I've said this repeatedly.. people sometimes have a much different version of failure than I do.. I hear many say they go to failure but if you put a gun to their head they have a couple more in them.. this is why I do not agree with the REPS IN RESERVE theory.. if a person " thinks" they just went to failure but had two more in them then what is their 2 reps in reserve ? It's actually 4 reps in reserve.. so the best thing to do is go to " failure " or at least what you think is failure lol.. many are truly short changing their sessions
Failure.
As an aside, this young man I have been training with, I usually have him
start the workout with 3 sets of 20 deep squats with safety bar at the
bottom to catch him. He squats like a piston in a cylinder, perfect form
and he likes to do them. Go figure. On Monday, new weight. First two sets
were killing him. Last set he saw God (or the Devil), got 20, the last rep
took him 8 seconds to go from ass to the grass to standing with perform!
(I could have had him do one last rep, pure negative but I took it easy
on him.) He racked the bar and hit the ground like I hit him in the head
with my blackjack. He laid in a puddle of sweat trying to catch his breadth,
his legs were shaking, could not walk for about 5 minutes, had a headache
for 15 minutes. He said that was the hardest he has worked at anything
in the last ten years of his life.
That is close enough to failure for me.
No small surprise he called in sick today