How do you train without going to failure

[Ronnie Rowland]

I recently read that going to failure on every set is not good so how do you train without going to failure. what percentage of your 1RM are you supposed to use. How do you progress the weight without going to failure. I have tried the search function but it's hard to find something this specific. Thanks.

You want to good failure not bad failure. Here's how-


Let’s pretend you are doing a set of incline bench presses. You lay back on the incline press and crank out one, two, three¸ four, and five reps. You get to rep number 6 and your face begins to show some pain. Those standing around you think you’re finished but you get rep number 7. Surely you are finished they are thinking, but you use sheer will-power to lift the weight to complete number 8 while still avoiding momentary failure. You try for rep number 9 and have to bounce the weight hard off your chest in order to get the barbell up on your own and you just barely make it at that. The set should have been terminated after the completion of rep number 8! Repetition number 8 is what I consider good failure and repetition number 9 is what I call bad failure. Simply said, you continue lifting until you know that if you attempted the get the last rep you couldn’t without severely draining the nervous system and using bad form!

Your goal as a bodybuilder is not to avoid training to failure; it’s to avoid training to the wrong kind of failure. The ideal situation is to reach as close to muscular failure as possible, but in a way that will induce maximum stimulus to the muscle fibers without causing injury or impairing the Central Nervous System. I call this good failure because it is the absolute best way to train for maximum size.

[asvt]

Thanks

[ascendant]

personally i find this to be very individualized, based on genetics and ones training program. funny thing is when most pro's are asked how hard to train, they'll all claim to failure and then some. however, ever watch any of their videos? they'll typically do 3-5 sets on an exercise, and you'll notice only the last 1-2 sets are actually done to failure. so why do they tell us to train to failure yet they don't themselves the majority of the time? i believe it's simply the ego of trying to be mr tough guy and not what's in your best interest.

during my training throughout the years, i have taken most sets to failure. i've always been a very fast gainer and it's what always put me above everyone else around me as far as gains. however, i do find that it puts a big toll on my CNS and when i do overtrain (which i used to at least 4-6 times a year if not more), it's usually cause my CNS is just burnt out from training.

within the past couple years, i began an approach more similar to what i see the pro's do in their videos. i'll start out with a fairly light weight and do a fairly high amount of reps without going to failure (usually). after all, higher reps causes sarcoplasmic hypertrophy which to my understanding, doesn't require training to failure to achieve. then i add on a fairly decent amount of weight for the following sets of the exercise until on the last one i bang out about 4-6 reps which i usually push to complete failure. i find this puts much less of a toll on my CNS and i still see the same kind of gains from it. after all if you think about it, on the first few sets though i'm not pushing myself to complete failure, it saves energy for those last couple where you can really push it. you can also go heavier than usual on the last couple sets of an exercise cause you've saved more strength than if you had trained to failure on the first couple. it works great, at least for me it does.