What's Better for Muscle Growth? High Weights, Low Reps, or Low Weights, High Reps?

What's better for muscle growth, low weight, high rep, or high weight, low rep, let's talk about it.

We know that you can build muscle with both light and heavy weights. But if you're looking to optimize your muscle growth and kind of get the best bang for your buck, it probably makes sense to lift more in the moderate to high weight range, because that's gonna allow you to get more effective reps in your session. And when I say effective reps, that just means the amount of reps that you're doing that are actually going to lead to that muscle growth. And those typically occur around three to five reps from fear from failure.

And so failure is just, you know, you're literally failing, you can't do any more. So the last three to five reps before you fail, that is where the the most muscle growth occurs. So if you are doing super, super high reps, or even just really low reps, it's going to be hard to get enough effective reps. Like I mentioned, we know that you can build muscle with heavy weights and low weights. And you can also build muscle, pretty much within any rep range.

So we know from the research that the five to 30 rep range, you can build muscle to the same degree, whether you're doing five reps, or whether you're doing 30 reps. But if we're talking about kind of optimizing our muscle growth potential, and getting the best bang for our buck, and also thinking about how we're going to recover from session to session, it probably makes sense to stick pretty much in between that. So if we're doing all of our sets in the five rep range, that's going to mean that we need to have you know, heavy enough weights to be able to get those effective reps that I talked about, right.

So if you're only doing five reps for every exercise, the weight is going to have to be pretty high. The issue with that is that it's going to put a lot of stress on your joints and your nervous system. So if you're doing all of your training in the low rep range, that's going to you know, hinder recovery a little bit from session to session, not saying that you shouldn't do any training in the five or below rep range, but you probably don't want to do everything in that rep range. And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, if we have that 30 rep range, if you're doing 30 reps for set, you're going to have to have a little bit lighter weight. And that's gonna get more into the endurance side of things.

So if your main goal is to build muscle, you don't necessarily want your cardiovascular system to be the limiting factor. And if we have higher reps lower weight, if we're doing that all the time, our cardiovascular system is probably going to take over a little bit. And it's going to limit us from actually paying attention to what the goal is right, which is muscle growth.

So being between, you know, the five to 30 rep range, and you know, maybe doing some lower rate, lower reps and some higher reps, and then sticking mostly I like to stick between like the six to 12 rep range for the majority of what I'm doing, especially if my goal is hypertrophy or muscle growth, that's probably going to be your best bet, just because we know that you're probably going to be able to recover better from that and that in itself is going to lead to more muscle growth over the long term.

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