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lighter weights you can do for higher reps, but each rep comes in less like a scream and more like a whisper. If I put your 100 rep max on the leg press, have you do leg presses, you're like, "But I did 100 reps!" But each rep was so little tension. You can add up a ton of reps, and each time your body, each rep that you do, your body's like, "What? Huh? Supposed to screw a muscle from this?" It doesn't seem like I'm even getting out of bed for this.
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Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength. Today's video topic is to ask the question of, "Are you training heavy enough for your best muscle growth, or is it too heavy?" Uh oh, uh oh. Let's troubleshoot some muscle growth and figure out how to get you your best gains because maybe you're not getting your best possible gains. Maybe you have some gains on the table left worth getting. And there is a chance that training too heavy or not heavy enough is what's costing you some of that potential gain. But after this video, you'll know enough to fix that problem and to move on in troubleshooting the other parts of your repertoire: how you train, how you eat, how you sleep, etc., that can maybe do a lot more for increasing your muscle growth than whether or not you're training too light or too heavy or something in between.
Three things to talk about today: One is the fundamental science of how many reps and how heavy to go. Two is a list of best recommendations, something you can take with you to do your best with. And three is a list of common mistakes that I've made myself, a bunch, a lot of other people make. And if you're making them, you can note them, understand why they're mistakes, know how to fix them, and then not have to make them anymore and get way more jacked.
So, the fundamental science. I think I have five points here. First, the fundamental stimulus of muscle growth seems to be muscle tension, force transduced through and by the muscle fibers. There's a good chance that metabolites play a role, uh, lactic acid, for example, might be able to actually cause some growth just with its presence as it's generated by the muscle fiber. Cell swelling might have a role to play. The fact that you get a pump might actually cause some hypertrophy. And there's some cellular level data to support that, so that's definitely a thing. But tension is king. It's responsible for the vast majority of growth.
But let's zoom in and ask, what kind of tension? And this is point number two. Tension needs time of application to be effective. One rep of very high tension, like your one rep max curl, will absolutely stimulate some muscle growth, but it's a teeny, teeny amount. If you do two reps, that's way more growth. And three and four and five, etc., is more and more and more growth as you do more and more reps. So yes, tension is king. But think of tension as how much water comes out of the faucet, and muscle growth is filling up a glass of water. If you just put the faucet on the highest throughput for a split second, a splash will occur, and you'll get a little bit of water down there. It's not going to fill up the cup. That's like doing one rep really hard and being like, "All got my attention, let's go." That doesn't quite work so well. And if you have a cup, or if you have a glass, and you turn on the faucet kind of halfway through, after a minute or so, a minute of doing a set of 20 reps or something, the cup can get quite full. That's how that works.
Now, because that's how it works, because tension over multiple reps is what drives hypertrophy, next we have to ask the question of, "Was how many reps?" And there are two fun realities to contend with here. Reality number one is that heavier weights cannot be lifted for high reps by definition. Your five rep max, you can't lift it more than five reps. So the weight's really heavy, but the reps have to be really low in any given working set that you use. So you get lots of growth per set, uh, per rep. Every rep is so fucking heavy, it grows you a ton, but there's not so many reps. So what this tells us is, and this is directly confirmed in the research literature, sets of two, sets of three reps at a time, anything less than about five reps per set, the total amount of tension stimulus gathered with pretty big reps, but so few of them, is suboptimal. You probably can't get your best growth in any one given set by doing fewer than about five reps. That's just a thing.
Next, the opposite end of that spectrum. Lighter weights you can do for higher reps, which is awesome because you get more opportunities to stimulate tension, more reps of stimulating the tension mechanisms of muscle growth. But each rep comes in less like a scream, more like a whisper. So all of a sudden, yeah, you got 25 reps of curls. Every single one of those reps wasn't really that muscle growth promoting. Now, all added together, they do a really, really good job. So more reps per set with lighter weights, but little growth per rep.
And the amount of tension that you have to have in order to get growth has kind of an exponential falloff or hyperbolic falloff, which means that at some point, what science seems to suggest is considerably north of 30 reps per set. Let's say you put your 50 rep max on the cable curl and you do 50 reps straight and then fail at rep number 49 or 50. When the load, when the weight, when the tension is that low, you end up having this kind of threshold phenomenon where it might not even be enough per rep to stimulate much of any growth outside of if you're a really new beginner or something like that.
