Should You Train To Failure To Maximize Muscle Growth?

Foreign.

What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Built With Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, myself, and I. That is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman, et al. And sitting directly in front of me, only 1,000 miles away, is the one and only Daniel Plotkin, aka Tootsie Pot Plotin, aka Danny Boy. And today we're going to be talking about failure training and what it means to go beyond failure. We're going to talk about what failure actually is. And believe it or not, that definition is a little bit more complex and nuanced than you might think. And we're going to talk about when it's more or less appropriate to go to failure. And then, of course, we're going to talk about what it means to go beyond failure. True iron grit, jail yard training style. But before we do any of that, Danny Boy, why don't you tell us what failure is?

Yeah. So, super complicated question, but I think there's multiple buckets for when talking about failure. So we have volitional failure. So that's failure when the person believes that they can't do another repetition, or at least another repetition with good form. And then we have. This gets kind of squirrely, but we have concentric failure. So we'll call it concentric task failure for the purposes of this discussion. So let's say you're doing a leg extension and you're trying to get a full rep. So once you can't achieve a full rep anymore, that's when you have concentric task failure. But you could also have just simple concentric failure where while you're doing the concentric, during the leg extension, you simply can't move the load anymore. So that's true concentric failure.

So you, you do a rep, you go all the way down, and then you try to start the rep again. And you're not able to make the. You're not able to move the weight stack at all or. Right. That would be concentrate failure. Okay.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think those are probably the main categories that we're going to talk about today. Do you have any to add there?

These. I don't know if these really count, but just to make the conversation even more complex, you have momentary failure, which is just where any point in the lift, you're not able to actually move the weight anymore or which is like how you would call failure for like a bench press and a, and a powerlifting meet.

Right.

Like if you're like, no matter where you stop, if it starts going down again, that's considered failure. And then you have 0rar right. Which is kind of similar to volitional failure, which by the way, been saying this for years now. Volitional failure is a misnomer. We should start calling it volitional cessation. But that's neither here nor there. But 0rr is just basically volitional failure, but in a more like accurate. Like you're actually right that you wouldn't be able to do another rep. But that's again, that's neither here nor there. I have here. Let's discuss the nuances of task specific failure, which is. I know something you've given a lot of thought in your lifetime before. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Well, what do you.

I guess, I mean like. No, go ahead, go ahead.

Well, actually expound upon that before.

Well, I guess this is not necessarily nuances of task specific failure, but kind of. And I don't know if you even agree with this but like how environment can actually affect failure to a certain extent. So like even though let's say that you ask me to go to failure, I'm at home using some dumbbells in my living room, I'm by myself and I take a set of bicep curls to failure, like to true failure where I'm not able to do any more at all. But then you put me in a lab setting, they're blasting my favorite music or whatever that may be. And then I have like six research assistants yelling at me while I'm doing it and I do three more reps. Even though both sides sets are taken to absolute failure. In my own head, one of those is slightly different than another. So that's kind of what I meant by how the environment and maybe the nuances of task specific failure. But I don't know if you had anything you wanted to add to that.

Yeah, I think any of these categories would probably be very, very nuanced. So you have task specific failure when people are going to true concentric failure, which takes a certain level of focus, a certain level of arousal and so on. And then volitional failure, which probably takes a little bit less arousal but still a significant amount. So the amount that external factors play into it would be probably less and less the further you get away from failure. And then you get into really murky territory where now when we start talking about intensity techniques later on like drop sets and so on, that it really is a sort of weird. Could I have done a little bit more? Am I just in a massive amount of pain. If I wait literally a fraction of a second, I can do two more reps type thing. It's a really weird failure sensation, especially when you're doing a bunch of drops. So it gets very murky very quickly as. As you get more and more fatigue. So, yeah, it's definitely not a straightforward answer and hard to standardize for that reason, particularly in the case of intensity techniques.

Yeah, I think I wasn't joking when I said that failure is like a much more complicated definition. It sounded kind of sarcastic at the beginning. But like, actually defining failure, believe it or not, is more complicated than. Than you might think. But let's ask the question that, that actually matters here, Danny boy, which is, do we need to go to failure? Is failure necessary for muscle growth at all?

Yeah.

So unless I'm skipping ahead, I don't think so. I think we're.

I think we're ready for the meat and potatoes.

Good.

