Dr. Layne Norton

So you need those sets.

But then volume is also important for strength.

There's quite a few studies that show that.

But interestingly, he did a – I believe he did a meta regression looking at hypertrophy showing that proximity to failure kind of was linearly associated with more hypertrophy.

So the closer you got to failure, the more hypertrophy you got.

The strength regression didn't show that.

It had no association with your proximity to failure.

And so one of the things they said is with strength, you're always managing kind of expression with fatigue.

So if you're training heavy a lot and going close to failure, you're doing a very specific skill, but you're also inducing a lot of fatigue, which is going to reduce the amount of strength that you can express, right?

Whereas the way we kind of train or he trains me is we'll, when I'm doing my compound squat bench press deadlift, I'll do one set or maybe two sets of a heavy single, double, triple, maybe four reps.

And then we'll do back offs that are much lighter, but we're doing multiple sets of them as fast as we can, like the speed of the rep as fast as we can.

And they've actually shown that you get better strength results with

not training to failure compared to training to failure, but you do have to do some heavy, heavy sets relatively close to failure.

And it's probably because, like I said, failure just, it induces a lot of fatigue and that's going to mask how much strength you can actually express when they test it.

So in general, this is kind of minutiae that a lot of people don't really need to worry about.

I always tell people, you know,

I'm 90% sure that you're not training too hard.

I'm almost sure of that, okay?

There are people who do train too hard.

There are people who overtrain themselves.