Depends on your goal. For muscle volume build up, it is better to go for heavy resistance, but it is heavy resistance for you, which can be quite light when you just started.
Reps for building muscle strength are 3-6 per set, for volume 5-20. Either way of course to exhaustion. Which means that if you’re training for volume you’re going for the lighter weights, which makes sense as what increases with volume training is energy storage within the muscles, that is, it’s a stamina thing, each set is supposed to drain the local stores completely without increasing overall cardio and rate of energy transfer from elsewhere to the muscles, prompting growth of that storage, while the strength sets go straight for maximum resistance.
That kind of thing is especially obvious when you see at what callisthenics folks tend to do. Can’t do a pullup? Other people would switch to an easier variation than a full pullup, but they’ll say “nah I want to train that exact movement, and its full range, and all the exact muscles involved, and I wanna get strong ASAP” and proceed to do sets of only negatives (i.e. jump up to the bar, then let yourself down as slowly as you can).
Good point. I guess in my answer I have not even considered to differentiate strength vs volume. Only volume and strength vs endurance. I myself would not even try weights that give me only 3 repetitions per set, because I am not an athlete and from my experience I will have problems with tendons (also, I am not that young)
Depends on your goal. For muscle volume build up, it is better to go for heavy resistance, but it is heavy resistance for you, which can be quite light when you just started.
I know what you mean, but now I’m imagining yelling muscles becoming progressively louder 😄
These are your muscles
Volume 25 [|||| ]These are your muscles on weights
Volume 75 [|||||||||||| ]Any questions?
Does it go to 111?
It’ll go to over 9000!
Damn, 25-75/>9000 seems pretty damn weak…
Thank you for doing the correct number of |'s
I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I hadn’t
Reps for building muscle strength are 3-6 per set, for volume 5-20. Either way of course to exhaustion. Which means that if you’re training for volume you’re going for the lighter weights, which makes sense as what increases with volume training is energy storage within the muscles, that is, it’s a stamina thing, each set is supposed to drain the local stores completely without increasing overall cardio and rate of energy transfer from elsewhere to the muscles, prompting growth of that storage, while the strength sets go straight for maximum resistance.
That kind of thing is especially obvious when you see at what callisthenics folks tend to do. Can’t do a pullup? Other people would switch to an easier variation than a full pullup, but they’ll say “nah I want to train that exact movement, and its full range, and all the exact muscles involved, and I wanna get strong ASAP” and proceed to do sets of only negatives (i.e. jump up to the bar, then let yourself down as slowly as you can).
Good point. I guess in my answer I have not even considered to differentiate strength vs volume. Only volume and strength vs endurance. I myself would not even try weights that give me only 3 repetitions per set, because I am not an athlete and from my experience I will have problems with tendons (also, I am not that young)