I was speaking the owner of the gym I go to and asked him for some advice on gaining size. He said to get strong you need to lift heavy weights and to get big you need to work the muscle, so far so good I thought.
When I asked him to elaborate on bodybuilding training he recommended a minimum of 15-17 reps per set and focusing on pumping the muscle and said that he didn’t focus on increasing the weight beacuse (I quote) ‘you can’t when your doing that amount of reps’
He has competed on a national level. I just thought i would share this and wondered what others thought of this advice…
Well, what do YOU think? There are clearly much better ways to train. Maybe it did work for him. But most strong people with solid physiques incorporate much lower rep, heavier weight work as well.
Other than rank beginners or just throwing 15-17 rep sets or even whole workouts into your routine occasionally to break things up, this is practically aerobics in my book.
Think for a minute, are you going to gain more size from one set with a weight you can move for that many reps or 3 sets of a weight you can move for 5 or 6?
I don’t know this guy’s story, but to get bigger you need to move consistently bigger weight on a generally ongoing basis. I don’t, however, go along with the school of thought that says you have to increase the weight with every single workout though in order to grow optimally.
There’s a ceiling somewhere in the finite future though. Nobody can bench 5000 pounds.