So you’ve made a commitment to getting stronger, bigger muscles. You’re not afraid of hard work. You couldn’t possibly be more motivated. You hit the gym with what Mike Mentzer used to call “The Siege Mentality”.

You attack your first exercise. Your form is good-slow, controlled lifting, hold, even slower lowering. You push yourself to the very end, until you can’t lift the weight any more with good form.

Congratulations! You’ve done a set to failure-positive failure, that is. And training like that will cause you to get bigger and stronger quickly, and for a long time.

Is there anything you can do in your training to accelerate the growth process-to get stronger faster? Can you go beyond positive failure? And if you can, should you?

Yes, yes, and maybe.

Skeletal muscles have 3 strength levels. They are, in order from weakest to strongest:

1. Positive, or concentric strength-the lifting of a weight. When you can no longer lift a weight, you have reached positive failure.

2.Static strength-the holding of a weight, usually in the fully contracted position. When you can no longer hold a weight, you have reached static failure.

3.Negative, or eccentric strength-the lowering of a weight. When you can no longer lower a weight under control, you have reached negative failure, which means total failure. Since your negative strength is greater than your positive or static strength, when you achieve negative failure you have, by default, reached positive and static failure as well.

So how do you get to negative failure? There are several advanced techniques that will allow you to do that. For example, if you have a partner, you can incorporate forced reps and negative-only reps at the end of your set.

Forced reps are where your partner gives you just enough assistance to barely complete another repetition. Your partner has to really be in tune with what your doing, and give you the absolute least amount of help necessary to complete the rep; otherwise, you will be making your set easier, not harder–less intense, not more intense.

After a couple of forced reps, you will not be able to lift the weight at all anymore under your own power. This is where the negative reps come into play. Your partner lifts the weight to the finish position for you, carefully transfers the weight to you only, then you lower the weight slowly, under control, in 4-8 seconds. When you reach the start position, your partner again lifts the weight for you and you lower it again by yourself, repeating this until you can no longer control the speed of descent; at which point, you end the set.

To see forced reps and negative-only reps in action, check out Java Jon smoking his biceps, with me helping out:

(Did you notice the loud “banging” noise in the background every few seconds? That was the guy in the background on the back extension machine dropping the weight on every rep and letting the weight stack crash together. I bet his spine loved that.)

Once you reach the point where you have exhausted your negative strength level, there is no strength left in that muscle. If you can’t lower it, you can’t hold it; and if you can’t hold it, you can’t lift it. You have done everything a human being can do to stimulate an increase in strength and size of that particular muscle with that particular exercise.

A word of caution-training to total failure dramatically increases the intensity of the workout, and the demands on your recovery ability. If you are making steady, continuous progress without this technique, keep doing what you’re doing. If you do decide to try it, don’t do it every workout, and don’t do it with every exercise in the workout. Use the technique sparingly for best results. Remember, if you can’t recover from it, you won’t grow from it.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think about this technique.

Train intensely and intelligently,

Dave Durell, MS, CCS, PTA
Author of High Intensity Muscle Building