So a seasoned trained person, if I put your 100 rep max on the leg press, have you do leg presses, it might cause you very little growth. You're like, "But I did 100 reps!" But each rep was so little tension that instead of every single rep your body feeling that rep, feeling that tension, go, "Alright, let's add, add to the muscle growth pile." If the reps are light enough, if the load is light enough, you can add up a ton of reps, and each time your body, each rep that you do, your body's like, "What? Huh? Supposed to scow muscle from this?" But it doesn't seem like they're, I even getting out of bed for this.
Case in point, who gets the most reps of anyone? Marathon runners. I mean, Jesus Christ. If you figure how much physical work they're doing with various joint angles over the course of 26.2 miles, I mean, oh my God, fuck your 10x10 squat workout. These motherfuckers are doing 100 by a thousand or some shit like that, convert it over. But they're not getting jacked because each step is such a small percent of the one rep max. The tension stimulus basically never turns on to begin with.
So what do we take from this? It's that sets of more than 30 reps probably don't grow as much muscle because doing lots of reps doesn't make up for that exponentially dropped off per rep stimulus. And sets of fewer than 30 reps, even if it's like say 27 reps versus seven reps, the seven rep set's going to grow you a ton. Why? Plenty of reps. Seven's a ton, and each rep grows a ton of muscle. If your 30 rep max is on the bar, or your 27 rep max, each rep isn't that much tension, but it's enough to give some kind of a whisper of growth. 27 whispers later, the message is received loud and clear.
Which takes us to point number five. Hard sets, sets coming pretty close to failure. We'll talk about that in a later video, and we've done plenty of videos about it all already. Hard sets of roughly between five reps per set and 30 reps per set, and everything in between, grow the most muscle. And they grow such an amount of muscle that in the research studies and regular folks, we can't even reliably tell these two apart. To put it another way, if I gave you a graph from a training study or a summary of training studies of high load, low rep versus low load, high rep, two bar graphs, and I didn't label them, I didn't say, "This is the five rep condition, this is the 30 rep condition," I just took those labels away, you wouldn't reliably be able to pick out which one it was. That's how similar they are.
So to put this very, very clearly, anything between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set, on average, that's a big thing. We're going to talk about a little bit, grows roughly the same amount of maximum muscle that you can grow in any one given set. Which part of the range is better for a given person matters based on individualization, and it also is a thing of variation because if you do lots of sets of 20, your body at first responds really well to them. Then after a while, they're not as challenging anymore, and they're stale, and they're old, so they don't grow you as well. Just going back to sets of 10, which you used to do months ago, will reinvigorate new growth. So variation plays a role, individualization plays a role. And to be completely frank, sets of less than five and sets of more than 30 reps still work to add muscle, but no less so.
If you see someone doing sets of 40, they had better have a compelling reason as to why that works well for them. If you see someone trying to do sets of one, and you're like, "Powerlifting?" "Nope, just trying to get jacked." You're like, "Four reps away from a five rep set. Why?" It's not immediately apparent that that's your best possible go-to. Speaking of best possible go-tos, next up.
So that's the basic science. Let's do our best recommendations. I can think of six. First, for beginners, stick mostly to sets of 5 to 10 repetitions, getting close to failure, close enough to challenge your ability to use good technique. This is because beginners have a huge priority to learn a really good technique, and sets of five to 10 are already well within that five to 30 rep category. So we're good. Beginners don't need a lot of variation because they're new to the shit anyway, and sets of five to 10 reps give us this really awesome ability to do enough reps per set to learn the movement. Because if you like, one rep at a time, there's not enough reps to really learn a lot of stuff. Reps like drillers make killers. You got to drill the thing to get good at it. But at the same time, if we were having people do sets of 15 as beginners, the fatigue would accumulate so much within every given set, the technical breakdown would start to occur. You would have your squat start out as a good squat, but by rep number 12, it's a real shitty squat, and then you're practicing shitty squats. Beginners training between roughly five and 10 reps per set, most of the time, with most movements, builds tons of muscle, tons of strength too, tons of movement competency, reduces the probability of injury, and it gives them a crapload of awesome learning, so they get really, really good at those techniques. And eventually, they're no longer beginners.
