i’m looking for some personal experience with doing a high rep routine during a bulk. my workouts consist mostly of pyramiding weight up and dropping reps. rep range is generally 8,7,6,5 so nothing crazy complicated. i have heard good tings about switching up to high reps.
i know when you exceed 15 reps you are working aerobically(depending on subject) so therefor your muscles are forced to create more veins and capillaries for oxygen, atp cp tranfer etc. 4 weeks of this and you body has become more efficient and should be be able to handle more stress, longer periods of work etc. my question is has anyone tried this? can you see hypertrophy from this? or is this wrong info? any help would be awesome.
I go through cycles of low, moderate, and high reps. Everytime I start a new rep range I think this is the best rep range and then after 12 weeks or so I change up again and think this is the best rep range. I would think a varied rep range has its benefits and it is up to you to decide how to fit into your training.
what im wondering is if anyone has any articles, or in detail proof or benefits of training in the higher rep range. everyone knows its good to change it up, what i want to know is what the benefits from a high rep routine would be
I recall some Ronnie Coleman training videos in which he trained with 15-20 reps perhaps. Not to mention the dumbbell rows done by Matt Kroc.
IMHO higher reps are great for lats, quads (widowmakers) and perhaps delts. But I usually use them on movements where the range of motion is somewhat shorter (eg. I’m tall, with never ending thigh bones, so I rarely manage to knock out too many reps with heavy loads, but this just makes 20 rep squats more challenging (taking deep breaths between reps )
Furthermore, when you lack the mind-muscle connection in a specific muscle, it can help to practice the movements with low weight and lot of reps. For example after you’ve mastered side delt raises with smaller weights you can easily go for the greater dumbbells cause you’ll feel your lateral delts working with even a form which is far from textbook.
Summing up: they can help you in some cases but relying on them exclusively sounds a dumb idea to me.
Since when is “the number of reps” the most important factor?
One poster mentioned Ronnie Coleman. Ronnie is using more weight than most humans can even hold onto when he does those “high reps”…which means THE BIGGEST ISSUE HERE ISN’T SOME NUMBER OF REPS BUT CONTROL OF THE WEIGHT USED.
I may use higher reps now than I used to…but I am lifting the whole stack of plates by the last set when I do it. It would be a waste of time to think that simply doing “12 reps” is the key to growth. IT ISN’T.
The op asked for proof…perhaps he should do like the rest of the world and TRY IT TO SEE IF IT WORKS FOR HIM.
Most here would be better off learning how to move weights that actually challenge them than worrying about rep numbers alone.
if you try this i guarantee you will PM me thanking me. Go to the gym, pick 3 or 4 movements. don’t count sets and reps and just work up to the most CHALLENGING weight you can handle for that day on all 3 or 4 movements and then leave the gym and eat. the key for this magic to happen is you stop counting sets and reps.
you set a pr in that movement by weight alone and your indicator being that you can handle and are actually performing the movement somewhat right. then you eat. vualla you have hypertrophy no calculator, graphs, or equations needed. kind of makes lifting ENJOYABLE doesn’t it?
[quote]if you try this i guarantee you will PM me thanking me. Go to the gym, pick 3 or 4 movements. don’t count sets and reps and just work up to the most CHALLENGING weight you can handle for that day on all 3 or 4 movements and then leave the gym and eat. the key for this magic to happen is you stop counting sets and reps.
you set a pr in that movement by weight alone and your indicator being that you can handle and are actually performing the movement somewhat right. then you eat. vualla you have hypertrophy no calculator, graphs, or equations needed. kind of makes lifting ENJOYABLE doesn’t it?[/quote]
lol I actually couldn’t have said it better myself. What Hazzyhazz24 said is exactly what I do. Final set is a MAX EFFORT SET … all other sets are basically just a warm-up to that one set. That one set I go all out and land somewhere between 6 and 10 full reps … then I throw in a few partial reps to finish off. Incredible for hypertrophy.
To answer the OP … yeah high reps are fine so long as the final few reps are CHALLENGING. Would I do strictly high rep work? From past experience no … as I found it gave me pretty average results and doesn’t work as well for me as what I do now. Experimentation is key here (which is how I came to my current style) … fuck what textbooks say is best. YOU won’t know whats best until you go through a little process of trial and error.
[quote]Vejne wrote:
I recall some Ronnie Coleman training videos in which he trained with 15-20 reps perhaps. Not to mention the dumbbell rows done by Matt Kroc.
IMHO higher reps are great for lats, quads (widowmakers) and perhaps delts. But I usually use them on movements where the range of motion is somewhat shorter (eg. I’m tall, with never ending thigh bones, so I rarely manage to knock out too many reps with heavy loads, but this just makes 20 rep squats more challenging (taking deep breaths between reps )
Furthermore, when you lack the mind-muscle connection in a specific muscle, it can help to practice the movements with low weight and lot of reps. For example after you’ve mastered side delt raises with smaller weights you can easily go for the greater dumbbells cause you’ll feel your lateral delts working with even a form which is far from textbook.
