Short answer: no, you don’t need to train to failure to elicit hypertrophy.
Long answer:
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/complete-strength-training-guide/ (someone shared this a couple weeks ago - great read).
Here’s a small excerpt from the intermediate section:
“1. Ramp up your training intensity for the main lifts a bit (doing most of your training with 75-85% of your max, with very little work below 70% and very little above 90% unless peaking for a meet) to continue improving your technique and skill lifting heavy weights.
2. Include more variation for your main lifts. This will allow you to push your lifts hard, while avoiding monotony and overuse injuries from sticking with the exact same movements all the time. Paused squat, front squat, close grip bench, bench from pins, opposite stance deadlifts, deficit deadlifts, etc.
3. Keep volume for your main lifts low to moderate, and stay at least 1-2 reps shy of failure at all times (avoiding technical failure). You don’t need a ton of high quality, heavy work to maintain and improve neural factors, but getting the bulk of your training volume from your main lifts will generally beat you up a bit more, and limit how much total training volume you can handle per session and per week.
4. Get the bulk of your training volume from accessory lifts for all major muscle groups, with sets of 6-15 reps, training each muscle/movement 2-3 times per week for 4-6 sets (or 40-70 total reps) per session. I recommend accessory lifts over lighter sets of squat, bench, and deadlift to cut down on risk of overuse injuries, and to keep training specificity high for the main lifts (since lifting heavy stuff for low reps and lighter stuff for higher reps are different skills, you don’t want to “water down” the motor learning you’re doing your main lifts, unless you’re splitting your training into more distinct phases, as we’ll discuss later).
5. Plan for weight increases and PR attempts for the big lifts on a realistic time scale. At first, use 4 week training blocks, shooting for small PRs every 4 weeks. When you aren’t hitting PRs consistently on that time scale any more, transition to 8 week cycles, then 12. You should be able to PR every 12 weeks (during bulk phases) throughout the duration of your time doing intermediate, hypertrophy-focused training.
6. Periodization isn’t overly important for hypertrophy, but varying your training a bit simply helps keep workouts feeling fresh.
7. Split your training into bulking and cutting phases. This generally allows you to gain muscle at a faster overall rate than attempting to gain it with minimal body fat fluctuations. Aim to gain about half a pound per week until your body fat percentage reaches about 20-22% for men, and 28-30% for women, then slowly cut back down to 10-15% for men, and 20-25% for women, losing about 1% of your bodyweight per week. I’d highly recommend this article for more in-depth details.
8. Don’t tie up too much of your time in training to peak for competitions. A simple 3-4 week peak will be enough for most people to hit very solid lifts on the platform since you’re training the main lifts fairly heavy throughout this period.”
