High Reps or Heavy Weight?

Question:
I hear a lot of confusing information about which is better between using high reps or low reps. Most people say that high reps with lower weight is better for “cutting”, whereas low reps with heavy weight is better for building muscle. Can you shed a little light on this please?
Answer:
Actually, either of these strategies is fine for building muscle, cutting fat, or both, provided you are challenging yourself with the weights being used. Muscles grow when they are forced to compensate for added work (lifting). Think about when you first started lifting weights. The growth you experienced was rapid because your muscles were not used to the new amount of work they now had to do. Basically they were shocked into growing quickly. After a while, though, they become accustomed to weight lifting and your progress begins to slow, or sometimes it stops altogether.

The human body is remarkably adaptable, so you need to change things up and challenge it in order to keep your progress moving forward. If you’ve been training heavy for quite a while, switch it up and start doing lighter weight, but higher reps. The same goes if you always train lighter with higher reps.

Your diet is going to play the biggest factor in how you look. Sets, reps and weight are secondary to building muscle or losing fat. If you do higher reps with lighter weight, “cutting up” is going to be much harder if all you eat is cheeseburgers.

In health,
Big Jim

You no longer need to keep scouring the internet to find the best deals on nutritional supplements. At www.i-supplements.com, everything you need to take your body to the next level is on one easy to use site, all at the lowest prices around.