The Holy Trinity of getting jacked and tan involves mechanical tension, muscle damage and metabolic stress. In simple terms, this boils down to lifting heavy things almost to the point that you can’t anymore to create a lot of heat and burning inside your muscles. Another way to say it is that you need to upset your body’s homeostasis. Homeostasis refers to variables that the body maintains at certain levels that, if disrupted too much, will result in death. If we want to slab on tissue, we’re going to have to disrupt the organism, BIG time. We need to gut-punch our systems in such a way with a big enough threat that our endocrine system (our bodies’ communications system) is forced to release a hormone response to return us back to a safe haven. That means acquiring a taste for discomfort, and voluntarily letting yourself get dick punched in the gym, day after day, after day, for a very long time. Still think it’s worth it? You better, otherwise find a different pursuit than the holy grail of getting jacked and lean. Muscular failure and task failure fit into this broader process of muscle building. If we’re being pedantic, which in this case I think we should be, it’s actually 4 principles that dictate whether or not we’re going to get swole. These 4 horsemen of the mass-ocalypse are the aforementioned mechanical load, muscle damage, metabolic stress AND nutrition. You can lift all you want all live-long day, but if you’re not eating enough food, you’re going to continue to look like Steve Rogers pre-Captain America serum. While there are many ways to grow muscle, we should be gravitating towards using more efficient means at our disposal. At the end of the day, effort runs the show, but if we can combine the right level of effort, with the best methods suited to our goals, why wouldn’t we choose that option? To build ourselves up, we need to perform the act of breaking our bodies down. Failure or proximity to failure seems to provide one part of the potent stimulus needed to begin this cascade of hormonal reactions that forces the human organism to adapt and get stronger. Longevity in training is underrated at the moment, and if we’re going to push our bodies to failure or close to, we want to do so with exercises that allow us to do so with relative safety. This brings us nicely to muscular failure and task failure. Before we use them to inform what exercises we pick to go all out, we first need to understand what is meant by each term. Muscular failure is the inability to complete another rep because the target muscle is too fatigued. Task failure is the inability to complete another rep because of technical breakdown or because other non-target areas are fatiguing faster than the target muscle. Task failure often occurs during exercises that involve a higher degree of skill to execute.
A good example of an exercise where task failure occurs before muscular failure is during barbell back squats. While the quads are the main muscle group working, other muscles such as the hamstrings, glutes, erectors, calves, and abdominals are also working and can often fatigue faster than the quads. The resulting fatigue in the non-target muscles may prematurely end the set. Also, the high degree of intra-muscular coordination involved in a barbell squat as well as the high global fatigue that comes with it means that failure is reached before the quads fail. By comparison, leg extensions will typically take the quads to muscular failure before task failure takes place. Fatigue is much more localised to the quads, and the greater degree of external stability from the machine reduces the level of skill needed to execute the movement as well as the amount of global fatigue that is induced. Exercises that fall into the high-skill category: - Barbell back squats - Barbell front squats - Olympic lifts - Deadlifts - Overhead press - Barbell bench press - Pull-ups This is far from an exhaustive list but you should start to notice that all of these exercises have a common theme of being quite technical. As an industry, the fitness space is very tribal and trendy. I don’t mean trendy in the sense that it’s the tip of the spear when it comes to the latest fashion or movement. I mean trendy in the sense that at any given point a pendulum is swinging for whatever topic is ‘hot’. Currently, doing the basics and training effort and intensity are two such hot topics and it’s trendy to talk about effort, and training to failure or close to it by incorporating the fundamental lifts. Hard training has always been a prerequisite for physical progress, and having a grasp of the basic lifts doesn’t do anyone any harm. But here’s a sure-fire recipe for confusion if ever there was one because many of the exercises on the list above (barring Olympic lifts) are often classed as basic (while they’re anything but) and now you’ve got every influencer and trainer screaming at you to train to failure. “Come on Susan. I know you’ve just come from working a 9-hour day and you’ve got 4 sick kids at home waiting to be fed, but I want you to keep squatting until your eyes pop!” Let’s not be morons who take things out of context. I’m not saying that training to failure on high-skill exercises is pointless. There are people who can barbell squat to muscular failure, look at Tom Platz. But choosing exercises wisely with the outcome we’re looking to achieve and applying the required amount of effort is a good idea. As a general rule, it’s much more realistic and safer to hit muscular failure on machines than on free weights, and much more likely to see task failure take place on exercises that don’t have as much external stability and involve more coordination and skill. Does that mean you can’t hit muscular failure on an incline dumbbell chest press? No, it doesn’t. It simply means that there’s less chance of task failure on a machine as other, non-target muscles aren’t going to fatigue as fast as the target muscle unless it’s a piss-poor machine design. Understanding the two types of failure can allow us to make more informed choices regarding rep ranges, when to punch it and when to leave some in the tank. Again, speaking in more general terms, it probably makes a lot of sense to programme lower to moderate rep ranges for barbell exercises such as the squat, deadlift, and overhead press before technique breakdown happens, if the goal is hypertrophy and strength. These exercises allow us to move the most substantial loads and provided the proximity to failure on sets is small, they will present a high amount of mechanical tension. If we’re using a high rep range for a skill-based exercise such as a deadlift, it becomes a load constraint for an exercise where loading is one of the main aspects it’s being chosen to help the main driver of muscle mass (mechanical tension). It also probably makes a lot of sense to programme moderate to higher rep ranges for the typical isolation exercises and machine work as here we’ll have a much easier (easy may be the wrong word) time of reaching muscular failure. Higher rep ranges work well here because the load is not the only consideration, and here we’re able to drive the volume of work up, creating a lot of metabolic stress (heat and acid) that comes with high rep sets and localized cell swelling (read: PUMP). To finish things off, you need to understand that building muscle and strength comes down to adaptation. Adaption is you voluntarily disrupting your body’s homeostatic mechanism, in other words, entering the gym and putting yourself through wear and tear. You shouldn’t come out of it unscathed. Choosing the right exercises based on task failure and muscular failure is probably a useful lens to look through. Using 2-4 sets of 6 to 20 reps depending on the exercise will probably do the job. Resting between 1 to 3 minutes depending on the exercise is plenty. As always, try things out, listen to the feedback from your body, make a note, and evaluate the effectiveness of your experiment. Go get jacked.
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