Why You Will Gain More Muscle If You Train to Failure

There have been many opinions regarding the best amount of reps for any given weight lifting session. In my opinion, most people should be training to failure if their goal is to gain muscle mass.

Building muscle is expensive metabolically. Your body doesn't really like it. Just maintaining one pound of muscle requires spending about 70 calories each day. Compared to that, one pound of fat just requires 4 calories every day.

With that in mind, it's easy to see why it's harder to gain muscle than it is to get fat. In order to beat your body's stubbornness, you have to give it a good enough reason to actually gain the muscle mass.

When training to failure, you're generating trauma in your muscle cells. Not only that, but your nervous system is also fully engaged towards lifting the weight. Because your body adapts to previous circumstances, it will decide it would be wise to build more muscle in order to not suffer so much the next time you lift that weight.

If on the other side, you didn't lift to failure, you probably would not generate enough trauma in your muscles. The weight that you were carrying would be light enough that you could carry it again with the same amount of muscle.

To select the best weight to train to failure, try to do from seven to twelve repetitions in about one minute. This means you will do seven repetitions, but you will not be able to do another one, simply because your muscles will be exhausted.

As you probably have guessed, one minute is a lot of time for doing few reps. That's because you have to do them slowly in order to discourage yourself from using momentum in order to lift the weights.

Finally, you should aim to beat your previous total weight lifted (reps * weight) on every lifting session. If you do not do this, then your body will have no reason to build more muscle.