Volitional Failure

Training
21

[quote]JLone wrote:

[quote]setto222 wrote:
I’ve never heard it referred to like that but if it’s anything like “technical failure” in mechanical and industrial engineering it’s a bit different.

Technical failure would occur when the muscle doesn’t meet the specifications and conditions to contract (i came to this by following the material-science concept of tech failure). So for muscle this could mean a few things from the brain all the way to the effected muscle (ex: Not enough Na to produce and action potential in the CNS motor cortex, insuficient mineral concentrations at synapse with peripheral nerves, insufficient concentrations at synapse at motor unit, insufficient nerve impulses to create an actual contration/meet threshold for AP…the list goes on).

So the way this would differ from volitional fatigue could be summed up by a friendly rat named Mickey. I take mickey and put him in a wheel and he runs and run and runs. Eventually he becomes exhausted and has to stop running (either jumps off the wheel or just plops down and spins along with the wheel) this is volitional fatigue.

Now, I take Micky off of the wheel and attatch surface electrodes (i’d rather not harm our hypothetical mouse with invasive electrodes…) and run enough current through them in order to cause a contraction. The muscle will contract and contract and contract becuase all of the ingredients for contraction are still there, but eventually the muscle will be unable to form another contraction (due to physiological factors) and that would be when the rat has reached technical fatigue.

It’s just the way I was taught, but maybe i have the nomenclature screwed up. [/quote]
This is lifting not engineering.

Technical failure simply means you can no longer perform the lift with good form.

ie. One is so fatigued they start using body-english to complete their bicep curls.

[/quote]

Well in that case, CSEP as well as ACSM both use the term “volitional fatigue”.

22

Failure might allways be a grey subject. In some exercises the sticky point is early and we cannot argue that we failed doing a rep we tried to do. In some exercises like the seated leg curl we allmost do that 1 more rep and we can add some more if we are not really strict because there is no early sticking point.
Also after some early relatively easy reps we do a hard one, a really hard one, a really really hard one and we might choose not to try and fail on the next one because we want to save our CNS or we do not want our brain to get used to failure or we had a tough week or avoid injury in some exercises. We obviously need to reach failure some times to be able to evaluate where we are in this process at any moment.
Just my 2 cents.