If you're an intermediate, training three to seven years, roughly pretty dedicated, you should probably stick to something like five to 20 reps. You don't need that 20 to 30. It might be a little too late for you to get a lot, a lot out of it. Mostly very strong people get more out of those higher rep ranges than, uh, people folks that are not so strong yet. But within that five to 20, see what's giving you the best stimulus and lowest fatigue in that range. Maybe sets of eight for squats really fucking work, where a sets of 18 for that pull downs to really work. So anything in between, and it's going to be per muscle. Your triceps might like heavier weights, your biceps might like lighter weights. And it's going to be per exercises. On machine rows, sets of 15 are awesome. On barbell rows, sets of 10 are better, based on how you perceive that stimulus, know pump, tension, soreness, etc., versus fatigue. How do your joints feel? How much out of breath are you? Etc., etc.
Advanced folks should be training or trying a mix of sets of 5 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30, their whole range. Now, if you're a beginner and especially an intermediate, can you use the whole range? Yeah, fuck yeah. These are just best practices. You can totally do sets of 25 and grow super great. Like an intermediate, it might not be your first choice, but it's definitely super valid. For advanced, it's the whole board. The whole board is your playing field. And as an advanced person, and really for most people, you want to choose the rep range you're doing at any one time based on the stimulus to fatigue ratio proxies that you can derive from it. Which of the rep ranges of 5 to 10, 10 to 20, or 20 to 30 in barbell bicep curls gives you the best pumps, the best soreness, the best perception of tension, the best burn, etc., etc., etc., while keeping your joints the safest? There's going to be a different answer every single time.
If you're squatting for quad size, you're probably doing sets of 5 to 10, maybe sets of 10 to 15. If you do sets of 25 to 30 in squats, which I have tried to do, I did squat 225 for a set of 30 one time when I was younger, and, uh, I just realized that it would really hit my lungs a lot, and it didn't hit my legs as much. They were just kind of tired. So for any given muscle group, exercise, or training phase, fat loss versus muscle gain, for example, you're going to pick your rep ranges based on the stimulus to fatigue ratio proxies. What is actually seemingly getting you the best pumps, the best soreness, the best tension, etc., and you pick those and you lean into them more. That being said, variation for its own sake is okay, and you can have a tie. So don't beat your brain up with thinking, "Okay, for me, squats, sets of five to 10 work really well. 10 to 15, they also work really well. Damn it, which one's the right answer?" You don't have to pick. It can be both. You can do five to 10. You can do for a few months, works great. You do sets of 10 to 15 for a few months, it also works great. No wrong answers. You can use either variation just for its own sake, as long as you can confidently say the variant I'm trying now is pretty damn good, seemingly for muscle growth, then you're good to go.
Last point I'll say is in situations which you're very fatigued. Let's say you have to catch a workout, but you had a stressful night, a very little sleep last night, you're still going to make that workout, and then sleep after, or in the last half of a really harsh diet to lose fat. You're at a higher level of fatigue. Heavier weights have a higher probability of injuring you than than lighter weights, period. And so in that case, doing some lighter weights, maybe sets of more 15 to 30, less 5 to 15, are better in those circumstances, precisely because you don't want to risk that, uh, acute injury probability. So just something to keep in mind.
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All right, common mistakes. I can think of eight. Mistake number one is super easy: training with one to four rep sets often. You may think like you're just making up mistakes to generate content. God, I wish that were true. I literally know bodybuilders who are one, two, three weeks out of their show, at their leanest and driest and most fatigued, doing doubles on incline barbell press. Why, you may ask? The answer is ego. Just because they're adult, steroid-filled men, and they just like to lift heavy shit. There is no logic or reasoning that goes into that. It is actually a terrible decision because it can get you really, really hurt. But a lot of people will train with sets of one to four reps often and delude themselves into thinking this is a serious approach to hypertrophy training. It is not.
