What the hell is the difference between failure and fatigue?

[weightzbeforedatez]

People say go to failure or till the muscle is fatigued, what the hell is the difference?

 

[bignate73]

many different versions of failure but for simplicities sake, it is until you cant lift the weight anymore or control it.

fatigue being when the repetitions are difficult or you get that last one out without a spot.

im sure others can word it better than i.

 

[Valdez]

I think fatigue refers to the bodies state of reduced strength nearing the end of a workout. say you do a workout consisting of ONLY chinups (to make this simple) you can do 19 chinups and then cannot preform another that is failure. say you do more sets second set= 16 reps third= 13 reps forth= 9 reps fifth= 5 reps... so by the fifth set you muscles are depleted of much strength and you have hit muscular fatigue??

 

[blood_drinker]

i'll second big nate

 

[GenetiKing]

Don't worry about "fatigue."

Reach failure on all your meat sets....perform any given exercise until you can no longer do the complete the range of motion by yourself. You have then achieved concentric failure. That's all you need to worry about. The term "fatigue" is rather general to me and less quantitative.

 

[bignate73]

Don't worry about "fatigue."

Reach failure on all your meat sets....perform any given exercise until you can no longer do the complete the range of motion by yourself. You have then achieved concentric failure. That's all you need to worry about. The term "fatigue" is rather general to me and less quantitative.

suuuure. shoot me down gk....

only reason i have to know what fatigue is....is cause i cant take some of the older folks to failure on every set. hehe. they would be crippled from d.o.m.s. oops can you say unhappy client? hehe.

if i had my "druthers" i would wreck everyone to failure...and then take em further. hehe.

 

[SwitchedOn]

I read somewhere...

I read somewhere, I think in Flex in an article by Ronnie Coleman that said fatigue is biochemical and failure is biomechanical in nature. Fatigue is brought about by lactic acid buildup in the muscles blah blah blah. Anyone heard this before?

 

[HeavyDutyGuy]

You dont want to take older folks to fatigue,either, unless they have been exercising a long time. Older people do not recover nearly as fast, so more volume is a step in the wrong direction.

 

[Valdez]

Re: I read somewhere...

I read somewhere, I think in Flex in an article by Ronnie Coleman that said fatigue is biochemical and failure is biomechanical in nature. Fatigue is brought about by lactic acid buildup in the muscles blah blah blah. Anyone heard this before?

didn't read the article but I know exactly what your talking about, it makes alot of sense.

biomechanical (failure) means you cannot preform another rep with a current weight. this too is not cut and dry because if you lower the weight or do partial reps you can still pump out more reps and the muscle will be stressed even further and be more stimulated for growth

biochemical (the muscle is low on ATP and excess lactic acid buildup makes more sets very painful and or very difficult to preform.

IMO you must attain both biomechanical and biochemical failure or fatigue whatever in each workout to get the MAXIMUM benefit.

 

[GenetiKing]

You dont want to take older folks to fatigue,either, unless they have been exercising a long time. Older people do not recover nearly as fast, so more volume is a step in the wrong direction.

"Volume" when used in reference to training denotes sets. In other words:

Many sets = High Volume

Few sets = Low Volume

For example, a H.I.T. bodybuilder would be a "low-volume" trainer but their intensity is very high.

Volume has nothing to do with intensity per se, they are generally mutually exculsive (i.e. You can't train with high intensity and high volume at the same time).

FYI...