What’s more important to training…fatigue and failure, or volume for muscle hypertrophy and strength?

Training for Size-Fatigue vs Volume: A Tall-Tale of the Hypertrophy Phase

The picture above is of me in 2016 when I weighed around 230 pounds. Now, I have worked my way up to 260 pounds and I will tell you this…I was not expecting that at all. Throughout high school and college I felt strong! I pushed 485 pounds, pulled 630 pounds, and felt dominant and at a good place! But when I programmed my workouts, how I do it now is MUCH different than how I did it then…

During my younger years, I would bang the iron for about two hours at a time. That seemed normal, traditional, and the bare minimum for anyone who wanted to be a dominant force in the realm of strength training. Fast forward to now, and I work out at most 45-50 minutes at a time which is more than HALF of what I used to do. But now I feel much more fatigued, exhausted, and at the same time, accomplished. When I would hoist the iron for two hours, I would literally throw the weight as hard as I could and as fast as I could. My only concern was if I lifted more than the previous week, and if I finished my reps with the prescribed weight for that exercise. If I was to do 365 pounds on bench press for 6 reps, I felt the best way to do this was to throw the weight fast, and get the set over with! I didn’t think about tension, tempo, fatigue, etc. I just wanted to be successful.

But as the years went on, I started to understand my training was lacking and that was causing myself to not meet my best potential. If you want to be big, thick, and strong…you shouldn’t always lift for speed. That’s something I have now learned, and will continue to express within this post. Maybe I needed to re-evaluate my programming and find new ways to make the same workouts better.

So what did it for me was investigating, and whether intentionally or unintentionally thinking about it, changing the quality of my movement. One of the first things I noticed when I would initially workout was that I was not sweating as much. I don’t think I was incorporating enough volume, especially during my offseason, to establish enough fatigue into my workout to help with eliciting high levels of growth and development. So to change this part of my routine, I started to engage in working sets of 12,15,20, or even 30 reps at a time. With this amount of volume came an intense increase in friction of my musculature, creating more heat and energy expenditure which in essence was the pool of sweat that would drip from my body down to the ground. Now the next problem that occurred was that although my programming seemed to go better and I was starting to sweat and maintain a higher heart rate throughout training sessions, my body would ache and start to suffer from the amount of abuse I put it through. One day I was doing cable flies and was told probably the most important thing I have ever learned in the gym…

“You want to train heavy, and you want to train HARD”

Josh Bryant told me this, and he is without a doubt the KING of strength. He knows all things strength, and has inspired me so much from my youth and even still to do this day. Taking that quote, and all the things I experienced up to this point, I worked hard to investigate the ideas of lifting “hard” and that maybe it wasn’t just about the reps and volume, maybe it was about slowing things down and establishing tension throughout certain movements. Once I did this, I found a HUGE leap in size and even found more strength in some movements than I ever have.

That’s where this post comes into play, what’s the best approach to elicit higher levels of growth within your typical cycle, or as some of the strength gurus say: your hypertrophy phase. What’s more important to training…fatigue and failure, or volume for muscle hypertrophy and strength?

There is a study called “Is performing repetitions to failure less important than volume for muscle hypertrophy and strength?”. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of muscle failure (MF) or not to MF (NMF) training on strength and muscle hypertrophy relative gains (average and individual data). Ten men untrained in resistance training participated in the study. Each leg was allocated in 1 of 2 unilateral training protocols (MF or NMF with equal volume) on knee extension exercise. Both protocols were performed with 3–4 sets, 3 minutes' rest, and 55–60% of one repetition maximum (1RM). Rectus femoris and vastus lateralis muscles cross-sectional area (CSA), maximal muscle strength (1RM and maximal voluntary isometric contraction), and muscular endurance (maximum number of repetition) were assessed before and after 14 weeks. In addition, neuromuscular activation by normalized root mean square of the electromyographic signal (EMGRMS) was measured in 2nd and 35th training sessions. The average results showed that both training protocols were similarly effective in inducing increases in strength and muscle hypertrophy gains. However, individual analysis data suggest that NMF protocol with equal volume may promote similar or even greater muscle hypertrophy (vastus lateralis) and muscular endurance performance when compared with MF protocol. Also, normalized EMGRMS responses analyzed during 2nd and 35th sessions were similar in MF and NMF protocols for rectus femoris and vastus lateralis muscles.

In conclusion, MF and NMF protocol conducted with the same total repetition numbers produced similar maximal muscle strength performance and neuromuscular activation. So what does this mean to us? Well, what it comes down to is that we need to think big picture:

Heavy volume will set us to fatigue, but that amount of volume can put wear and tear onto our bodies. But also, that level of volume can help with gaining strength in our tendons and other features of the body that could also gain benefit. I think that its safe to say that in addition to volume, you work with slow and tense movements to also engage in fatiguing movements in your programming to compliment or replace the heavy load of volume for better care of the body. Some examples of this could be as follows:

Bench Press 3x6

Incline DB Press 3x10

Eccentric Dips 4x8

Chest Flies 3x20

This program starts with strength, dumbbells for stability and increase range for tension, eccentric focus for fatigue, and chest flies for volume-setting fatigue.

As I have said many of times, the sharpest sword doesn’t always prevail, it’s the sharpest mind. So take this information and add it to your array of knowledge, and continue to grow into the thick minded specimen that dominates the iron amongst his fellow brethren! Be the best you can, and as always, BANG THE IRON!

Lacerda, LT, Marra-Lopes, RO, Diniz, RCR, Lima, FV, Rodrigues, SA, Martins-Costa, HC, Bemben, MG, and Chagas, MH. Is performing repetitions to failure less important than volume for muscle hypertrophy and strength? J Strength Cond Res 34(5): 1237–1248, 2020