Thursday, June 27, 2013

The Ideal Rep Range For Muscle Building

By Russ Howe


If you're wondering how to build muscle quickly you are in the right place. Today we are going to answer one of the most asked questions in the gym: How many reps should you do when you are trying to build size and strength?

The majority of people who train are a little bit lost so if you're in a situation at the moment where you don't know what to do the first thing you should do is stop worrying. You aren't alone, that's for certain. But today you'll be well on your way to getting some results.

The reason most men get a bit lost with fitness is they're training for two different goals simultaneously. Whereas the majority of girls just want to shed fat, guys want to build while losing unwanted fat.

The first step to achieving the body you want is to learn that your body will not change by itself. You literally have to force it into change. It's only concern is keeping you alive, it really doesn't care if you'd like to look different. In order to make it more powerful you need to force it to become so.

There are two main ranges of reps which will help you to determine what type of results you will get:

* The hypertrophy zone.

* Endurance.

The fact that you are reading this article, given it's title, tells us that you are here because you want to learn how to gain muscle and therefore you should be swinging for the hypertrophy zone. You should be aiming the majority of your sets at the 8-12 range.

If you were to continue pushing you reps, say, into the 15-20 zone, you would find yourself in the muscular endurance category. This would help you to tone up and really build up the stamina of whichever muscle you were training but it wouldn't work as effectively as the hypertrophy zone if your goal is pure size.

If you'd like to give yourself a confidence boost, we urge you to take a look around the resistance section the next time you walk into your local gym. You will see people training with seemingly no structure, going through the motions and, despite putting in effort while training, not seeing any results specific to what they want to achieve.

So you now know that the rules with weights have nothing to do with the popular gym mythologies out there. You know the ones we're talking about, right? Things such as 'high reps are just for women'. High reps are for those looking to build muscular endurance, regardless of your sex.

Before we end today's class we also want to bring your attention to a second fact. This fact is the single most important aspect of your training, without it you won't get anywhere. We are talking, of course, about steady progression. Resistance training is something which your body is built to adapt to and, as we pointed out earlier, you will need to progressively challenge yourself more in order to keep forcing results from it.

The rep range we brought your attention to is a good way to do this. Many people ask us how much weight they should be using on a particular exercise and your rep range will determine this for you. For hypertrophy, find a weight which forces you to quit at around eight reps and then keep working with that weight until you get stronger. Once you can manage twelve reps at that level it's time to increase the resistance, forcing yourself back down to eight reps at a slightly heavier level and beginning the cycle again.

You will now find results far easier to come by. It might seem rather simple, given the amount of confusion in the health and fitness industry in general, but these facts are proven and backed up by decades of scientific research. Learning how to build muscle is simple, but most people never figure it out. You now have!




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