If you feel this in the gym, stop training
Crushing yourself to muscle failure involves forcing your body on repetitions. How to detect your limits to avoid injury
Have you found yourself in the situation of doing a dumbbell lifting exercise in which, after many repetitions, you get one that you cannot complete? Has it happened to you that, by doing push-ups, your body has told you enough! , and could not continue? If the answer is yes, you have reached the fault. And no, it's not about making the wrong move. We refer to muscle failure.
This expression is very recurring among trainers, high-performance athletes, and bodybuilders, although it can also be heard in any gym, and more in full bikini operation. We can all go to failure if we push the purpose of training to the extreme, and we are not able to stop when we have reached the maximum effort threshold. Technically, "that means voluntarily reaching the maximum activation of certain muscle fibers," notes Guillermo Alvarado, director of Performa Personal Trainers in Valencia.
In most cases, this practice is carried out within the bodybuilding world with the aim of gaining muscle volume. It's not about improving strength, it's about increasing muscle size. To achieve this, significant overloads are used and an unlimited number of repetitions are made until a time comes when you can not take it anymore.
Great or risky technique?
As expected, this technique is not without controversy. "When it comes to a person who does not play sports, whatever he does will serve to improve his strength (always within limits, obviously). But even among those who train regularly, it seems to be a risk to go to failure because it involves loss of other abilities, such as speed and strength, "says Josep Mª Padullés, an expert in high performance in team sports and coach in the Spanish Athletics Team.
In fact, a study published in Sports Medicine warns that training until failure has not been shown to help gain more muscle strength. "If a muscle is worked at a very high level, it can be damaged to the point of causing injury, and if many muscles are involved at this level of demand, as occurs when disciplines such as extreme CrossFit are practiced, You can even suffer kidney failure, "says Padullés. When these extremes are reached, explains Alvarado, "apart from increasing the risk of injury, burn out syndrome can occur, which is the lack of motivation caused by excessive training, and can even cause someone to abandon the activity physical".
The ideal, experts say, is to follow an exercise routine and stop before reaching that physical "top" in which the body asks us to stop. And that can be applied to all kinds of exercises, such as push-ups and sit-ups. This is how Jorge García, physical trainer of the Royal Spanish Hockey Federation and professor at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) explains it: "The limit should be at this point where you can see that a repetition costs much more than the previous ones. If you know what the maximum is, the ideal is to stay two repetitions of the failure. "
Not suitable for everyone
There is also the option to clarify the protocol or the way to reach this failure. Daniel Martínez, Bachelor of Science in Physical Activity and Sports and co-founder of the Muscle Academy training center, assures that "this technique is not so dangerous if it is executed at controlled speeds and with a well-defined technique." The speed or slowness with which the weight-bearing movements are carried out is decisive. According to Martinez, not taking that factor into account "could cause soft tissues, such as ligaments, capsules or tendons to be damaged."
For his part, Padullés warns that the most important thing when choosing a training program or another is to think about what we are going to prepare for and opt for functional training. In other words, if we are preparing for a marathon, "we should work on the core strength (the abdominal, lumbar, pelvic and gluteal muscles) and the parts of the body that are involved in dynamic actions. For example, running uphill, jump or series with weight ". In most sports, he summarizes, what is sought is to make quick movements and increase our resistance to effort, so training strength at a static level would not make much sense.