Positive, negative, or no failure at all?

From my understanding, positive failure is when you lift to the point when you can just barely finish your planned sets/reps unassisted. Negative failure is when you can't quite finish it without help from a spotter. My question is this:

I've heard that it's good to challenge your body by going to failure sometimes (I'm guessing negative?...), but should you always be doing it? Is there a specific amount of minimum reps thats considered the standard when doing so? (8 seems to be a popular number).

Technically, if you aren't lifting to failure, are you pushing yourself as much as is safely possible? And therefore, is it still considered strength training?

note- when I say "you", I don't necessarily mean "you", I mostly mean me (but if it applies to you as well, then, cool!)  :P

Actually, positive failure is when you can't lift the weight through the positive phase - easy example, not being able to get the weight all the way up with a bicep curl. And negative failure is not being able to resist the weight in a static hold - failing to be able to hold the weight up.

 With a spotter, you can go to positive failure - not being able to get the weight up - and then have the spotter get the weight up into top position and just do the negatives up until you can't stop or even slow down the weight.

 Meh. The going to negative failure is a HIT thing, and like most HIT techniques the usefulness is mostly a figment of the HIT jedi's imagination. There's no point to it for anyone not doing as many steroids as Mike Menzer or Casey Viator, when going to positive failure you've pushed your muscles to the useful training limit for the non-enhanced athlete.

 Going to positive failure is also very draining on your CNS, which can be good or bad - last fall I did a program where I'd push to positive failure for 3 weeks until I hit overtraining, and then coast for 3 weeks and stop 1-3 reps before failure. Which did work to a great extent - I like periodization, your results are better when you vary your training.

 But it's just one of many possible intensification techniques, and not something you want to do when you're under any other stress - the CNS impact hampers recovery and stresses your immune system. So you don't want to combine it with sgnificant work or life stress.

you asked, Technically, if you aren't lifting to failure, are you pushing yourself as much as is safely possible? And therefore, is it still considered strength training?

many ppl say, "you must always lift to failure."  how very wrong.  strength training is training based on carefully stressing your body out, so that after your muscle repairs, it's EVEN STRONGER.  the science of how much/how often/in what way to stress muscles out is where the questions arise.

but having a rule like, "always stress yourself out" is silliness.  i mean, say it aloud.  does it sound like silliness?  of course it does.  bec you're a human, and you can break.  you don't want to break, you want to be strong.  so you must be smart about how you stress yourself.  different programs present different protocols.  some programs will say, "do this for 10 reps, and after 7 sets, you should be failing at the final rep."  some may say, "do this strong and fast for 3 reps, and rest long enough so that in every subsequent set you don't fail." 

in response to melkor's post, i do negative pullups and sometimes fail when i've done a bunch of sets.  i have read a lot about the major strength gains that happen in the eccentric phase, so if i'm going to lift to failure, i think i'd rather lift to negative failure.

Oh, yes, straight negatives are useful little beasties for increasing strength - it's the forced reps to negative failure after pushing yourself to positive failure I'm sceptical of. There's something about pushing yourself to failure and then forcing your alread-abused body to do more negative reps that strikes me as a bit odd - you've already stimulated your body as much as possible and doing forced negatives is just overstressing your system.

 That's not in the same class of effort as starting out fresh and doing just the negatives, neh?

Sometimes when im in the gym i'll do my sets and complete them, and sometimes i fail, generally i take the success to mean that next gym session i need to up my "sets, reps or weights" depending on the program im on.

However i sometimes wonder what i should do on the session i compleate, sometimes i wonder if i should do another set or perhaps do the final set till failure rather than just stopping when my program tells me too??

Like this week .. im shedualed tommorrow to do 10 reps X 3 sets, but next week im shedualed on the same exercises to do 10 X 4 sets ... so i know next week will be tougher because im doing an extra set but what if i compleate tommorrow??

Should i do an extra set then?  Either way what about next week??  just because i compleated with X weight this week doens't mean i can compleate 4 sets at that weight next week?? if i up my wieght i might be abit premature with my assumtion i needed more weight especially as the weights tend to jump in reasonably big increments.

Because i've had it a few times where i've upped my weights and it was a total mistake (i almost killed myself with chest presses yesterday haha... i moved up a weight and it was bad REALLY BAD ended up stuck halfway haha) 

What if you do realise it was a mistake?? because yesterday when i lowered my wieght again realising my mistake but i'd tired myself out so badly with something that was blatently to heavy i couldn't even compleate last weeks reps.

wow am i making any sence??

Oh and lastly (sorry for the waffle)

I do specific body parts on specific days ... like yesterday was chest, now i have 5 exercises for chest and i always find i "compleate" the first exercises i do because im all fresh and rested, but the performance on my last exercise of the day always sucks because im fatigued, i try and combat this by rotating my exercises each week so im not always fatigued on the same exercise?? is this right??? at which point am i doing it wrong because im NOT failing on the first one?? im assuming i have 5 different chest exercises because they all work the chest differently (push pull etc ) So isn't it important i exercise them all equally??

Sorry i just feel like im still in a position where im finding my limits and finding out what my body's cabable of, im still at the stage where i seem to be upping my weights on almost a weekly basis and sometimes i wonder i'f im pushing myself hard enough.

I hear ya, Leiela - I'm wondering a lot of the same things. I've been trying to work toward mastery of form as I increase weight levels. My gym only has free weights that advance in 5lb increments so I'll start with a high weight, do as many as I can in the best form I can, but the form is not top notch because my body is learning to balance and support the increased weight. However when the form is good and I can finish all of the sets feeling strong I usually stop, so I'm glad this question is being pondered by all ya'all.

I love caloriecountiingme's response. It's nice to be reminded to stop and think about what makes sense - yup, good stuff.

the question of when to increase weights is essentially the same question as what weight to choose in the first place.  what i mean is, what goals is your program based around?

once you can complete all your sets at a given weight, then increase the reps or the sets or the weight or the tempo--but stay w/in this program-goal-based range.  once you're beyond that, increase the reps.  for example:  if you're doing 5 sets of 5 at 100lbs and you complete your sets/reps, next time you might

1)change reps or sets: try 5 sets of 6, or 3 sets of 5 and 2 sets of 6.  or 5 sets of 5 at 100 and then 1 set of 4 at 95

2) change weights:  2 sets of 6 at 95, 1 set of 5 at 100, 1 set of 3 at 105, 1 set of 3 at 100.

3) change the tempo:  perform the eccentric portion of the lift super slowly, or hold at the midpoint of the lift (like holding a squat in the "hole" position)

different ppl will choose different ways of challenging themselves until they can move up to the next weight for all reps and sets. 

_______________________________

the order of the lifts in your program is determined by the goals of your program as well as the types of lifts you have.  for example, total body lifts like snatches would go first bec they require so much power.  deadlifts go last bec they're such a drain on your central nervous system.  BIG lifts that are compound and involve big muscles (squats, bench press) usually go before little lifts (lateral raise, pullover) bec you wanna give a lot of energy to those big-muscle-building lifts (and don't want to be squatting 160lbs when your energy's all spent, you'll end up skimping on form and hurting yourself).  but goals are a big point to not neglect.  for example, if you REALLY REALLY want to be able to do 5 dips in a row, then start w/the dips.