So I don't think getting to any of the categories of failure is necessary for maximizing hypertrophy, particularly in the context of moderate to high volumes. So taking some sets to failure is probably a very good idea for a bunch of reasons. So one, it helps you calibrate your training. Two, it helps you know that for that particular session, toward the end of the session, you've taxed yourself sort of adequately. So I like doing that sort of from a psychological standpoint as well, and also sort of a barometer session to session, knowing whether you got stronger or not. But from all of the studies we have, and we have a decent amount now, it seems like if you leave one to two reps in the tank, you can get very similar hypertrophy, especially at moderate volumes. So should you worry about going to failure? Probably not. But is it a very good idea to go to failure sometimes? It's probably a pretty good idea. The one thing that I'd mention that I think is really important in order to drive context here is that all of these studies compared a standardized non failure condition to a standardized failure condition. There's obviously everything in between, which I mentioned from a practical standpoint. So we don't really know what the fatigue dynamics would be if you took, let's say a set 2 rar, 1 rir, and then 0 rir, which is typically actually how I mostly do my own training. Just from a logical standpoint, I think the fatigue from a failure set would probably bleed into the next sets more readily, as opposed to the converse where taking sets further from failure and then getting closer to failure as you're done with an exercise and makes a bit more sense to me, but that's never been looked at, at least compared directly. Study designs have used something similar to that when they were looking at a different question, but they haven't compared that sort of RIR scheme to only failure versus only away from failure and so on. And obviously you can get into every iteration of that to RR to RIR 0 to 10, 100 and and so on and so forth. But I think just trying to scratch the surface of that question would be a good further direction.

I'm going to ask you a question that we weren't planning on talking about and it's. There's no data on this, but I'm just actually curious as to your opinion. Do you think there's a threshold by which you're severely hurting yourself by not taking it further or closer to failure? Like if you're five reps away from failure on average versus two reps away on average and let's say you're doing a normal amount of volume in a week, like do you think there's going to be a big difference in growth between those two protocols? 5 and 05 and 2. I just any. It doesn't even matter which numbers you say. I was just talking about a general threshold as so to speak.

Yeah, I think that especially. Yeah, so there's no research on this at higher volumes, but if you look at Zack's matter aggression with more lower volume type training, you do see less growth from training that's further from failure. So basically in a stepwise fashion. So the further and further you go from failure, the less amount of growth they see in the regression. So I would say there's probably not any very good reason to ever be further from 4ish, maybe 5 depending on the exercise and depending on other goals. But from a hypertrophy standpoint, I would probably never and I do never really go beyond 4 and usually 3 RIR.

That study, Zach's meta regression did show you can still get some growth even as far as was it 10 or 12 reps away from failure. Again, they did that indirectly. I think they mostly relied on velocity based training for those values. But still a great study, no less. But you can still grow even when you're very far from failure. It's just going to be markedly less than you would if you were even. Not even going to failure but just closer to failure in general.

Right?

Yeah. You ask which one in terms of comparatively. So obviously I'm not trying to get some growth. I'm Trying to get the most growth possible. So yeah, whether you're asking whether there's a threshold of no growth, that would be a different question. Where, yeah, it seems like you can be pretty far, especially depending on the population. That's why, you know, there's some folks out there who sort of draw an arbitrary line as to where you're not going to achieve more growth. So after, you know, five reps, you're not going to get any more growth. But obviously that's super arbitrary because one population matters a lot. So are we talking about untrained people versus trained people? Are we talking about people that took some time off from training, started retraining, which exercises and so on? So yeah, if I had to put a number on it, I'd probably say for a trained person, maybe seven, maybe eight. But obviously that's not, you know.

Yeah, I was just asking for your speculation. Obviously you did say something important there, which was that like you're talking about the difference between going to failure and not going to failure at different volumes for a given muscle for the week.

Right.

Which I think is a good lead in a good segue to when it's actually less or more appropriate to take most of your training closer or further from failure. Right. So for instance, if you're doing pretty low volumes on average for each muscle, you're probably better off. It might not be necessary, but you're probably better off taking the majority of those sets pretty close to failure as opposed to if you're running some, some high volume NS level ENUs. Little inside joke, 52 sets a week for your quads. If you're doing such a high amount of volume, you might be better off going a little bit further away from failure to perturb some of the potential fatigue you see from closer to failure training.

Right.

But are there any other instances where you think it's more or less appropriate to go over closer or further away from failure?

Right.

