The Best Rep Range To Gain Muscle
Weight trainers know that the exercise of weight lifting consists of many repetitions to gain muscle. But how much is enough?
How many reps does is required to achieve the goals of an individual? You might ask yourself, how many reps should I do to get bigger? These are the questions that stump most weightlifters at some point when they were beginners.
If you have the same questions, or you are just innately curious, read on to find out how exercise repetitions affect the outcome of your training
Strength
The basic principles of strength training exercise to gain muscle fast consist of overloading and progression. To gain muscle, you should be exposing your muscles to stress it is not used to. Progression means exercising the muscles against an increasing resistance so that the objective of overloading is met.
The American College of Sports Medicine in 1990 issued a report stating the importance of strength training in maintaining a low body fat percentage. For moderate intensity strength training, performing sets with 3-6 repetitions that target major muscle groups at least twice a week is the recommended minimum. Recommended exercises include bench press, bicep curl, leg extension, abdominal crunch and others.
Strength training is beneficial to bone development, muscle tone and elasticity, strength of the tendons and ligaments, and improved joint mobility. Improved cardiac and lung functions are other important benefits of strength training. Getting stronger in lower rep ranges will translate into strength gains in higher rep ranges.
Conditioning
Conditioning, maintenance, or cross training to gain muscle, aims to get the benefits of a mixture of exercises in order to improve over all performance. Cross training is great to fill in the gaps of your training program. Stated differently, a particular exercise targets a specific muscle group but not others and by cross training or conditioning, a wide range of muscles are stimulated.
Because conditioning implies performing multiple exercises in one session, the ideal rep range falls within about 15-20 reps per exercise. The sequence of exercises should be set up so that the following set does not depend on the muscle group of the preceding set for correct form and execution.
For athletes in the competitive phase, conditioning is important to maintain strength otherwise the effects of detraining will be felt which could be detrimental to performance. Some coaches recommend a set with 15 to 20 repetitions as ideal for conditioning exercises.
Hypertrophy – The Main Way to Gain Muscle
The goal of hypertrophy is to gain muscle and increase muscle bulk. This is achieved by maximizing efficiency and intensity. Lower rep range workouts are some of the best to gain muscle.
A good range is from 6 to 8 where an individual can correctly execute the exercise for five repetitions but at the seventh try, the muscles are already exhausted such that it becomes difficult to do one more rep.
Hypertrophy training is volume training for muscular exhaustion. The effect of cumulative exhaustion is that chemical reactions and the metabolism of protein are enhanced so that maximum muscle growth to gain muscle mass is achieved.
