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Taking a look at reps
by priest943, Moderator at www.IronLife.com
What is the most important part of designing a weight training program? How many sets? How much weight? Nope, its how many reps. That’s right how many repetitions is the most important. Reps determine how you are going to train a muscle weather it is for size, strength, or endurance.
You must first decide what it is your trying to do. Beginners starting out should follow a higher rep range to get familiar with the movements learning proper form first and learn how to stabilize the weights being used before moving on to strength or mass training.
Low reps in the 1-5 range will produce the best gains in strength. Reps in the 6-10 range will produce the best gains in muscle mass. While 11 and higher will be best for muscular endurance. This is just a generalization of repetitions people will find they have to fine tune the number of reps slightly lower or higher for their personal body type.
I personally feel large muscle groups such as the back and legs can be trained with higher rep ranges. For strength 5-7 and for mass gains 8-15 being large muscle groups it is harder to fully pump them with low reps. When trying to increase muscle size the pump is very important it will stretch the fascia the rubber like coating encapsulating the muscles and allow for further growth.
Once you have decided on what you’re training for strength, size, or endurance, you must now pay attention to proper form. Just simply lifting a weight wont cut it. You must lift a weight to complete a repetition. There is no such thing as swing reps, you need to move the weight from point a-b using the muscles.
Walk into any gym and it won’t take long to find someone swinging and leaning back to complete a barbell curl. Chances are you could go back to the same gym a year later and see the same guy still swinging away with about the same sized biceps he had last year.
Don’t be this guy always control the weight. Swinging large weights might impress the Chick in spandex or the 14 year old benching a pair of 25s on a bar but it will not induce maximum muscle growth.
A 40 pound dumbbell curled in a slow controlled manner will stimulate more muscle growth than a heaved 60 pounder. Lets also not forget that bouncing and swinging weights puts undue stress on the muscles and tendons and other connective tissues.
Forced reps are another useful tool to take a set past failure. Lets use the bench press as an example and lets use 8 reps for a base when you finish the 8th rep another would be impossible to complete so, a training partner would then lend assistance to complete 1-3 more. This will allow you to work more muscle fibers in a given set by pushing beyond normal failure.
Now if you don’t have a training partner there are other ways to take a set past failure. Partial reps can be used without a training partner lets say you can complete 10 reps on the barbell curl an 11th would be impossible but, after lowering the bar on the 10th rep you could curl it another 6inches up and lower again maybe even 3-4 times this will also allow you to work more muscle fibers in a given set.
Speed of reps is also very important. Most people take between 3-5 seconds to complete a full rep. Again most people feel they need to change up there program or (exercises) to keep from going stale not so, you can simply change rep speed to offer the muscles something new. Think of how hard a set would be if you switched rep speed to 4seconds up and 8 down or for those who have real balls 10sec up and 20 down. I bet you would be lucky to get 3-4 reps with a weight you normally do 10 with.
Yet again we could employ super fast reps explosive lifting 1-2sec on the positive and 2 on the negative. Using the 10 rep example you could do maybe 12 in this fashion with the same weight
In the old days people would think that the negative part of an exercise was the most important or that it caused the most muscle damage not so. Recent studies through MRI scans show the positive to be just as important as the negative. That being the case we could then switch are reps up further by using 10sec on the positive and 2-3 on the negative.
Changing rep speed offers so much in continued growth. You could keep the same program all year and just keep changing the reps to keep from going stale. Weight trainers will put a lot of effort into designing their exercise programs but how many pay attention to rep speed? This is just a reminder to consider the reps it will help you to reach your goals.
* Article by priest943, Moderator at www.IronLife.com
* Back to Issue #6 Frontpage
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