Damage mechanics has shown a great potential in predicting ductile material failure and, therefore, can be used to develop reliable tools for the design of components undergoing plastic deformation. In spite of the importance of cycling loading in components design, there are few examples of application of damage mechanics to fully reversed cycling. In this paper, the damage model proposed by Bonora [Eng. Fract. Mech. 58 (1997) 11] has been reformulated in order to account for compressive loading by introducing a new internal variable associated to damage. The model has been implemented into commercial finite element codes (MSC/MARC, ABAQUS). It was used to predict single element performance under cycling loading and damage accumulation in a round notched tensile bar. Some preliminary results are also discussed