For years it was believed that you needed to lift heavy weights for muscle and strength, but light weights for endurance and fat loss. There’s an element of truth in that, but like all things fitness there’s a million shades of grey in there too. In this article we’re going to look at weights, sets and reps, discussing what the science tells us about different rep ranges, loads and volumes of resistance training.
As always on the AdMac Fitness we’ll link to studies that tell us what the science shows, giving you the proof that here we share science, not opinion.
Last week we discussed weight training for fat loss, but today we’re going to look in more depth at the nuances of weight training and how you can adjust your lifting to suit your different goals.
Weight Training - The Physiology
At the most basic level, weight training works by breaking muscle tissue down through excess loading. This breakdown of the tissue forces a physiological and hormonal adaption, making the body build more contractile fibres. This makes the muscle stronger and able to cope with more load in future.
To help you visualise what happens, the diagram below shows the physiology of muscle tissue. What weight training does is increase the quantity, size and density of the myofibrils. These are the contractile units that determine the strength of a muscle and its ability to handle load.
It would be wrong to assume that all weight training does is to increase the size and density of the myofibrils. You can adapt weight training methodologies to bring about a different response in the muscle tissue, so all weight training isn’t the same.
What we know from the science is that weight training affects the body differently when we use different weights, sets and rest periods.
Adjusting Weights - What Happens
When the body lifts different levels of load, it creates a change in the outcome for the muscle. It used to be thought that heavier weight increases muscle mass more effectively than lighter weight, but it turns out that that isn’t strictly true.
Whilst heavy weight can be effective for muscle building, light weights have been shows to effectively build muscle too. In fact, some studies show that light weights can be more effective at building muscle. This is because of the volume of training - they typically do more training as the rep ranges are higher, and in lots of cases, more reps leads to more muscle tissue stress and more adaption. Although the muscle growth was higher in the study though, strength didn’t improve as much as in the higher load group.
If you want to improve strength, the loads have to increase. Study after study shows that if strength improvement is the desired outcome, then load becomes more important than volume, especially in trained populations.
In untrained populations there’s evidence that volume is more important than load, but this is possibly due to a neural response rather than a forced adaption at a physiological level. If you’re reading this as someone who has some training experience (more than 1 year), the load is more important than volume when it comes to strength improvement.
Overwhelmingly in trained populations, the evidence shows that strength adaption is forced by lifting progressively heavier weights. If we take a look at this study it shows that pushing heavier weights (up to 90% of 1 rep maximum) at a high intensity showed significantly greater strength gains that moderate or low load weight training. What’s important to note here is that the rest periods were longer in the strength group, allowing them to full recover between sets, meaning they were fresher for each high load set.
So to conclude, light to moderate weight with high repetitions leads to more muscle growth. Heaver weights with fewer reps and longer rests leads to more strength gains.
Adjusting Sets - What Happens
The volume question is important, because it brings into account levels of fatigue and expected outcomes of training. We know from the previous sections that higher volume tends to increase muscle mass, with higher loads increasing strength, but is there an optimal number of sets and reps?
The answer appears to be no, there isn’t an ‘optimal’, but typically speaking higher volumes will show greater improvements in the desired outcome. For clarity, what we mean here isn’t about the load lifted - that should always be specific to the goal, but more the number of sets and reps.
For example, if when training for strength we lift with around a 1-5 rep range, it appears that additional sets will be beneficial. So, rather than do 3 sets of 5, research shows that 5 sets of 5 would likely produce a better result because the volume is higher for the goal. The same goes with muscle building - if you would normally do 4 sets of 10, evidence suggests 5 sets of 10 would be better.
More volume at a given rep range appears to be more effective than lower volume. Whether you increase the volume during a workout (by doing extra sets in the same workout) or you increase the volume across the week (by doing additional workouts) doesn’t seem to matter, what matters is that you just do more.
What’s important though is that you recover.
Recovery from Exercise
There is a limit to the rate of muscle protein synthesis, which means the rate at which your body can physically build muscle tissue. Search shows that in older populations, additional volume is more beneficial than in younger populations, so your training history is something to bear in mind.
Your job isn’t to destroy your body in training, it’s to stimulate it and provide the best conditions in which muscle can be grown. Train hard 3-6 times per week, but recover well too. Where the research shows high volume is effective when it comes to weight training, it also tells us there’s a point at which extra training ceases to become effective. Your job is to listen to your body and when it’s telling you it needs a rest, you give it one!
Let AdMac Help You Weight Train!
As professional personal trainers, it’s our job to help you exercise safely and effectively. We also work out of our private studio in Bow, East London. We operate in a safe, socially-distanced way and assure you that our standards of hygiene and cleanliness are second to none.
If you want to let us help you lose weight, contact us on 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!