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This week's episode kicked off with two completely unrelated stories. I told the one about beating my 9 year old, Caleb, in a race after he was a little too confident about his new football speed. Jaime followed that up with the saga of trying to rescue leftover food from a hotel banquet hall (a woman named Miss Terry was involved, and she was not on Jaime's side), which somehow turned into a real conversation about the difference between rule-followers and rule-benders. Fun tangent, no science required.

The actual content of the episode split into two research topics. I brought a new study on velocity loss and squats, looking at how close to failure you actually need to train to see gains in muscle, strength, and power. Jaime brought two studies on diet breaks and refeed days, looking at whether stepping out of a calorie deficit here and there helps or hurts fat loss. Both segments ended up answering questions people search for constantly, so here's the real answer to each.

Diet Breaks vs. Continuous Dieting: Which One Actually Works Better?

They basically tie on fat loss, but the diet break wins everywhere else, and the case for it is better than most people think.

What the Study Found

A 2026 study in Nutrients put diet breaks up against a straight continuous deficit over 12 weeks. Thirty women with obesity were split into two groups.

One group stayed in a continuous 25% calorie deficit the entire time. The other followed the same 25% deficit most days, but took a refeed day at maintenance calories every seventh day, plus two full seven day diet breaks at maintenance calories built into the 12 weeks. That second group only actually dieted about 71% of the days in the study, compared to 100% for the continuous group.

Fat loss came out almost identical between the two groups. The continuous group lost about 9.3 kg of fat, the diet break group lost about 9.2 kg. Same result, in the same 12 weeks, with the diet break group spending roughly a third of that time eating at maintenance instead of in a deficit.

On top of that, the diet break group actually came out ahead on two other measures. They gained more lean mass over the 12 weeks, about 2.4 kg compared to 1.2 kg in the continuous group, close to double. They also stuck to their targets better, with about 91% adherence compared to 88% in the continuous group.

What This Actually Means

Nobody assumes taking a break from a diet will get you leaner faster, and it doesn't. What it does is get you to the same result without asking you to grind through a deficit for 12 straight weeks.

You get real food back in your week on a regular basis, you hold onto more muscle while you're at it, and you're more likely to actually stick with the plan. Who wouldn't take that trade.

Why I Think This Works

My take on why this works comes down to two things.

First, adherence is the whole game with dieting. A diet only works if you can actually stay on it, and knowing a refeed or a break is coming makes it a lot easier to push through the harder stretches instead of burning out and quitting halfway.

Second, there's a metabolic piece to this too. The longer you sit in a deficit without a break, the more your body tends to adapt to it, meaning your metabolism slows down more than your weight loss alone would predict. Going back to maintenance periodically is thought to blunt some of that adaptation, which is part of why other research on diet breaks and refeeds, like the Campbell et al. 2020 study on resistance trained lifters, has found better preservation of resting metabolic rate in the groups that took planned breaks. It's a reasonable piece of the puzzle here too, even though this particular study didn't measure it directly.

Worth noting this was a small study of 30 women, so I wouldn't call it the final word, but it lines up with what a lot of other research on diet breaks has found.

Do You Need to Train Close to Failure to Build Muscle?

Not really, though the study is more nuanced than a flat "no."

What the Study Found

A 2026 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research tested this directly using a smith machine squat. Researchers split 51 moderately trained men into four groups. All of them squatted twice a week for eight weeks at the same relative intensity, using loads between 55 and 70% of their one rep max.

That load detail matters. This wasn't light weight for high reps, it was a real, moderate load across all four groups. The only thing that changed was how close to failure each set went, measured by velocity loss. One group stopped every set after just one rep, barely touching failure. The other three groups pushed further, up to a group training at 40% velocity loss, which put them very close to failure on every set.

Every group built muscle, including the group doing one rep per set. And when you look at the actual numbers, the groups training closer to failure did build somewhat more muscle than the groups that didn't. That difference just didn't reach statistical significance, which is a different thing than saying there was no difference at all.

A Limitation Worth Knowing

This study only ran for eight weeks. A gap that's small over two months could easily turn into something meaningful over six months or a year. Short study windows are one of the real limitations of this kind of research, and they tend to understate the case for whichever approach needs more time to show its full effect.

Strength told a different story here too. All the groups got stronger, but the group training at a moderate distance from failure actually came out ahead on maximal strength gains, not the group pushing hardest.

My Take on Applying This

Here's my opinion on what this means in practice, and I want to be clear that this part is my take, not something the study proves outright.

I don't think this gives you a free pass to stop caring about proximity to failure for hypertrophy. Training closer to failure is still, in my opinion, the more efficient way to build muscle, because most people don't have the time or the recovery capacity to rack up enough total volume to make up for consistently stopping sets short. Doing fewer sets, each pushed a bit closer to failure, gets you there faster than doing a lot more sets at low effort. Not everyone has five hours a day to spend in the gym chasing the same result a harder set could get them to in less time.

So for most of your sets, if your main goal is building muscle, I'd aim for an RPE of about 8. That's close enough to failure to get a strong growth signal, without needing to grind to full failure and rack up unnecessary fatigue on every single set.

That said, this is a "most of the time" guideline, not a rule you need to follow on every single set. It's completely fine to push a lift, all the way to failure sometimes. You just don't need to make that your default for every set of every session to build muscle effectively.

If your main goal is strength, I'd aim more for an RPE of 7 to 8 and prioritize accumulating quality reps and sets over chasing failure, since strength responds more to practicing the lift under real load than to how close each set gets to failure. Heavier loads still matter here though. They force more of your muscle fibers to work together at once, which is exactly the kind of intra and intermuscular coordination that builds strength.

Putting It Together

Practically, that means treating your main compound lifts, like the squat, deadlift, and bench press, as strength work. Load them heavy, keep the reps lower, and you don't need to push them to failure. Save your accessory and isolation exercises for the sets that push closer to failure, since those tend to be safer and more efficient places to chase that extra hypertrophy stimulus.

That doesn't mean your compound lifts won't build muscle too. Training them at something like a 7 RPE will still build plenty of muscle, on top of everything they're doing for your strength.

If you want a program that already puts all of this together, grab my free 6-week strength training program. It's built around the same concepts covered here, so you're not stuck guessing how to structure your sets, reps, or intensity.