Why You Should NOT Go To Failure

When weight lifting, many individuals are under the impression that if you want to see maximum gains, you should be lifting to absolutely failure after every workout. Once you do this, then allow your body enough chance to build and repair itself back up you will begin to see amazing progress. Unfortunately though, this is not always the case.

While it is definitely true that you want to push your body hard during your workouts, especially if gaining lean muscle mass is your goal, if you are going too hard all the time this is not all that productive either.

The first reason being that it will encourage overtraining to take place. Generally, the more frequent you are able to work a muscle the better the response will be. That said, you do still need to ensure proper rest. If you are maxing out your muscles with every session you do, chances are you are going to also need a lot time to ensure recovery. This translates into you not being able to train that frequently - and as was just stated, this is not preferable.

The second reason why you shouldn't be maxing out every session in the gym is because when you are taking your muscles to the point of depletion (using all the muscle glycogen stores they have available), you are then going to need to restore these muscle glycogen stores. Until these stores are full once again, the body will not be able to focus on building lean muscle mass on top of what you already have as it is taking care of its present needs. Using depletion training too frequently will really put a lot of pressure on you to make sure your diet is absolutely spot on if you still hope to see gains. While depletion training definitely has its place once in a while for those who are looking for muscle mass gains, it is likely not the smartest approach to do this on a regular basis.

A better plan would be to push your muscles hard enough that they feel the stimulus but then back off so that they can recover quicker. This will ensure that you don't need to spend too long out of the gym before your next session. Furthermore, try to aid this recovery by taking care of your post-workout nutrition as this also significantly contributes to the process of refilling muscle stores and repairing the tissues.

Be sure to set-up your program so you are using a full body split or an upper/lower type of split in some sort of fashion. Nine times out of ten these are going to be better in terms of seeing results than the body part splits that bodybuilders of the past used to use.

Also try to vary your rep ranges slightly each workout so you can work over a variety of different modalities, furthering your muscular ability and improving your performance. This in itself is also another good way to avoid overtraining since you will not be consistently always putting the same stimulus on your body as far as weight and rep range are concerned.

So before you push yourself past the point of fatigue in yet another workout, reconsider. You may be doing more harm than good if you do this too often.