To Fail or not to Fail(ure) for Muscle Growth: Necessary or Not? A lot of lifters still act as if a set only “counts” if it ends in complete collapse. The newer evidence does not support that. Grgic et al. systematically reviewed and meta-analysed studies comparing resistance training performed to repetition failure versus non-failure and found that muscle hypertrophy was not meaningfully different between approaches when training was otherwise reasonably hard and well-designed. In plain English, you do not have to hit failure to grow muscle. PMCID: PMC9068575. Singer et al. looked primarily at rest intervals and hypertrophy, but an important sub-analysis asked whether the set endpoint mattered, that is, training to failure versus stopping short. Their conclusion was that failure versus non-failure did not meaningfully change the relationship between rest intervals and muscle growth. Again, failure was not shown to be a magic ingredient. PMCID: PMC11349676. That lines up nicely wit...