One Set to Failure Revisited, Plus, Balancing Push and Pull?

Sets and Failure
What is failure?  How many sets are enough?  Too many?  Too few?  I'd like to be able to work all my muscles hard every day.  Bodybuilders blush at this.  "Rest" days are gospel.  The notion that muscles rebuild themselves during "rest" is pretty much uncontested.  I wonder if it should be.  I'm more interested in balanced daily effort than muscle building.  In fact, I wouldn't mind not getting any bigger.  Stronger, yes.  Bigger?  Who cares?  It looks silly anyway.  Ever seen a bodybuilder in regular clothes?

But then again I *am* interested in strength building and some muscle building probably has to come along with that.  At any rate, I'm interested in progress, writ large.

Ok, what's the point here?  The point is that there is a certain attraction to doing the minimum amount of work to get the maximum result.  Even though he was pretty wacky, I love Mike Mentzer's ideas.  To do minimum work and get maximum results you have to increase effort.  If you can do 35 push-ups before having to stop, you can do sets of 10 all day.  Is that a good thing to do?  At some point you need to do more and then revisit the 35, right?  35 needs to become 50.  In which case it might be better to do 35 and call it a day. And rest, I suppose (unless you feel fine the next day).  At any rate, I've realized that if I'm going to use the term "failure" I'd probably better figure out what it means.

I'm playing with one set to failure.  To do an exercise all day you have to stop the set when it starts to get difficult... when you slow down, shake, feel like you might not be able to do it again.  Form degrades.  But complete failure?  That would mean that you can't do another rep.  But "can't" is a word open to interpretation.  If you're coming from a "Convict Conditioning" perspective then you follow Coach Wade's advice and "keep a little in the tank in case you have to defend yourself."  Fortunately I don't need to ponder this in the literal, but the idea is valuable.  If you push yourself to failure truly in push-ups and then sit down on the floor for some reason, you might need to rely on some other means to get yourself back up than pushing.  I'm not sure that's a great idea.

For pull-ups I'm flirting with 20.  17+ usually.  For dips, I'm flirting with 30.  For assisted pistol squats it's around 14 to 15.

My one set to "failure" experiments have been useful because they've helped me to realize the importance of effort.  Eight sets of 10 pull-ups requires a lot of effort.  So does one set of 18.  The former is good and if you can do it then you can probably do it again the next day.  The latter is also good and makes you sore and tired and you probably can't do it the next day.

Balancing Push and Pull (and Squat)
Push and pull body-weight exercises, and the muscles that underlie these activities, are somewhat different animals.  Pull-ups are just so much more difficult than just about any exercise on the push side, save for maybe hand-stand push-ups.  But I'll never know about that as I don't consider them an option for me.  I would choose dips as the closest push exercise to pull-ups.  Dips are difficult.  But after a relatively short time they are not so difficult and you can flirt with 28-30 max good form dips, where pull-ups and the like seem to hover around 12-18 no matter what you do.  They're just hard.  And when your pull-up set starts to degrade, you're pretty much done for the day, whereas with push-ups you can push yourself to failure more than once and come back again and do it tomorrow, or even later today.  So it doesn't make sense to do too much pulling.  That said, I realized that keeping your "big four" to pull-ups, push-ups, dips and squats seems to short-change the pulling side a bit as you only have one exercise, granted a difficult one, whereas with pushing you have a difficult one with full body-weight (dips) and an easier one with a lever (push-ups).  I think I want to balance the pulling side with this and add a row.  The row is pretty much the pulling counterpart to the push-up.  That gives me a big five:  Dips, Squats, Pull-ups, Push-Ups, Rows.  I'm curious to see if maxing rows negatively or positively affects pull-ups.  (NOTE:  It's a subject for another post, but legs need a new friend too, no?  I think the big five becomes a big six with a one-leg movement and a two-leg movement.)