LOW VOLUME TRAINING HISTORY PART VIII – Trevor Smith & Beyond Failure Training
Something to remember before you read the rest of this blog is that Beyond Failure Training was designed with a very specific person and problem in mind.
Trevor Smith was enormous. He was huge—6'3 and over 400 pounds—and he was still getting bigger. He was monstrously strong. There is video evidence of him doing 675-pound incline presses on the Smith machine and 200-pound dumbbell presses for consistent, high double digits in the teens. So, to get bigger and to create stimulus, he had to come up with a crazy method of training.
Keep that in mind with stuff like this. It was for a specific individual with a specific problem, which means it might not be for you—but it’s still interesting.
What Beyond Failure Training believed is that a set doesn’t really begin until you reach failure. Ideally, you would hit failure and then have a training partner assist you with six to eight beyond-failure reps. Then you would drop the weight by 30 to 40 percent and repeat. Then again. Each set would have six failure points within one single set.
So that’s:
Six failure points
Six drops
Six times someone is pushing you past failure
You would only do one to two sets per exercise and never more than two exercises per body part. And even that might be a lot for this style of training.
Some of these sets could go for 30, 40, or even 50+ reps. The method recommends no more than six continuous weeks of this style before deloading with at least four weeks of standard low-intensity bodybuilding training.
This style also assumes you have one, if not two, training partners with you every session. Otherwise, it’s virtually impossible to do. You also need to choose exercises that allow for quick plate changes—otherwise the pace completely falls apart.
What’s interesting is that while Trevor Smith created the method, the most famous person to use it is probably Jay Cutler, who won the Mr. Olympia title four times. He used this style of training during several phases of his career, said he enjoyed it, and found success with it. But again, Jay Cutler was an enormous individual who was also extremely strong.