Yeah. So I think one context from, yeah, an ecologically valid standpoint is lower volumes in other contexts is when you have higher frequencies as well. So let's say you just have a cab exercise. So one cab exercise for the day and you're doing calves four or five times a week. Yeah. Do I think it's necessary to leave a bunch of reps in the reserve there? Probably not. So I'll take most of my calf sets to failure and sometimes beyond failure.

As, as we'll talk about.

So higher frequency muscles that I hit at a higher frequency. I typically like to take closer to Failure because that fatigue is not going to bleed into the next exercise. And I don't think with that small amount of sets, it matters too much. So just from a covering my basis standpoint, not based on any sort of super hard evidence, I prefer to take that those sets to failure when there's.

Higher frequencies, closer to failure, higher frequencies.

Particularly for muscles that I just believe it's actually less about frequencies. So let me be more clear. It's more about the volume in that session. So if it's a low volume in that session for that muscle group, then I'll take that to failure. The reason why frequency gets a little bit murky is if you're training that muscle too frequently, then you can have some bleed over or fatigue into the next day and so on. So I mentioned calves because of the fact that I don't seem to get. So like, if I train Monday, Wednesday, Friday for so, you know, three days per week there, and I'm doing like a three, three, six situation. Three sets, Three sets, six sets. You get what I'm saying there? Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Okay, cool. Then I do most of my sets to failure or all my sets to failure Monday, Wednesday. But then some of those sets with some reps in reserve on that Friday day because of the fact that I have two exercises. So there might be some bleed over into the next exercise if I take all those first, you know, three, four sets to failure.

Smart man. That makes sense. Yeah, of course. So frequency volumes. What about like specific exercises? Like, do you think that we should treat compound lifts versus isolation lifts with respect to failure any differently?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I pretty much never take any compound lift to true concentric failure unless I did it by accident because I was, you know, yoloing it that day. But for isolation lifts, more sets, generally speaking, to true failure with compound lifts, usually I leave them 1 to 3 rir. So things like squats, things like deadlifts, things like bench, especially when you don't have safeties and so on. Probably not the best idea to take to true failure is your.

Do you have a rationale for that outside of literal pragmatic safety reasons? Like you don't want to. You just don't want to take a set of squats to the house. Like, you just. That's just not a wise decision for the potential of getting absolutely crushed by a barbell. Same with a barbell bench.

Right.

But like, do you, would there be any reason that you would say that you shouldn't take like an incline? Dumbbell bench press to failure versus like a flat dumbbell fly to failure. Like is there. Do you think there's a big difference between those two as far as taking.

One failure for those specific exercises? No. But for the compound lifts, I think you could definitely have. Regardless of what sort of, you know, really tough people want to say, I think without encouragement or training partner and so on. When you're training alone, taking a set of deadlifts to failure, whether it's in the middle or beginning of a session, does seem to at the very least psychologically tax you. If not for, obviously there's central nervous system related fatigue that could bleed over into other exercises. So I think especially with exercises that task many or tax many muscles and take a toll on you and could bleed into your next session, even for muscles that are unrelated, it's probably a good idea to leave those reps in reserve for just maintaining the intensity of.

Your actual session in general, following exercises after those. So this is kind of my fault for saying compounds versus isolations because we've talked on this podcast before about kind of silly, a silly distinction between those two. Like the best example I can give is a stiff legged deadlift, like a perfect stiff legged deadlift where the only movement being created is through the hips. Would we call that a, an isolation lift? Most people wouldn't.

Right.

They would call that a compound lift. Even though by the technical definition of, of isolation versus compound, it is an isolation lift.

Right.

So it would be better to say that there are certain exercises.

Joints of the back. No, I'm kidding.

Fair, but. Well then, no, no, I'm not gonna get into.

Yeah, exactly. But every exercise that you like, there.

Are certain exercises that probably do just cause more fatigue than others and it doesn't really necessarily matter if they're isolation or compounds. Again the stiff, like a deadlift example. But like for instance, a squat, like the, I hate to say, axial fatigue associated with a squat.

Right.

There are certain things that, at least from a my anecdotal perspective, taking a set of squats to the house, even compared to a bench press, which is also a compound lift.

Right.

It just doesn't, for lack of a better term, you up nearly as badly.

Right.

