It’s the age-old debate. Coke vs. Pepsi? Chuck Norris vs. Bruce Lee? High reps or low reps? The answer to the first two is quite simple. Coke vs. Pepsi: neither. Chuck Norris vs. Bruce Lee: Chuck Norris (after all, the boogeyman checks for Chuck Norris under his bed. You can see other stupid/funny Chuck Norris facts here). But high reps vs. low reps? Not so simple. By that, I mean, should you use a lower resistance, and do higher repetitions, or should you use a higher resistance and do lower repetitions? That’s what we’ll investigate in this article.
If Your Goal is Strength…
The answer to “what’s best” always starts with a target. What are you trying to do? If your goal is to get stronger, the next question is “what’s your starting point?” If as a starting point, you’re a complete beginner, and either never strength trained, or haven’t strength trained in at least 6 months, then the answer to your question is “it doesn’t matter.” There will be no difference whether you choose to do high repetitions or low repetitions. Any type of strength training will make you stronger than not doing strength training. Initially. As a beginner.
If, on the other hand, you’re not a beginner, then low repetitions (with heavier weight) are far superior for building strength compared to higher repetitions (with lighter weight).
Why?
Because the more advanced you get, the higher the threshold of stimulation for what it takes to make you stronger. What do I mean by that? As a beginner who’s never strength trained before, just doing strength training with a weight that’s around 40% of your maximal capacity will make you stronger. In other words, if you can lift 10 pounds for 1 repetition, doing your exercises with 4 pounds will make you stronger. Again, that’s if you’re a beginner.
As an intermediate trainee (for the sake of standardization, we’ll define “intermediate” as someone who has been strength training correctly, and progressively for at least a year, constantly trying to raise the weight or the repetitions for a year. In other words, if you’ve been training for a year, but you haven’t raised your weights after that period of time, you’re still a beginner), the threshold of what it takes to make you stronger rises to about 60-80% of your maximum.
So whereas when you were a beginner, lifting 40% of your maximum would make you stronger, as an intermediate, you need to lift 60-80% to improve your strength. Anything below that threshold will not build strength. You might maintain strength. You might build muscular endurance. But you won’t get stronger.
An advanced trainee (let’s define that as someone who has been strength training for at least 2 years) has an even higher threshold of what it takes to make him/her stronger. It’s about 80-85%. So this person needs to lift weights that are at least 80-85% of his/her maximum to get stronger. If you’re lifting 80-85%, you’re only doing 5-10 repetitions, at most. If you’re lifting 40%, as our beginner is, you’re lifting it over 20 times.
So if you’re an intermediate or advanced trainee, the answer to “what’s better: high reps or low reps”, the answer is very clearly low reps.
If you want help putting together a program that helps you get stronger, we can help with that. But you have to see if you qualify by responding to this email with the words “Make Me Stronger” in the subject line.
If Your Goal is Muscular Endurance
However, what if your goal isn’t to be as strong as humanly possible? What if your goal is instead muscular endurance?
In that case, the follow-up question becomes “are you trying to get more than 25-30 repetitions, or less?“
For example, is there a specific exercise (like pushups), where your performance is being measured? And how many can you already do? If you can do fewer than 25 repetitions of an exercise, then the most direct way to increase your endurance is to actually increase strength. That means doing low reps.
It might sound a bit funny that to increase your performance up to 25 repetitions, you have to do sets of 3-6 repetitions with a heavier weight, but it’s true. After all, who can do more repetitions with 10 pounds: the trainee who has a maximum of 20 pounds, or the trainee who has a maximum of 30 pounds?
Of course it’s the trainee with the 30-pound max, because for that person, 10 pounds only represents 33% of his maximal capacity. Whereas for the trainee with the 20-pound max, 10 pounds represents 50% of his maximal capacity.
This logic works up to the point where you can do 25 repetitions. But what if you can already do 35 or 45 or 50 repetitions of an exercise? At that point, the relationship of strength to endurance changes, and the most direct way to go even higher is to do higher repetitions and lower weight.
But I Just Want to Tone…
- You don’t want to lift as much weight as humanly possible. But you don’t exactly want to do 100 pushups either. You just want to look good in a dress, or a suit, or a tank top. In that case, what’s better: higher reps or lower reps?
The answer is (drumroll, please): both
Neither one really has an advantage over the other, and with our clients, we will actually use both high repetitions and low repetitions to get them toned.
I can hear you thinking now “but Igor, aren’t high reps for toning, and low reps for bulking?”
The answer is no. Realistically, there’s really no such thing as “bulking” or “toning.” The body can only do 4 simple things:
- Gain muscle
- Lose muscle
- Gain fat
- Lose fat
That’s it. You can’t “tone” a muscle. You can’t “bulk” a muscle. You can’t give yourself “lean, long, swimmers muscles.” You can only do 2 things to your muscles:
- Make them bigger
- Make them smaller
You can’t change their shape. Not with nutrition, and not with exercise. You can only change their size.
Both high repetitions and low repetitions can make a muscle grow (and therefore, make you “toned”), but for different reasons, that I elaborated on in my article on muscle building.
So the way we use both high repetitions and low repetitions in our clients’ training is usually by starting with 2-4 months on a high repetition program (that’s 15-20 reps), and over time, work our way down to a lower-repetition program (that’s 5-7 reps). After we’ve made our way down, we return back to the high repetition exercise scheme, and repeat the cycle (albeit, with different exercises, tempos, etc).
If you’d like to figure out specifically how to put together a program based on your body, you can see if you qualify to work with us, send an email to igor@torontofitnessonline.com with the subject line “Make Me Stronger.”
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