Training To Failure: This Study Completely Changed How I Think – Transcript

00:00It seems to be true that you'll lose more reps if you go to failure. But does it matter? I almost favor a study like you did. More experienced trainees. I know they were training to failure. I understand the methodology. You've got the ultrasound. Everything is like in a very controlled environment. You even controlled nutrition in that study which is very very rare. I think it gave us a really really powerful insight into what experienced trainees can expect out of

00:27training with reps in reserve. just a few versus training to failure. I want you to tell me one thing that you're pretty confident is true, but you don't have any data to support it yet. >> Okay, >> Dr. Martin Rafalo, welcome to the podcast.

00:43>> Thank you so much, Jeff. It's an honor to be here. >> Sweet, man. So, listen, I would say you are one of the, if not the most underrated researchers in the game right now. And you are actually the lead author on I'm just going to say this. I think this is my favorite paper in exercise science, right?

00:58>> Wow, that's a big call. >> And um it's about reps and reserve um which which we'll get into, but in case anyone's not familiar with you, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to. >> Yeah, for sure. So yeah, my name is Martin. Really appreciate you hearing that by the way. That's really cool to hear. Um I recently graduated from really 10 years of studying exercise science. So I did a bachelor's degree, master degree, and then a PhD in exercise science. But specifically, I was looking at muscle hypertrophy and

01:25how proximity to failure influences muscle hypertrophy, which I'm sure we're going to speak about. Um, but over the past 10 years, I've also been coaching. So, I'm a coowner of JPS Health and Fitness. I've been coaching there face to face and in person. And I've recently also become the president of the WNBF in Australia. So, for those who don't know, the World Natural Bodybuilding Federation. Um, and I've been involved in bodybuilding for many years. I competed back in 2017. So, it's cool now to take that next step and give back to

01:53the bodybuilding community. So, that's a bit about me and yeah, at the moment, obviously trying to juggle all those things and still publishing research um more so in the background and yeah, I have over 10 well over 10 publications now under my belt and um I'm looking forward to yeah, pushing that, you know, further over the years.

02:11>> So, those 10 10 publications are bangers, too. like I was I was going through your catalog and I didn't realize just how much you've contributed to the field almost like behind the scenes because I've seen so many different YouTubers myself included referencing your work. So I'm really excited to like actually get to talk with you in the flesh. Um okay so so how about we start with the reps and reserve stuff. Um so for anybody who isn't aware

02:38reps in reserve just stands for or sorry >> RI stands for reps in reserve. um which is basically exactly what it sounds like. So if you hit zero reps in reserve, it means you had zero reps in reserve. You had zero reps in the tank, right? So even if there was a million bucks on the line and I said do another rep, you couldn't get another rep, right? So So everything is is slowing down and then you kind of get to that point where you fail or you're at least confident you couldn't have gotten another rep, right?

03:06>> Is that how you describe zero? >> Yeah, basically. Yeah. Um, and it's interesting because before I started researching proximity to failure, a lot of this was ambiguous in the research. You'd hear people speak about these concepts in practice. But when you actually dug into the studies and and you read the fine details of studies, you'd realize that even um researchers were unsure about how to define certain uh concepts like zero ri for example or

03:34like failure. You know, the definition of failure in and of itself for many years was variable in studies. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So, that would be your zero R. That basically you're at your limit. One R would mean you left one rep in reserve. So, you you stop at that point where >> with a million bucks on the line, you could have gotten one more rep, but you terminated the set right before that.

03:56That's right. Two R would be again, you'd have you you're leaving two reps in the tank. Three R would be, you know, three reps in the tank. Okay. Um, now within the community, and I would say even within the science-based community, there's kind of a debate about how close you need to train to failure. So, basically, how hard you need to train.

04:13>> On one side, you have people saying, well, you need to be close to failure, but >> you can kind of reap all the gains that you're going to get by stopping one to three reps shy of failure. And why might you want to do that? Well, because it causes a lot less fatigue than if you go all the way to failure, right? If you go all the way to failure, you might get the same gains, but you get way more fatigue. And so that's a trade-off that's just not worth it. Okay. Now, on

04:39the other side, you have a camp that says, "No, no, no, you should go all the way to failure. That way, you'll activate the highest threshold motor units. You'll maximize hypertrophy, and the FE fatigue difference is probably overstated. And if there is a fatigue difference, then you should just do less volume. Okay? And you [clears throat] kind of just like bite the bullet on the fatigue for that one set or whatever, and just push it to your limit. So I guess off the jump before we get into this study and like I said this is

05:05probably my favorite study. I think it's probably the most welldesigned and executed study on this topic. >> Um just like on a purely vibes basis. Okay. >> What do you think training to failure? Is it overrated or underrated?

