So now for today's post.
When working out with people, I often get the question on how many repetitions you should be doing per set for any given exercise. And there are many philosophies on this. Some believe that lower rep ranges with heavy weight is ideal for packing on slabs of muscle, while higher rep ranges with lower weight is ideal for muscle definition and hypertrophy. There are those who also caution against "overtraining" and, of course, there are proponents for incorporating or cycling all of these various approaches into your workouts.
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| Source: flickr.com. User: Pascal |
So what do I think? I actually DO have an opinion on this, and promise that my viewpoint on this topic won't be as non-conclusive as a bunch of my other blog posts.
I like to think of my muscle as a student in a classroom. If you, as a student, were able to get an A in a class without ever doing any of the homework or study.........would you ever do any of the homework or study? I feel the same thing applies to muscle growth.
In my opinion, if your muscle has absolutely no reason to grow, it won't. If there is no stimulus powerful enough for it to send whatever biological signals it sends throughout the body to indicate that there is a stress on them greater than they can handle, they will have no reason to want to grow / produce more muscle tissue. If you don't have your muscle tissue screaming at you and / or wondering WHAT the heck was just unleashed on them, they won't try to prepare for the next session of absolute chaos.
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| Source: farm9.staticflickr.com |
Muscle takes a lot of effort and resources for your body to build and maintain. It doesn't just store muscle from the food you eat. It's a biological process of breakdown, repair, and strengthening. In other words, it's not really a process that your body wants to go through unless it really feels it needs to. In a lot of biological systems, the path of least resistance is almost always the chosen one, and thus your body doesn't just start magically producing muscle without enough stress and stimulus.
That's why I'm an advocate of not focusing on the repetitions at all. What I mean by that is, go until failure on ever single set you ever do in the gym. Some of you are HIGHLY against this, but from the very beginning until the very end I will be an advocate of training until failure. (To review, lifting until failure means you are trying as hard as you can to lift the weight during your repetitions, but your body is making you unable to continue lifting it).
Now, the weight you choose is the non-constant variable here. I do think that the weight you choose is important, and that there IS in fact a rep range you should shoot for. But don't take that as me saying you should stop once you hit that range.
When I started bodybuilding, I would make sure that I hit at least 8-12 repetitions on every single set I did. And if I couldn't hit that with the weight I was using, I'd immediately drop-set to a weight I could keep lifting with until I was in that range of repetitions and continue until failure. If I went over that rep range, perhaps I would increase the weight until I failed within that range. If I kept having trouble hitting that range, perhaps I'd consider lowering the weight on the next set.
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| Source: blog.csharplearners.com |
And I do think that certain weights do offer different types of stimulus to your muscles. Heavier weights (relative to YOUR size and strength), where form is somewhat sacrificed (but should never be fully sacrificed) are good for overall increases in size, while semi-heavy (NOT LIGHT) weight with extreme focus on form helps with muscle separation and changes in definition (though, leanness and definition will always be more of a nutrition thing in my book).
There is also a time-under-tension and consistency of lifting discussion that could and probably should take place here, but that's for another blog post. But the next time you find yourself in the gym, wondering how many repetitions you should do in the gym, immediately yell at yourself for thinking that there's a set number for you to stop at. Aim for a rep range of 8-12 repetitions, and use a weight that makes you fail around that range. If you can keep lifting past that, keep going until failure and consider increasing your weight on the next set. If you fail before that range, consider lowering the weight a bit.
I hope that helps! Have fun using what was discussed here during your next gym session!
-Jtrain
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