Training to Failure

 You can’t train to failure with heavy weights; you can only train to failure with light weights. Failure is just that — the momentary inability to lift even the most minimal weight. Drop sets were the beginning of this evolution. It’s not the weight one begins with — but the weight one ends with that denotes failure. And so when one begins with 100 lbs, and can do no more, they drop the weight down so that one can continue, and then drop the weight again, etc. But that is a very labor-intensive way of training — particularly for the spotters who are removing the weight, and ensuring that the trainee is not killed when the muscle fails — with a heavy load. That’s how many people get killed, crushed or disabled.

But one knows that every repetition will decrease one’s subsequent momentary ability — unless they are resting overly long for a complete recovery — as in the case of the many trainees who are actually lifting only 1% of their time while resting 99% of the time — which are obvious in their results. Arthur Jones’ original thesis was that a person moving from one exercise to the next with as little rest as possible produced sufficient failure throughout the musculature that the body would be forced to adapt and grow. But the mistake all the subsequent high intensity people made was increasing the resistance rather than moving continuously from repetition to repetition that is only possible using lighter weights — as Sandow did a hundred years earlier.

That’s also how the concept of “pre-exhaustion” came into play. Each repetition done in this nonstop manner, made the muscles exhausted for the subsequent exercise — until the point of total muscular failure — at which point one could not go on, and frequently required up to a week to recover from. And thus the claim that high intensity exercise of this quality, must be brief and infrequent, while producing superior gains because they triggered the need for actual improvements in the recovery.

Where most people get it wrong is in thinking that cardiovascular failure is muscular failure — because in the use of too heavy weights, breathing is constricted and prevents them from continuing after the first three or four reps — because they are not breathing in a manner that will allow them to sustain their effort. But rather than weight-training and cardio (aerobics) being diametrically opposed, weight training with light weights is the superior cardio workout because the contractions of the voluntary muscles at the extremities complement the autonomic function of the heart to optimize the circulation rather than working against each other in the manner many are “conditioned” to think is desirable.

One wants all cylinders firing in the same direction — and not each canceling out the effectiveness of all the others in a zero sum game.