Should You Train to Failure to Build Muscle? (Mike Mentzer, High-Intensity Training)

One thing Mike Mentzer and current research agree on is to build muscle; you have to train intensely. The question is, how close to failure do you have to train for best results? Or do you have to go past failure for maximum muscle growth?

There are numerous definitions of failure, and this can confuse the issue. There’s volitional failure or fatigue, where a person voluntarily stops when THEY feel they’ve reached failure.

With a newer lifter, this could be a long way from actual concentric failure, which is the beginning of Mike’s definitions of failure.

In between volitional and concentric failure, I’d put technical failure; this is the last repetition you can do with good form. There’s a cross-over between these three terms as on certain exercises, an experienced lifter’s last rep could meet all definitions.

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Research papers have another term called repetition maximum; this is the same as concentric failure, the last complete repetition you can perform before momentary muscular failure. This is true failure when you can no longer complete a full repetition.

Technical, concentric and momentary failure are the big three to keep in mind.

Mike still has 2 more. There’s static failure, where you hold a weight in one position without locking out your joints until you can no longer resist the force. The final one is eccentric or negative failure, where you use a heavy weight and lower it as slowly as possible, reaching a point of total muscular failure.

With exercises like pull ups or lat pulldowns this could be done on your last rep, but in most cases you’ll need a training partner to help you get the weight in place and rack it. This creates a lot of muscle damage and when doing high intensity training it’s done on the working set of each exercise.

This damage takes longer to recover from. Leading us to the question: does more muscle damage equal more muscle growth?

The three factors that cause muscle growth are mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress. Of these three, mechanical tension is considered to be the primary one, and the best way to keep the tension high is through progressive overload. This is something both Mike and modern research agree on.

But we haven’t answered the question about muscle damage. Brad Schoenfeld, after reviewing all the available research on muscle damage back in 2012, found “a sound theoretical rationale supporting a potential role for exercise-induced muscle damage in the hypertrophic response,” meaning that it possibly plays a role, also noting “that muscle growth can occur in the relative absence of muscle damage.” So it’s not something you need to build muscle.

Something else I got out of this paper was that the evidence indicates that there’s a point where muscle damage is no longer beneficial and “may, in fact, interfere with the process.”

This is a good time to mention beginners don’t need to be training to failure; as Mike states in his book High-intensity Training

Another consideration with training to failure is exercise selection; certain exercises, especially compound movements like squats, deadlifts and shoulder presses, have a greater risk of form breakdown that could lead to injury

Other exercises are low-risk when taking them to failure and beyond. Isolation exercises like arm curls or triceps extensions, even some compound exercises like pull-ups or lat pulldowns and specific machine exercises are very safe.

As long as it can be done safely, it’s good to occasionally train to true momentary muscular failure to understand what it feels like and to ensure you are training hard enough.

In a paper published by a group of leading researchers, including Brad Schoenfeld in 2021 on “resistance training recommendations to maximize muscle hypertrophy in an athletic population,”

States with regards experienced lifters, “momentary muscular failure” “should be employed, somewhat conservatively, perhaps limiting application to the last set of a given exercise.”