My favourite part of my job is the variety of people that I work with on a daily basis and the opportunity I have to not only help shape they’re physical appearance, but more importantly their mindset as it relates to training. Whenever I work with a new client I always encourage them to embrace the fact that they are going to fail at some point in a training session. This is often met with confusion and sometimes resistance from people and understandably so, as we all want to be the best at everything. However, failing a rep, or not completing a circuit as quickly as the last one isn’t in and of itself a bad thing - it just means you’re training to failure, something that (in my opinion) is absolutely essential for improvement.
At it’s core the purpose of a training session is the put the body under sufficient physical stress that it adapts to better cope with said stress in the future. The human body is smart and it won’t expend the valuable resources required for this physical adaptation voluntarily, you have to force it to do so by training to the point of failure. Bare in mind though that you don’t have to do this every single session, for the best results I would recommend pushing yourself the maximum at least once per week, any more than this and you risk over doing it.
From a practical stand point, training to failure means working until you physically cannot continue. You will be surprised what you are physically able to push yourself through and most of the time it is actually a person’s mental resolve gives in. As your mental fortitude improves, so too will your ability to put your body under physical stress, thereby allowing to you get even better results further down the road.
One way that I ensure my clients achieve true failure when they train is to program rep ranges instead of specific numbers. For example, getting them to complete 10-15 reps of an exercise at a weight that I know they will not be able to do 15 reps for, ensuring that they fail somewhere in the 10-15 rep range. One message that I always try to get across to my clients is that (to a degree) the number of reps you complete is arbitrary and rather the stress that they put on the muscle is the driving force in development. So as long as you are working as hard as you possibly can, then whether you complete 10, 12 or 15 reps is irrelevant - just make sure you fail!
If you are looking for a training program that is tailored specifically to you and your goals then you can find more information about my Online Personal Training Service here