05:19>> On a pure vibes basis. >> Yeah. Don't think don't think too hard about this. >> Yeah. I I think I've changed my kind of views to an extent or kind of tempered my views to an extent over the years.

05:32Um, you have to train to failure, I think, to maximize muscle growth. Um, throughout like a program, it has to be uh probably a pretty large component of the program. Does it have to be on every single set all the time? Probably not, but it has to be inclusive. Uh, for sure. So, I'm I'm not sure if I can say if it's either underrated or overrated, but it it needs to be part of the program. What I will say though is I think usually this debate um forces RI

06:00and failure against each other, but for me they sit on the same side of the fence. They operate on the same scale. And we can utilize both strategies within a training program to maximize muscle growth. Like it doesn't ever have to be either or. It's it's it's a false dichotomy to to think that way.

06:17>> Yeah, that's a good point. That's a very uh scientific answer. Um okay, so so how about we go through this study now? I will say up front, the fact that you, as you said, are a coach, a competitor, and a researcher, I think that really shows through in this. And so the study I'm talking about, if in case anybody wants to look it up, this is from 2024, and the title is similar muscle hypertrophy following eight weeks of resistance training to momentary muscular failure or with repetitions in reserve in

06:45resistance trained individuals. That's a mouthful, but it's a very, very good paper. And I think the reason I like it so much is that you actually covered for the things that most people on the internet complain about. Okay, so I would say the number one thing that I hear from people when it comes to research is they were a bunch of newbies. These guys were not newbies. I just looked this up before this. The average training experience in this study was 7.7 years and a lot of the subjects were

07:14>> competitive bodybuilders and powerlifters. So like these guys were elite. And the other thing people complain about is, "Oh, all these researchers don't actually know how to push people to failure. They're not really training to failure. What are they calling failure?" You actually got video or I saw a video of you pushing one of the subjects to failure. Let me tell you, like they were going to failure, right? Um, so I'll let you kind of explain what you did, but this was basically like a controlled study with

07:40advanced subjects where you'd compare going to failure versus stopping with reps in reserve. So I'll let you take it from there. >> Yeah. So basically the idea here was to build off previous years worth of research and like you said, you hit the nail on the head there. I wanted people to be able to resonate with the paper when they read through it. So I wanted people to think, oh, this makes sense.

08:03You know, they're well trained. Um they're training twice a week. You know, they're doing the leg press and leg extension, which are common exercises. Like I wanted to cover off a lot of the points that people often bring up when they're critiquing research. And I think I've done that pretty well because most people I speak to um understand right the reasoning behind a lot of the decisions that I made and every study has limitations. But I think overall the

08:28team and I did a good job to to package a study together that uh filled a lot of the previous gaps in the research. So, I I brought up this point earlier, but prior to this study, you'd see a lot of studies just comparing failure with non-failure. And we didn't really know what non-failure was. Like, that can mean so many different things. And so, what do you make of that practically?

08:53Well, it's hard to make practical applications from that type of research. So in this case, like you said, I wanted to to bring RIIR into the mix and it it is the first study to compare RIIR against failure um across like a long-term intervention period and um look at muscle hypertrophy. And when I say use RI, I literally mean participants stopped their sets, terminated their

09:19sets when they believed they had reached the set RAIR target. So yes, it was supervised, but I wasn't telling participants when to stop. They stopped on their own accord. Um, and it was a one to two RI target. So it was an 8week study. I had uh 12 men and six women.

09:37And like you said, they were quite well trained. Uh they'd all had experience with RAIR and RP as well. And I think that's an important point like they all had trained to failure in the past. They all had trained at a pretty high level.

09:50And it was an 8week study where they came into the facility twice a week and they trained their lower body but they trained their legs a little differently. So it was a within subject design which has its own uh unique uh benefits in research.

10:05>> And so one leg just trained to failure for eight weeks straight and the other trained to ri within the same person. So it was interesting as a researcher to observe that like I'd obviously read studies that um outlined you know what a within subject design is like but then you know seeing it and having to conduct it was interesting because like participants were working hard like it was eight weeks of hard training twice a

10:31week like the the failure condition was a hard condition. Um, and obviously the study being supervised kind of takes that to the next level because they're not on their own like they're being pushed via supervision and we know there's so many benefits to supervision.

10:47So that's what the study broadly looked like. Uh, the leg press and leg extension were the two exercises that we did in in that order. And you know, people often critique uh again training to failure. How do we know they trained to failure? Well, we know because they got to the point where they involuntarily stopped the set. And like there's always the question that comes up, well maybe, you know, if they were a little more aroused, they could have