Failure is not necessary. You can always drop the weight if need be, but it's hard on equipment. I only go to failure occasionally on bench and biceps. If you're getting DOMS you're working hard enough.
I'm a former competitive bodybuilder. I will NEVER, EVER give someone advice to squat to failure inside a squat rack. When probability of injury outweighs potential gains, you don't do it. Those of you who are serious, and train to failure, you need a spotter on each side of the bar. When I switched up my routine to HIT, I ALWAYS had two spotters when I did my set of 20. I didn't say you can't go to failure, for example, bench pressing in a power rack. You can (hopefully), slide out from under the bar if it's stuck on the safety. For squats, no way I'd even try. Getting stuck with the bar resting on the safety in squat position is begging for an injury.
Exactly! And most of the gym rats I know overtrain. Why? They train to failure every single workout... Once I learned how to 1. Eat correctly 2. Sleep enough (8-9hrs/night) 3. Recover completely from the previous workout Then I could fine tune with good accuracy my gym routines, and weights used.
I only went parallel when I did squats, and I set the safety bars just below the parallel point of the movement. It came in quite handy a few times when I overestimated my ability to do an additional rep. As for ATG, I can only imagine the bars would need to be set at around, or very slightly lower than, ATG so that you can maneuver your way out from under the bar if you find yourself at the bottom but can't get up. However, I do admit that for ATG, it seems somewhat riskier than for parallel, and I'm really not the guy to ask. The "spot" portion would be where the bar doesn't fully have its way with you at failure. As I noted earlier, I stopped doing squats about 7 years ago, in my mid 40s. I figured if there was one exercise that could do me serious harm if I overestimated myself and wasn't properly focused even momentarily, it was the barbell squat. And so for me, "better safe than sorry" was saying goodbye to barbell squats, because I like to go all out but didn't feel that squats were a good fit for that as I got older. As an aside, the pistol squats that I can't seem to shut up about are ATG, and I have gone to full failure on the last rep of the last set, where all I had to do was descend back to the bottom of the movement and release the dumbbells. Not much drama there, but as hard an upper leg movement as any I've ever done.
I can do 5x5 with squats to near failure and not be able to walk the next day. This talk of failure seems more hypothetical than practice. Just lift! If you're sore the next day you accomplished the goal. If you're too sore to lift on day 4 you're overtraining. It's a fine line. Conversely, the skinny guy in the gym doing 20lb DB curls at 20 reps is going to stay skinny and weak. It doesn't require a lot of talk. You will know your limitations and how hard you need to push yourself. I like to get in 2x sessions when possible, so I pair bench (am) and squats (pm) as they're complimentary and don't involve the same groups.
These pistol squats aren't for me. You're expending a ton of effort under balance and the movement is too laid back. IMO, these balance movements are here to sell crossfit training and it doubles the time doing squats. I'll bet it makes you great at crossing a slackline, but I don't really see the point.
Warrior Diet anyone? Mr Ori Hofmekler knows what he is talking about. We have an evolution in computers, transportation, media, but certainly degradation in health, fitness and nutrition vs 5-10k years ago.
There you go with the balancing act again. As for the movement being too laid back, the same guidelines are followed as for regular ATG squats: butt to heel, heel on the ground, knees not beyond toes. Also, you may recall that I don't do them as you may have seen it done on Youtube. I don't hold the dumbbells out front, but rather at the sides, since holding them out front makes the shoulders the bottleneck rather than the legs, and perhaps alters the posture in the way that you find troubling. I understand you can't give them a go because of your ankle, but I wish you were able to try them in order to make a proper hands-on comparison for yourself. And as I have said before, it is as hard a leg movement as any I have ever done when properly weighted. Despite our disagreement, I guess that's good enough for me. Regarding crossfit training, I don't know anything about it, as the only exercise I ever did in my adulthood was weights and cardio. And since June, bodyweight+added weight and no cardio. To each his own, eh?