Week 1 FT Setup

[Scott Stevenson]

Hi Dr Scott,

Hope you are having a great Christmas!

Just saw Brad Schoenfeld post thus on FB and wanted your opinion as I know a latge part of FT is failure training:

The persistent claim by some in the industry that training to absolute muscular failure is essential for maximizing muscle growth is without research-based support. Certainly training with a high level of effort is important for continued muscular gains, and perhaps there *might* be a benefit to taking some sets to all out failure (again, the basis for this is largely speculative). But there's no basis to contend that the vein in your temple needs to bulge like a serpent when eking out that last rep to maximize growth, and it may in fact be detrimental over time by hastening the onset of overtraining. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; here the evidence is virtually non-existent

Thanks Doc!!

Joe

I'm exactly on the same page as Brad here, as far as I can tell. I address this on page 17 of the book. (I've covered this here on the board a few times now, I think.)

Failure takes its toll, and my empirical observation has been that, e.g, with LOADING sets, stopping 1-2 reps shy of failure allows the vast majority of the volume to be performed with the sets (e.g., 9 reps whereby 10 would have been the last rep, failing when attempting an 11th reps) without the disproportionate impact on recovery that comes from a true failure set.

This is why the sets in an MR performed after the failure point are with a weight / load that does NOT elicit failure. (You'll get good at picking these depending on where in the MR you reach failure. See the examples in the book on page 96 or so.)

As far as failure on PUMP sets... Again, it's in the book. (I'm intentionally not going to respond here other than that to get you in the habit of looking at the book. )

-S