Or it you up way worse, depending on which order I actually said that in originally. So yeah, there are certain exercises that you probably shouldn't take to absolute failure if for no other reason besides safety. Obviously it might actually have some sort of an effect on subsequent training sessions or just the sets that you're going to do following that exercise. Right. Even though my biceps are not used almost at all during a squat, if I take a set of squats to absolute failure, three sets of squats to absolute failure, I'm just my bicep work afterwards. Let's say that I'm doing curls after squats. For whatever reason, it's probably just not going to be as good as it would have been had I not done that. Right. So it's possible that there is some bleed over there.

Right.

Last thing we'll say about is failure necessary for growth. Are there specific muscles, not exercises necessarily, but are there specific muscles that you might think may benefit more from going closer to failure versus not.

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Yeah, so in this particular section I wanted to go into which muscles might benefit from going closer to failure on particular exercises. So I think one thing that doesn't get mentioned is that when you're doing particularly compound exercises, you might be failing because of the weakest link, but taking a set closer to failure allows you to take the muscles that aren't the weakest link a bit closer. So for example, on the squat, if you're failing because of the quads going closer, or let's say you take a set of squats to 2 rirc, going closer to failure allows you to bring your glutes closer to failure, where obviously if you took a set to, you know, multiple reps away from failure, then the muscle that's least likely to get fatigued is even further from failure than the limiting muscle. So one thing that doesn't get talked about a whole lot because we're only measuring a particular muscle in a study, is how does failure affect synergist muscles? So in let's say the Rafalo study where they did different, let's say not the leg extension, but the leg press, would there be similar growth in the glute in leg press taken to failure versus non failure. So I don't think that's necessarily something that you need to think about too, too much because there's a bit of speculation there. And also it might not be worth the fatigue and risk like we talked about. But it's something to at least think about when approaching compound lifts and thinking about the volume for a given muscle. So if you know that the leg presses both a quad exercise and a glute exercise, you might say, all right, if I'm prioritizing both equally, then maybe I'll give an exercise some love that makes sure that the glute is the limiter in that session or at least balance it out over the week. So just something to think about when programming from a whole weak standpoint.

That's a really good point. I think that the. It's funny, I was asking a more pointed question, but that's actually a much more interesting thing to. To talk about. I. I think. But before we kind of further expound upon that, I know that you brought up the Rafalo study and for those of you who don't know, Mr. Fitness, Martin Ruffalo had a. And personally, my favorite study from last year.

He.

He had two groups compare RIR training versus concentric failure training in the leg press and the leg extension. And they measured the growth of the quads from that. They found on average basically no difference between going to failure and staying a little bit further away from failure. However, they did see that the. The rectus femoris, right, grew slightly favored RAR training and the vastus lateralis slightly favored going to failure. There's obviously complexities there. I don't think that that necessarily means, okay, the. The VL need. We need to take the VL to failure if we want that to best growth. And we need to not take the rectus memoris to failure if we want the best growth for that. There's also issues with like exercise order in which. In which they saw. But it is at least possible that there are some muscles that favor going to failure just in general, as opposed to staying further away from failure. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that in general.

Yeah, I basically agree. I think that like you said, exercise order does confound that a little bit with that particular design. But yeah, I mean, it's certainly theoretically possible that certain muscles. But I wouldn't say that it's obvious or at least makes sense from a physiological standpoint. Meaning I don't know of any mechanism that I would be able to hang my hat on that says that one muscle would grow better from being a bit further versus closer to failure.

So.

Sorry, go ahead.

So, yeah, so my, my priors sort of take me to. Each muscle probably benefits. If, if most muscles benefit, there's no strong reason to believe that others wouldn't. But I don't think we have the evidence to say anything super strongly in one way or another. So it would all be speculation but. Or you're going to ask.

I was gonna say, like, could you think of any reason why maybe like a more type 1 dominant muscle may benefit from going closer to failure or not? Not that I. No, I'm not comparing the, the type 1 type 2 distribution between the rectus femoris and vastus lateralis here, but just in general, I'm just thinking of potential reasons why some muscles might favor failure versus not, not that I even think that's the case obviously. It's just if we're playing with the potential of that being the case, could that be a factor?

Yes. So the problem with that would be that most muscles are pretty even in their distribution of type 1 and type 2. The only muscle in humans that's a little bit more skewed would be the soleus. And you could maybe make the case that as you get especially on sort of a higher up set, if it's mostly type one, that you'd go type one, type one, type one for longer and then you would need to take it closer to failure in order to get that type more drop fibers.

Yeah.

