Mark Ottobre explains when to push beginner clients to failure: prioritize technique first, stop when form breaks down, and watch rep velocity to gauge fatigue. Technical failure, when proper form can't be maintained, signals the muscles are exhausted.
Both my clients are very beginner clients. Yeah. And they're understanding what happens with movement at this point. So I feel like I haven't pushed them just, you know, once you start to be able to suck it.
If you look at it as 2 levers, you have the lever of volume and intensity. So right now we're cranking on the lever of intensity, as in we're getting them much closer to the fire rather than exposure. The first thing you want to make sure that you do is you have respect for the movement pattern. Can they maintain the pattern? And technical failure is perfectly acceptable. So as in they just can't continue to do the rep that you've asked Excellent. In maintaining the same technique. If he keeps breaking his technique on the 6th rep, well, that's— he's reached technical failure because now he's using muscles that I didn't want him to use and he's doing the movement incorrectly. And then what you're looking at is the velocity of which they do the movement pattern. So as that movement pattern starts to slow down— so as you probably saw, it was a good first couple. Like, every rep from the warm-up of the bar to that last rep, it looked the same. The only difference was the velocity in which he moved with. It was a grind. That's what you're looking for. So everything else should maintain. The speed of which it's moved through is what's going to be slow.
