Brady Holmer

You know, you have to be ready to, you know, if you lift 95% of your one rep max on, you know, this set, you want to be able to do that the next set.

You need adequate recovery to be able to do that, particularly if your goal is to improve strength or even muscle power as well could be similar.

So he meant he even mentioned that he says, you know, if he's has something planned for the day where he's trying to go like really maximal, like either lift a failure or set like a PR in the squat or deadlift or something, and he's like stressed, then he won't do it.

Because yeah, you have to be not only is going to raise your injury risk, but you know, you're probably not going to be able to perform that activity because your nervous system just isn't in the

state that's primed to do that.

I know Lane has like posted videos and he'll post videos on social media where he's preparing for a lift and you see how psychologically amped up that he gets before doing that.

And like, that's what you got to do because part of it, yeah, you need to be strong to lift the weight, but it's like your nervous system is contributing a lot to lifting the weight during training and trying to set like a PR attempt.

So it's one of the aspects I think of training that kind of goes, it's less talked about, but it's certainly important.

It might.

Or maybe some of those smelling salts that the lifters use.

Yeah.

It appears, yeah, training to failure doesn't appear to be necessary to optimize strength or hypertrophy.

It appears at least, you know, pretty equal to training with, you know, a couple reps in reserve.

And we'll talk about what that means in a second.

But so, yeah, training to failure doesn't appear to be necessary, I think.

If you're going to train to failure, Dr. Schoenfeld seemed to recommend doing machine-based exercises versus on free weights because the injury risk and the risk of an accident happening is lower.

If you're on a machine, you can't drop a weight on yourself really if you're using a machine.

So going to failure on machine-based exercises seems to be fine.

And on maybe those single joint exercises too.

So if you're doing something like a bicep curl, okay, you can do to failure on that, but maybe not going to failure on a back barbell back squat or something like that.