So assuming that you have an individual that has quote unquote taxed their ability to grow their type 1 fibers, and you do see this in the literature, that more trained individuals have more type 2 growth than type 1 growth, while earlier on in training you get know, more similar growth. So it's possible at least in that one muscle. But because most muscles have a very similar distribution that I would be very surprised if it did in fact matter. Are there any, are any of those failure studies in the cav?

Well, we have one beyond failure study in the cav. We'll talk about very shortly. In fact, getting away from failure in general. Let's talk a little bit about going beyond failure. For the true, the true Iron cult followers here particularly. This is a really, really popular, this has been a really popular form of training for a very long time, but it's kind of seeing like a resurgence with the popularization of Mike Menser. They say that it's not failure, you have to go beyond failure if you actually want to see the most growth, especially when training at lower volumes. That's all I'll say about Mike Menserv. But let's just talk about different ways by which you can go beyond failure. Obviously there's things like drop sets as well as just partner assisted sets. You know, like, bro, the first seven were all you. It was only the last three that I was actually helping you a little bit on the bench, stuff like that. And then of course, mechanical drop sets. So you want to talk to us a little bit about what it means to go beyond failure and then just beyond failure training in general, the potential benefits associated with it.

Yeah, so I think this is something that's important to make the distinction between comparing failure and non failure to comparisons of beyond failure training. And the reason why it's important to make the distinction is because people, when they see that failure versus non failure doesn't matter, they take that to mean that training beyond failure, of course de facto doesn't matter because if going to failure doesn't matter, you're making things worse by going past failure. But I think that would be a mistake because you're not accounting for the density of stimulus per unit of time. So, for example, in something like a drop set, even though you're probably getting less stimulus during each drop, you're still getting a whole lot of stimulus and you're doing a lot more within that allotted time. So while they're not necessarily comparable on a one to one basis, like you can't compare one set to failure versus one set to two rir, you're comparing multiple drops to traditional sets and there's multiple ways to do this. And I don't think, honestly that there's any great way to standardize, but we do see that you can get a lot of density of stimulus within a shorter amount of time when you use intensity techniques or techniques that have you train beyond failure. And sort of the dynamics of that is what we're really trying to piece together. And we can only really speculate on how it should fit together in a program currently. But I think it's safe to say that they're a completely different context. So it's not useful to harp constantly on the fact that if failure training doesn't matter, then beyond failure training clearly doesn't matter. So I just wanted to draw that distinction before sort of diving into the specific literature.

And before we do that, I just. With respect to drop sets, you were talking about how you can't make the comparison between a set to a drop set. As far as the effectiveness, or you were saying, sorry, that you can't, we can't say standardize that. But also, sorry, I, I misspoke. Actually, what I was saying is that yes, a one straight set is probably better or sorry, actually, okay, we're gonna run it back. I'm gonna say it correctly this time. The two subsequent drop sets that you do after your initial set probably aren't as effective as the two straight sets that you do following an initial straight set.

Right.

However, just to put some numbers on this, we're talking about half the training time. You can always compare training density and stimulus per unit of time. And even though those are, those two following sets are likely less effective. The we're talking about like 50% less time that you're spending actually causing some sort of stimulus for muscle growth. Right. So it is a pretty big difference, and it's something that is an incredible option for people that are short on time. We also now have good data on supersets being a really good intensity technique for saving time. But this has nothing to do with beyond failure, so I won't talk about that. Okay, now let's dive into the specifics like you were about to say.

So.

Potential ways of going beyond failure that you think might pose some benefit.

Yeah, So I think drop sets are a huge one where there's a good amount of literature now, I don't know, maybe four or five studies, different designs, hard to compare, but pretty clear that they're time saving. So I think that's one. Then we have things like giant sets, things where you basically wait a little bit longer before your next set. So a drop set, obviously you drop the weight immediately go into your next set, and then there's a bunch of different modalities which have a bunch of different names that basically all they're doing is waiting a bit longer until that next set. And theoretically that allows for some recovery and some replenishment of, you know, creatine and all those kinds of things that allow you to get a little bit more juice in that next set compared to just straight up dropping into the next set.

And sorry, just to clarify, because I get very confused when you talk about. Because you're kind of talking about my reps to a certain extent and giant cells names.

Right.

