Times have changed for the worse, and this is why you should care.
You don’t build muscle in the gym—you build muscle in your sleep. The same goes for abs: they aren’t made in the gym; they’re revealed in the kitchen. If it were possible, instead of training clients for just 3–4 hours a week, I’d hover around them for the other 164 hours—slapping bad food off the table and making sure they were asleep by 10 p.m. each night.
Real talk: What you do in the gym is the smallest part of your body composition. You could skip the gym entirely, nail your diet, hydration, sleep, and stress management, and still make serious changes. That said, regular weight training basically hits the turbo button on your fat-loss and muscle-building goals. So, until I figure out how to monitor y’all 24/7, we’ll focus on the gym for now.
Enter “training to failure.” We’ve all heard it before. You see it in commercials selling the latest fitness garbage, with everyone bouncing around like chihuahua energy. Or worse, pro bodybuilders on YouTube lying about how “going to failure” is the only way to make gains—cut to someone screaming under a squat rack.
It’s odd because I’ve been in the iron game for over 13 years, a lot of it in gyms full of veritable monsters, and I rarely see anyone truly going to “failure.” A little grunting? Sure. Some plate dropping? Definitely. But no one freaking out and collapsing after that “hardcore” set.
So let’s talk about what “failure” really means.
The original meaning of failure (and it still works great) was a simple timed-pause rep trick. For example, I’d instruct you to do one set of barbell curls until failure: Perform reps in a steady cadence—maybe a 1-2-3 count up, 1-2-3 down. When you broke cadence (paused at the top for a quick break or slowed dramatically), that was failure. Super simple, and it’s a great way to stress the hypertrophy range. Nothing crazy—just one more tool to spice up the standard 4×12 muscle-building protocol.
The popular version (think high-school coach mentality): Do [insert exercise] until you vomit and call it “hardcore.” For extra points, lie about how often you actually do it. That way, everyone else training sensibly starts wondering if they’re “hardcore” enough. Silly.
Not only is this silly, it’s massively counterproductive. You’re only as good as your recovery (where real gains are made), and you still have to show up to the gym the next day. Real progress comes from consistent work that accumulates over time. There’s no shortcut around it.
Think of a successful workout as something that stores energy rather than drains it. As fitness-minded people with actual lives, our goal is to expand our capacity—not destroy it.
The truth is, if there’s any type of “failure” we should push through, it’s that golden second right before we cut ourselves a break. That little pause we want to take before the set ends. Walking the last 50 feet of our run because it’s “good enough.” That quick Instagram scroll between sets that kills our momentum.
Inside every training session, we have a golden opportunity to achieve that glorious mental “alpha state.” Each workout becomes a small monument to the person we want to become. So those little breaks and shortcuts we give ourselves? Those are the real failures we must learn to overcome.
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