Another one, of course, is training with 30+ rep sets often. You say, "Okay, Mike, yeah, you're really making this one up. Bullshit. Bikini girls, we get a pair of pink dumbbells or nothing at all." Pink dumbbells weigh a pound each, and I've seen them go around the gym doing lunges for what seems like sets of 60 to 70 or something like that, and they're not close to failure at all, remotely. They just kind of just bop-bop, never close to failure, never challenging the muscle, and the load is so low that they might be getting almost no growth at all. Good news: they can't really get hurt that way, and it's easy as fuck. And all best part, you get to feel like you're doing something and really pat yourself on the back. But it turns out that getting jacked requires you to lift heavy. And the bar for what heavy is is not that high. Even your 30 rep max is heavy enough. Some people can't be driven to lift that heavy, and they also can't be driven to get their best muscle growth, which is a big problem.
Problem: If you're going to do higher reps, sets of 20 to 30, research has confirmed one really important thing. A lot of regular people have trouble pushing close to failure and thus getting their best per set growth in high reps because high reps are produced two kinds of things, maybe three. One, cardiovascular limitations. You're breathing so heavy, you can't even keep going. Two, is physical pain. The pain of acidosis in your muscles is terrible. Set of 25, fuck that. The last 10 reps are like hell. And the third one, kind of a mix of the two, is just existential dread. I don't want to call it boredom, but just kind of like, if you got a set of, you know, 28 reps to do, you're like, "Fucking Christ, I'm here forever. This is terrible." And what it tends to happen with folks that feel that pain, feel that cardio burn, and and feel that existential dread is they don't quite push these sets hard. They get them done, but they don't get close to failure because that hurts even more. That's a problem because then you're violating the idea that you need to get close to failure in training for your best results, which is probably a very, very good idea. And yeah, you're technically doing sets of 25, but you're no longer pushing it like you're supposed to be. High rep training works best when you really, really try. So make sure you push hard enough on sets of 20 to 30 reps to actually do some fucking damage instead of just kind of getting through them and being like, "Alright, good enough. I'm not going to push because it really starts to hurt." It's supposed to hurt.
Number four, big one that still comes up. Some people think that if they don't train heavy on a diet when they're losing fat, and they don't have a constant day-to-day, week-to-week connection with their raw strength, sets of five to 10 type of strength, that they're just going to lose a ton of muscle and lose a ton of strength. And that's just not true. So a lot of people on a fat loss diet, they'll say, they'll have leg press, they'll have hack squat, they'll have all this great stuff. And then they're like, "Got to do high bar squats first." "Okay, sweet." "Um, sets of 10, sets of 12." "Like, man, I'm actually doing sets of five." And you're like, "Why? Why put yourself under that much acc risk of injury? Very fatigued. What are you getting out of it?" And they'll say, "Well, I mean, I think muscles are kind of fuller when you go heavier." And I got to be honest, there's a high probability that's all just bro nonsense again, weaved into by the ego that convinces you that heavy is ideal and everything else is just you're being a pussy.
Number five, common mistake is thinking that there is something magical to sets of five to 10 reps. This is again ego. This has been coming up a little bit more in the social media fitness world of people saying like, "Dude, low reps are everything, man. Low reps are king. Five to 10, man. None of that high rep shit works." But, but the studies just say that's not true. And tons of the best bodybuilders in the world use high rep sets all the time. They just never got the memo. Sets of five to 10 reps are, if you like lifting heavy, the easiest because you don't have to get out of breath and and get really tired, and there's not a lot of pain. It's just like the bar stops at some point. And it also gives you the ability to go heavy in the gym, which, you know, blows up some skirts, makes you feel good about yourself. But you don't have to pretend that that's some kind of superior way of training. It's a perfectly fine way of training, maybe not for all contexts, but in most. But if you go around telling people, "Yeah, that's a 20 to 30, don't do anything," this is just a good way to get embarrassed for being categorically incorrect based on every available analysis of any kind of evidence that we have.