And matched, paired. So, like. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I get very confused by this because depending on the influencer or even scientist that you're talking to, they have a different word for this. Basically, it's like a drop set, but you're using time as opposed to a drop in the load that you're using. So, like, you would do a set of curls to failure as much as you could, and then you would rest without putting the bar down. Some people. Some people do put the Bar down, doesn't matter. You rest like literally five to 10 seconds and then get right back to it and do as many reps as you can Again. So, sorry, I just wanted to clarify that that's what you're talking about, not even for the audience's sake, but from my own sake in this particular.

Yeah, exactly. And you have like millions of iterations of, of that in terms of, well, how much time are you actually resting? How are you matching reps? Are you matching reps for the total set? Are you making sure there's a minimum amount of. Amount of reps on all the subsequent sets and stopping once you reach a certain, certain threshold and so on. So the reason I didn't mention any specific names because one, like you, I get freaking confused with all these freaking names. And two, I don't know that it's fully standardized. There's def. It's. I know for a fact it's not standardized in the literature because there's actually a recent study that looked at, I believe, drop sets and one other intensity techniques. Actually, I don't think it was. I think it was pre fatigue. So.

Okay, so that's a different study than what. That's the more new study. Correct. That I just posted about it. But there, I think one of the drop set studies compares myoreps drop sets and straight sets in the study and similar findings between very obviously.

And none of them are standardized in that what each protocol looks like is very different. Particularly the drop set one was very odd. The most recent drop set one, it wasn't really even.

Yeah, it wasn't a drop. Yeah.

So that one we can, we can go on a limb and say, all right, that probably doesn't fall into the category of drop set, but all that to say that even within the literature there's a whole bunch of usage of terms that are sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly used as a sort of umbrella term for anything that's an intensity technique. So long story short, there's a bunch of ways to actually go about going beyond failure. But a very recent study gives us a very, very practical way to go about doing this. And it sort of jives with a very hot topic, lengthened literature in general. So if you want, you can go into the study, or I can go into study. Your call.

Yeah, I'll do what we always do and I'll briefly touch on it and you'll correct all the egregious mistakes that I make while doing so. But this is the. And.

And.

Well, the first thing I'm going To say you're going to disagree with, but just to, you know, just for making it make sense within the context of the conversation. This is the one of the only studies where we see a going beyond failure actually leads to more growth. Again, I know you have contentions with that. I do as well, which you could touch on in a second. But it's literally the title of the study is Beyond Failure Failure Training.

Right.

Or not really, but get the point. Anyway. They had two groups, an incredible study where they had one group train. It was all done on the cabs. And one group did as many reps as they possibly could until they reached the point where they could no longer reach the top of the calf race. And then they dropped down and did only partial reps. So from peak dorsiflexion all the way to parallel.

Right.

And then the other group. Nope, already.

So we talked about this offline. This. This was one group. So I guess maybe I'll go over the whole design. So one group.

Here we go.

So one group was doing a full cab raise until they reached peak plantar flexion. So a full contraction. And then when they couldn't do a full contraction anymore, they stopped. So task failure there. And the other group continued to do as much range of motion as they could throughout the whole set and didn't stop until they literally couldn't move or get any amount of plantar flexion. So they ended in a dorsiflex position. So they ended in the most stretched position with the inability to do any amount of a partial rep. So one group was going to task failure, which is peak plantar flexion. And the other group, once they couldn't do peak plantar flexion, didn't drop to the middle. They did as much as they could and then as much as they could again. And obviously the range of motion continued to drop as they tried to do more and more until they reached a point where. Where they legitimately couldn't move at all, which was in that most stretched position.

You put me. You set me up for failure there, bro. I hate you.

We literally went over.

We did. And then we talked about this and I said this exact.

This exact thing. And you went back to the original design that you thought it was.

Listen, my love, my loved ones, my built with science loved ones, I'm a human, okay? Unlike my counterpart here, I am a human without a perfect memory. And we did talk about this and we talked about the study that we would like to see, which was the exact design that I then described. And I conflated the two, and I do apologize, but this is why I lead the conversation. And you are the person that actually knows a thing or two about exercise science. Okay, ignore everything that just happened. Let's talk about that study and how it's kind of different from a drop set or how it's kind of different in of itself from going beyond failure, so to speak.

