Do You Have to Lift To Failure for the Best Muscle Gains?

If you're a bit of a gym rat, interested in putting on muscle, or you've been reading my articles for a while, you've likely encountered the term “lift to failure.” But just in case it's new to you, let me explain.

For years now, it has been a bit of a 'known fact' that if you want to gain strength and muscle size, you need to lift to failure

Close your eyes and pretend you're lying on a weight lifting bench about to do a set of bench presses. If you have enough weight on the bar and you do enough reps, you will eventually not be able to complete the movement. Panic will set in, your eyes might bug out, and you might have to grunt, groan, and contort your body to get the bar safely back on the rack.

That's lifting to failure. 

For years now, it has been a bit of a “known fact” that if you want to gain strength and muscle size, you need to lift to failure. No matter how much weight is involved or how many reps you want to do, you must reach that point where you can’t successfully do another rep, if your goal is to get the maximum benefit from that workout.

This is an important point that I don’t want you to miss. The weight doesn’t have to be heavy for this protocol to be effective. You can reach failure by lifting big heavy weights or you can reach failure by doing a whole lot of reps. Either way is effective.

In fact, Dr. David Behm, a Memorial University of Newfoundland researcher who studies resistance-training protocols, told the Globe and Mail a few years ago:

To get stronger, you need to stress both the muscles and the neuromuscular signaling pathways between brain and muscle. Whether you do this by lifting heavy weights a few times or light weights many times, the important point is that the individual must go to failure.

Well, hold on to your sweatband because a new study has thrown a bit of a monkey wrench in this long-held belief. East Tennessee State University published research in Sports that has shown that backing off—just a little bit—from failure (at least some of the time) may actually give you greater gains. 

The "lift to failure" study

The stated purpose of this study was to compare the physiological responses of skeletal muscle to a resistance training program using repetition maximum (RM) or relative intensity (RISR). Which, in plain English, means they wanted to compare the muscle gains between lifting to failure and lifting just below failure...

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