 The next question is from Maypunk. Should we be lifting to failure each set or should we feel like we can get more reps in with each set? How can I tell if I'm lifting the right amount of weight to make progress? Oh, man. Guess we haven't addressed this in a while. I guess it's been a while. It is. You know, when I was younger, I was under the impression that lifting the failure was essential because you knew if you went to failure, you at least passed the threshold for building muscle or sending that signal. So going to failure, you know you hit that threshold. Not only that. And I know you were reading the same articles and shit I was reading. I mean, there was a lot of stuff to support the benefits of that, to show what would happen if you ended up training to failure, the extra benefits of doing that. The problem with that is a lot of those that research doesn't take into account like how taxing it is on your central nervous system, what you do the next day or two days. How that affects you like multiple days afterwards. And then, yeah, and what that looks like over the course of three to five months because what ends up happening is, and I'm sure there's lots of teenage boys that do the same thing that I did, which is read an article like that and go like, oh, training to failure gets x% more built, more muscle because of x, y, and z. Okay, every session, every exercise, I'm training to failure using my buddy in a spotter and you're just fried all the time. No, the truth is I got the best results in my life with myself and my clients, almost never trained to failure. In fact, if you look at some of the best strength athletes in the world, they rarely ever train to failure. You look at Olympic athletes, even power lifters rarely go to failure except for maybe competitions. Bodybuilders tend to be the ones that go to failure more often, but even bodybuilders, even if you watch pro bodybuilders, they rarely go to failure. Lee Haney, one of the most winningest Mr. Olympia said, stimulate, don't annihilate. Okay, so these are all opinions, right, and experience. What are the study show? Studies also support this. Going to failure does not produce better results. In fact, actually starts to produce less results or worse results than not going to failure. So what's the right intensity? For most people it's stopping maybe two or three reps before failure. So here's where I see the value of going to failure. Every once in a while it's good to go to failure so that you know what it feels like. And then you know what's stopping two reps short of that feels like. That's what I'll do. So I'll go to failure once every three months or six months. Now, okay, this is the intensity that failure feels like. Sort of your barometer or whatever. A gauge for you to know, okay, here's where my threshold is, but honestly, the least amount of times you're gonna like expose yourself to go into failure probably the better. I use it a lot with strength athletes and athletes in general just to kind of see if the training has been successful leading up to this point. So it's almost like you kind of build up to a point where now you're displaying your true strength and finding out, okay, like how much am I capable of with this, but there's gotta be like, there's significant time after that where they need to recover and then go back to this two reps shy of failure. The other thing that's really negative about training to failure too is it can be very detrimental to your form. So if you're like I was a kid who was always chasing that PR or always trying to put more weight on the bar and having buddy spot him. Like, can you remember? I know you would have a vivid memory of yourself. Oh yeah. It's pressing like this to get the weight up. And if you're doing that all the time, you're creating bad patterns, bad habits. And maybe at 20 years old, it don't bother you right now, but that's the type of shit that catches up when you're 30 and 40 years old. Yeah, this is mind blowing stuff that I've been teaching these kids, these high school kids is when we're going through these like compound lifts. It's like, we don't wanna perform a bad rep. It's not even worth it. Like, it's way better for you to master the technique and hone in on that and treat it as real practice. Every time you're doing the lift, I want you to go down and in load until we do it right. Yes. So that was something that they just were like, what, cause like every other coach wants to just keep loading, loading, loading. What can we do? But it's all slop. Like he said, you have somebody spotting them when they're struggling their way through it. And as they're doing their compensating the whole time, like shifting their weight to the side and overreaching with their arm. And you get terrible results. You develop an unbalanced physique. You increase your risk of injury. Like I'd like to redefine failure. How about this? Go until your form is about to break down. That's right. And I think that's important that you say that too, because when we talk about failure like that being too short, that's like two reps short of absolute failure, but you can cut your rep. And I think a better gauge is literally the minute that you can feel your forms about the DVA. Yes, cause it's perfect play. Yes, cause most people think failure is, or at least the way it's defined popularly is, I can't do another rep. That's right. No. Can you do, you can't do another perfect rep. With quality. Yes. If the second you feel like you can't do another perfect rep, then you stop. And incidentally, that probably matches up pretty closely to two reps or three reps short of failure. Yeah.