Yeah. So I think the context of this, what they termed a lengthened superset, is interesting because it sort of falls only into a particular category of exercises. So the only way to go beyond failure on an exercise that ends in the bottom range of motion or the initial range of motion is to drop the load. So, for example, in a squat, if I were to fail at the bottom, then obviously I wouldn't be able to go down again and do any sort of partials, because if I went down, I wouldn't come back up. So you could technically do the reverse of the study and just not go as far down and try to guess at where, you know, you could continue to do reps that way, but that would be shortened partials. In this study, they did lengthened partials, where they continued to do the range of motion that was possible, which happened to be because it was the cav in the more lengthened position. So, bunch of different contexts. And that's why we sort of prefaced it with. There's a lot of ways to go beyond failure. In this particular case, it may be one both ecologically useful because you're just continuing a set. You don't need to decide how many drops you want to do or anything like that. You're just continuing a set. You don't even need to know exactly where you would fail. Like. Like the squad example, you could just keep on cranking away until you reach either sort of parallel range of motion, you decide to stop there, or you just keep cranking away until you can't get any motion at all. Which.

Concentric failure.

Yeah, true concentric failure. And then you're done with the set. So very ecologically valid. You can legitimately just freaking do the set until you can't move anymore. Pretty simple instruction. And what they found was is that that group grew a bit more than the group that failed at that concentric portion or at the peak concentric. So what that tells us is potentially two things. One, obviously, they did. They trained beyond failure. They did more volume. But two, based on another study, Cassiano and colleagues, it may be that they were just accumulating more reps or more volume at the More hypertrophic position, which seems to be, at least based on the evidence that we have, that bottom position of the cab raise. So just to briefly touch on the Catiano study, they did a full range of motion cavities, so to peak concentric, then they did from flat, so parallel to the floor only to the top. So a shortened partial compared to a lengthened partial where they stretched all the way down and stopped when they reached parallel to the floor. And they grew substantially more in the lengthened partial condition. So the group that was only stretching the cab down and stopping once they were parallel to the floor. So that, along with this new study, tells us that it's fairly likely that you would benefit more from the lengthened position or accumulating more volume in the lengthened position. And I think perhaps a really, really interesting question would be, do we even need the peak concentric at all? So what would happen if you compared the type of design that they had in this most recent study where they just couldn't move at all, but they were doing the peak concentric at the begin compared to an only lengthened partial? And would you accumulate more volume and therefore get more growth from the lengthened position and still achieve more growth even with that lengthened super set condition? So I think that's probably in the works soon where we'll.

Someone's gotta be doing that, right?

Yeah. It's like the ecological step. Yeah, yeah.

And I think that you're not allowed to do this. I'm aware of the statistical. Egregious, statistical error I'm about to make, but the difference in growth in the Casiano study was greater than the difference in growth within this John study, which, again, I know that there are a lot of issues with doing so, but that's just another potential reason why you would think that you're probably better off just spending your time in that lengthened position. And just to touch on, kind of like to expound upon what you were talking about earlier. There are probably. There are certainly exercises where this just would not work. Trying to go to finish with a lengthened partial as opposed to the full range of motion. Like when you fail a bench press, you're not failing at the top. Right. You're going to fail. They're like either right off the chest or off just in. Like, you can't produce any movement off the chest at all. So you wouldn't be able to do a set extended length of partial with. With a lot of muscles. But there are certain muscles that probably do benefit from this a lot More like, for instance, the calves like we found in this study. We don't have any studies on. This is the only study obviously that they've done this type of protocol for.

Right.

But it makes logical sense that certain muscles would benefit from it as well. Things like the back, obviously you're much stronger and usually you fail a back exercise there towards the bottom of the rep as opposed to towards the top when you're pulling.

Right.

Or it doesn't matter. Same with like the biceps or, or the, the delts. These are probably muscles that you can take, you can do this type of training with and expect to see some better growth as opposed to something like a squat or an RDL or anything like that.

Right.

Just because of the strength curve of those muscles in general. You know, actually now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know if we can say that confidently about the delts because I actually don't know what the strength, like the, the raw strength curve of the delts are. Because we almost always do lateral raises with dumbbells in an exercise that. Not because of the muscle, but because of the exercise specific itself. You failed at the top. Right. So I don't know if this would necess be the case with like a cable lateral raise, but the cable. So at the height of your hand. I don't know if you have anything you want to say about that.