Summing up: they can help you in some cases but relying on them exclusively sounds a dumb idea to me.[/quote]
Similar to what PX is saying, Kroc is rowing weights that would make most suffer a fucking aortic dissection even thinking about doing. It was to increase his upper back strength (I think locking out on deads had been a problem or something), it wasn’t about just doing lots of reps for the hell of it or to “mix things up”. Yeah feel dem burnz! “High reps” with light weights will do jack shit.
I was asked last night why I was doing so many reps for rack pulls. If I was using a light weight he wouldn’t have said anything or probably even noticed. He was definitely asking the wrong question. Too many really focus on the wrong shit.
seated barbell presses with 135lbs for 6 reps, and came back to it week after week trying to get more reps until finally I got 15, then I went to 185lbs (able to get about 6 reps) and did the same thing (up to 15) in order to get to 225lbs…
… what reps were making my muscles grow?
My answer: the reps that made me grow were the extra ones I squeezed out every time I went to the gym. Do you think your body really cares if those happened to be your 7th and 8th rep, or your 12th, or your 15th?
OK mikedefran, let me confuse you even more. Think about this: varying from individual to individual, different muscle groups may respond better to high(er) reps than others. So the question isn’t even “is high rep training effective for growth?”, its “is high rep training effective for (insert muscle group) growth?”
To answer your question - yes you can see hypertrophy from high rep training. High reps is pretty much synonymous with increased TUT, and as long as the load is sufficient, and you can keep increasing it, you will grow. Is it optimal for growth? Not necessarily. But the short answer is yes, it can be a valuable tool.
thats how i always looked at it. not to knock on any bodybuilders but most successful meaning top rank bodybuilders …Ron Coleman, Johnnie Jackson, Justin Harris, Matt Kroc and even Arnold came up “powerlifting” AKA they got strong as fuck in a bunch of movements. I think Jason Ferrugia said something along the lines of “when you see matt kroc doing dumbbell rows with 225 for sets of 20 you know hes inducing hypertophy just because its fucking heavy but when you see a kid in the gym doing 20 reps with the 35 you just feel bad for him” i agree and i think getting strong on bodybuilding movement aka full squats, leg pressess, incline and decline bench, rows and even curls and extensions is really the only important factor.
Its one of the reasons DC training is so popular. Have you ever seen a guy that benched 400lbs, ate like a beast without big arms, chest, and shoulders? the only common factor ive seen in every big dude…ever. whether bodybuilder, strongman, powerlifter, whatever is that they were strong as fuck all over and ate a whole lot too. It amazes me how people disregard these two MAJOR commonalities amongst every big dude and skip to unimportant shit like reps, sets, supps, training programs, steroids, flip flops, etc… If you bench 400 your can probably rep 315 for reps in the teens i say get to 400 as quickly and as efficiently as possible before worrying about how many reps you should do.
[quote]doubleh wrote:
OK mikedefran, let me confuse you even more. Think about this: varying from individual to individual, different muscle groups may respond better to high(er) reps than others. So the question isn’t even “is high rep training effective for growth?”, its “is high rep training effective for (insert muscle group) growth?”
To answer your question - yes you can see hypertrophy from high rep training. High reps is pretty much synonymous with increased TUT, and as long as the load is sufficient, and you can keep increasing it, you will grow. Is it optimal for growth? Not necessarily. But the short answer is yes, it can be a valuable tool.[/quote]
thank you so much! maybe i should have been more specific. i will be doing 4 weeks of high reps for chest only. just so everyone knows where i was at my incline was 225 for 8 solid reps
flat was 245 for 8 solid reps. i have made some serious improvements as far as chest size and strength in the last 5 months. was benching 185 for incline and pretty much the same for flat.
i will keep track of the high reps just incase anyone else has hit a plataue and is wondering about doing a high reps program. thanks again!
[quote]Sarev0k wrote:
But then you have people like Tom Platz who swore by 20 rep squats, which just happened not to do shit for me.
[/quote]
ROLLING ON FLOOR LAUGHING COPTER!!
Platz managed to do over 20 reps with 500lbs. Think the sheer weight he was using might have something to do with it?[/quote]
Exactly. Once again, the REPS are not so much the issue as the WEIGHT used when doing them.
Doing 20 reps with a 15lbs dumbbell is NOT going to build 20" arms on anyone.[/quote]
But doesn’t it depend on whats heavy for you, rather that what is heavy in general? Personally I do a low rep set and then widowaker on the leg press and see growth from it, and I’m by no means strong.
Of course I don’t expect to get huge legs by continually doing 20 reps of my current weight, but if I keep progressing in the weight I use then surely I can keep growing? It would only be a problem if I couldnt progress the weight due to the high number of reps but so far thats not happened.
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