Number six is a big one. This is a more nuanced one. A lot of people just kind of want the simplified version. They just want, "Just hashtag, just trust the science," and they just do the shit. And some of these people assume that anything between five and 30 reps, no matter the conditions, grows an equal amount of muscle. How do they figure this out? Well, the research studies show that that's true, but the research studies don't show individual by individual. They go on average between these 18 people and these 17 people. 18 of these guys trained with sets of 25, these 17 people trained with sets of five. They got the average growth was basically almost exactly the same. But if you zoom in, not everyone responded the best to every single rep range. Just five to 30 is not the end of the conversation for someone who wants to know as much as possible about this and really get their maximum growth. These folks also characteristically ignore the stimulus proxies and the fatigue proxies in various parts of the range. For example, if a movement done for sets of eight hurts your joints and doesn't really tire out the muscle, bad problem. Maybe sets of eight are not ideal. And if you do sets of 16, and all of a sudden you're getting crazy psychotic pumps and sore and all that other stuff, but your joints feel great, yeah, on paper, five to 30 on average is good for everyone, but you're not the average, you're an individual. So for you, if you notice that certain ranges for certain exercises or muscle groups just tend to give you more stimulus and less fatigue than others, don't just pink that hole away and say, "Well, you know what, five to 30 is good enough for general basic stuff." It totally is for average populations. It absolutely is. For individuals, you got to play around in each range and find out what works best for you.
Number seven, this is another really big one. Number seven, common mistake is assuming that all of your muscle groups have the same rep range optima at the same time. People will be like, "Am I fast twitch or slow twitch?" First of all, it's a spectrum, so I can't give you an answer to that. And second of all, every muscle in your body may be subtly or not so subtly different. So, for example, in my forearm training, sets of 20 to 30 might be the best fucking thing that ever happened to me. In my chest training, sets of five to 10 might be the best thing that's happened to me. So if someone asks me a question of, "Do you prefer high reps or low reps?" I actually have to go, "Okay, which muscle? Which exercise?" Because there's differences there. And what, what was I just doing? What was my phase of training? Because if I have just been doing lots of sets of five to 10, sets of, you know, 17 to 22 might be that fucking thing that really hits me. So trying to just say, "Okay, uh, I prefer sets of five to 10, period," is a cool thing for an intermediate to say. It may very well be true for them. But an advanced lifter knows that you got to find out what that is for every muscle, every exercise, every so on and so forth. And it seems like a lot to know, but your intuition built around it over years, you're going to know what super, super well by the time you're advanced. So if someone's like, "Hack squats, sets of eight?" You're like, "Sets of 10 to 15 for me, bro." Like, "Well, why not set a 20?" And you're like, "I can tell you how that's going to work, and it's not going to work to my advantage." And they'll go, "But you trained heavy earlier on, bent row." Like, "Yes, that was a different exercise and a different muscle group. Very, very big difference."
And lastly, assuming number eight. Assuming that you will respond to rep ranges like your favorite influencer. Some fucking juiced-up IFBB Pro bodybuilder could be doing sets of 25 on machine rows, and you're like, "Dude, that's the shit. Let's go try it." And there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that. But if you try it and it works super well, amazing. Rock on. If you try it and it doesn't work super well, it doesn't seem to pump, it just kind of makes you tired, not a whole lot happening. Don't be like, "What the fuck's going on?" Because why would you assume that something very specific that worked for someone else was quite different than you would work automatically for you? Not even two juiced-up IFBB Pros compared to each other can agree on the kind of rep ranges that they like in that one back machine at the corner of the gym. How do you think just reading the shit off the internet they like? That's it. That's a 20. That's what he's doing. That's what's going to work for me. And you would think this is like antic, almost. But you get people being like, "Yeah, man, worked for Dorian. It's going to work for you." Like, "But Dorian's a very different kind of person than everybody else." "Fucking Ronnie did it. It's fucking going to work." Like, "Is it really though? Maybe it just worked for Ronnie. Maybe it didn't even work that great for Ronnie. It would have been even bigger." That's a whole other thing. But copying fitness influencers and doing their exact rep ranges for exact muscles and thinking this is the way it's going to be, not a good idea. Trying it and seeing if something you respond to, fucking rock on.
All right folks, go out there, stop making common mistakes, and just #d o better. You're just like not anyway. Sorry, I almost went back to 2020 by accident. See you guys next time.
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