Reps in Reserve

Gaining strength and hypertrophy requires a stressful stimulus that the body has to improve itself with to make sure that the next time that stimulus is applied it isn’t so damaging.
Using reps in reserve is a great way to ensure we are achieving that stimulus required without going to the point of unrecoverable damage or an injury.
It has been shown that leaving up to 2 reps in reserve is plently to achieve the disired outcome.
Things to note when dosing the rep range, or time under tension is that the more reps you have to perform to get to that 2 or less reps in reserve onboards more fatigue which will make the perceived effort higher and may give the athlete a false sense of their 2 reps in reserve, and requires longer time to recover from to apply another stimulus.
The less reps you give the more sudden the onset of fatigue and higher risk of injury.

So, as a coach we can observe technique on a free weight exercise and go till the first or second rep that the technique starts to fail, this is technical failure. On a machine we can take our clients to mechanical failure due to the safety of the machine catching the weight, which means we are able to get further than 0 reps in reserve if desired and work the muscle till it can no longer fire off any motor units. Be mindful that mechanical failure has a lot of recovery time so you may only get to stimulate that muscle once a week instead of two times a week.

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