The Push-to-Failure Fallacy

And why it fails outside the gym

Read in Substack

There’s this concept in strength training called push-to-failure.

You load the muscle until it can no longer perform the movement with proper form. The logic is simple: mechanical stress creates micro-tears, recovery repairs them, and the muscle adapts to carry heavier loads each time.

In the gym, this works when done correctly, because it is contained and it is a simple, biological response. But even then, it’s not without it’s risks: overtraining, nervous system fatigue, higher chance of injury. Which is precisely why I don’t agree with it being translated into personal or professional development concepts outside of the gym.

You’ve heard the “fail fast, fail often" saying? This is a similar concept, and in my opinion, when this becomes a life philosophy something has already gone really wrong.

A muscle is a simple system; You apply a load, you observe the response, you allow recovery and then it adapt for future loads. The feedback is immediate, the “failure” is local and recovery is expected.

The muscle doesn’t internalise it’s past failures or attach meaning to the pain. Failure here is more mechanical, no existential. And even within this controlled system, experienced lifters don’t push to failure constantly. They use it selectively, strategically, and with awareness.

You can probably already see where I am going with this.

Life is not contained and unbounded. Unlike the muscle, it is a far more complex adaptive system. It don’t respond linearly to stress; too little pressure leads to stagnation, yes, but too much pressure causes collapse, not growth.

Failure in life is rarely isolated. It spills over into self confidence, into nervous systems, into relationships, all of which impacting reputation and esteem. You can’t reset any of this after a day of rest. We carry each failure into memory and attach meaning to it, forming identity around it

Which means, repeated “push-to-fail” cycles won’t definitively produce resilience. In fact, they are more likely to produce injury—psychological, emotional, relational.

Practical wisdom and readiness

Aristotle distinguished between different kinds of knowledge in his theory of epistemology.

There is episteme, theoretical or scientific knowledge.
There is techne, skills and craft or technical knowledge.
And then there is phronesis, practical wisdom.

Phronesis, or prudence (the bridge between moral virtue and action) cannot be learned by force. It’s developed through experience and discernment.

Push-to-failure assumes readiness, that you’re one rep away from growth. But in life, many people aren’t untrained muscles waiting to be stressed. They’re complex beings still building foundations.

Without practical wisdom, stress doesn’t teach, it just overwhelms.

Taleb’s antifragility concept is where ideas like push-to-failure are birth from, but what they misunderstand is that, antifragile systems don’t just grow from any stress. They grow from bounded, intelligent stress with recovery built in.

In fact, Taleb himself distinguishes between volatility that sharpens systems and ones that destroys them. Applying “fail fast” indiscriminately ignores this distinction and grossly mistakes damage for adaptation.

All this to say that not all stress strengthens, some stress simply breaks.

Meaning-making in place of injury

Here’s the line that I keep returning to:

Muscles grow by being torn and repaired.
Humans grow by meaning-making, not repeated injury.

Growth in life doesn’t come from how much you can endure but from how well you integrate all experiences. Learning through reflection and calibration without needing collapse as proof.

This doesn’t mean avoiding difficulty entirely, but really acknowledging and respecting the complexity. Because real life doesn’t reward brute force.
It rewards discernment built from knowing when to push, when to pause, and when to stop masquerading damage as discipline.

Push-to-failure is a tool and should not be conflated as a worldview. In the gym, it has a clear place. but in life, it needs restraint.

It is not a muscle. Life doesn’t regenerate on a rest day.