Yeah, it's unrelated to the strength curve of the muscle and more related to the resistance curve of typical exercises used. So like you were saying, a pull up, a row, a calf raise, lateral raise, and so on. When you use the implements that are more typically used, if you wanted to continue to set, you could with a lengthened partial superset or a lengthened partial. Exactly. But whether that would be superior to actually just making the resistance curve such that it was harder in a more lengthened position. You failed. The length of position is definitely an open question. So it's just a tool that people can have in the toolkit if they wanted to get both areas or hit both areas. I think you could probably have a better theoretical rationale for some muscles more than others. So when you have just a few muscles which you care about in an area. So for example, the lateral delta is the only muscle there that's pretty. I mean, you have to trap too, I guess. But the lateral delta is the main muscle that you care about. When you're doing a lateral raise, you're not really thinking much about any other muscle. Then you might not.

I do lateral raises for my Rotator cuff. So speak for yourself, please.

Yeah, exactly. There's obviously, you know, the smaller muscles, you know, super smooth, so on. But when you're doing exercise, you most care about it. So for that kind of deal, you might lean toward, depending on your interpretation of the literature, just straight up doing something that's either a lengthened partial or the resistance curve at least favors the length of position as opposed to fatiguing yourself until you get to that lengthened position. But you can theoretically say for an exercise like a bicep curl, where there's a bunch of elbow flexors that you care about that the moment arm differences and potentially where they're receiving a stretch and all that kind of stuff might make it so that you kind of traversing both areas and doing like a full repetition and then stopping short and then continuing to cut your range of motion might have some theoretical benefits to all of the elbow flexures. So obviously, again, we're getting into some theoretical speculation around there, but I think, especially based on the fact that.

We.

Don'T really know, tipping into some of these areas is probably not a bad idea, especially because you get a pretty baller pump from all of them.

So, you know, which is all that really matters. All right, before we start fully on diverging into just talking about the pump being the most important thing, let's just talk about our takeaways. Kind of like when it's probably best to implement this style of training, which we kind of already have to a certain extent, but. And then we can. We'll do a quick little outro and we'll call it here. So are there anything, last takeaways that you'd like to discuss on your end before the outro?

Takeaways for the whole thing or takeaways?

Yeah, just takeaways in general, obviously, when it comes to failure, I'll just do this. If you're doing less volume and less frequency, probably. Or depending on. I'm not even talking about the frequency thing because that was a little bit more complex, but when you're doing lower volumes, it's probably worth taking a bit more of your sense closer to failure as opposed to further away.

Right.

But then with respect to beyond failure training, just what, like takeaways from that portion of the episode?

Yep. So I think you covered failure well. The beyond failure would probably be a few contexts where there's some practical considerations. One is that when you're taking sets beyond failure, you probably want to do it in such a way where it doesn't bleed into the rest of the session. So if you're hitting a muscle super early on, I'm probably not going to do all drop sets and then go into straight sets afterwards. So that's probably a good practical recommendation there. Then just generally speaking, how you allocate how much volume you put into that bucket is probably contextual. So if you have a bunch of drop sets in your program and how much of your program is made up of drop sets, probably has a lot to do with one, just the fatigue and two, the theoretical framework. So I'm a lot more confident in the dose response relationship for straight sets. So that's why I typically veer toward more straight sets than drop sets while having the drop sets be more of a time saving cherry on top that I get toward the end of sessions. So just from a pragmatic standpoint, I think it's useful to sort of have. All right, I'm confident in this, while I'm a little less confident in this. And then the newest context where we're seeing sets continued past failure is probably most pertinent to, at least on a theoretical basis, exercises which are hardest in the most shortened position. So I'm not going to try to continue a set which has a resistance curve that makes it so that I'm failing at the most lengthened position because then I'm going to do shortened partials for the rest of the set, which.

Is probably could be at least a little confident that it's not the takeaway for growth in general.

Exactly. Because when you compare shortened versus full or lengthened, you pretty much across the board see less growth there. So if you're going to dip into beyond failure training within a set, whether it's a mechanical drop set or continued length and superset, probably veered toward accumulating more volume or more tension in that lengthened position.

Tweet. Yeah, I think that was a beautiful.

I don't.

I don't think I have anything to add there. All right, that was beautiful. Well done. I had a fun. This was a fun conversation, bro. As a, you know, disregarding the very embarrassing.

You just wanted your own study to be done so badly.

I knew that. I just, I'm just trying to force. It's. John, please just do the study that we all want to see. Right. Same with you, Warnicky Wernicke. Give us the study we want to see. Thank you so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. If there's a topic that you want us to cover that we have yet to discuss, please feel free to reach out to us at Built with Science on Instagram. And as always, thank you so much for listening.