stay warmed up that way. What you’re describing is how people tend to get big without the gym (lifting heavy things through the day) but they also tend be pretty active in between (think farm work).

But as long as you’re not going so hard you risk injury, it might be great overall. Could be really good for your mental state.

You might also be interested in reading about Pavel Tsatsouline's "grease the groove".

That's why I always get as close as I can until I feel my form suffer, then stop that set. I've hurt my neck a few times, and it's always been from "oh i can push ONE more..." then suffer for it. It's never been worth 100% optimized gains. A few people I know did the same with deadlifts and paid for it, right now one's awaiting back surgery that's basically cost her all her savings.

Perfect form isnt a thing, its all a matter of what joint positions you are adapted to produce or reduce force in. So the problem with form breakdown isnt that the position you end up in is dangerous (no, rounding your back some is not bad), but that you are not prepared for the stress in that position.

Its unfortunate that people say deadlifting "wrong" causes injury, while the evidence does not support it. People should not be turned off from lifting heavy by such statements.

Your point about the injury risk going up is valid. That being said going to failure and beyond is extremely effective way to train.

As I mentioned in another comment a possibile way to mitigate the risks is to reduce the load and make the exercise harder and increase the time under load by slowing down the exercise.

Also it's a good idea to swap from a higher risk exercise to a safer one to crank out the last reps. For example from squat to leg press.

I think the total volume idea is more flawed than you realise. Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise, just by decreasing the weight, so your high rep caveat is covering up for quite a lot. This is true mathematically for an Epley style model for example.

> Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise

I’m not sure this is true and it might be the opposite. Lactic acid will build up with light weight while trying to hit a volume number that will make it hard for people to finish.

Anecdotally, my gym had a "challenge" some times back where the goal was to achieve the max total volume in one set without pause.

I tried various combos of weight* reps, and in the end the optimum was somewhere in the middle because no matter how light the weight there was a limit for me at about ~150 reps.

In my case, the curve would be: total volume increases quickly initially at you go from max weight/1 rep to something like 20/30 reps, then something of a plateau as things equalise, then it goes down again as you reach the max reps threshold.

Great point. Personally I find lactic acid build up way more limiting for me than muscle fatigue. It's why I gravitated towards power lifting.

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