An energy balance procedure is developed to incorporate the effects of earthquake duration which involves the effect of cyclic loading and the corresponding cumulative plastic deformation. Particular emphasis is given to the flexural failure of non-seismically designed columns of reinforced concrete frames. For this, conceptual strength deterioration models for columns, governed by concrete, anchorage failure and longitudinal steel fracture due to low-cycle fatigue, are proposed. It is evident that the energy-based method has good agreement with the experimental data and is able to predict the failure mode.