The general consensus is 1-5 for strength, 8-12 for hypertrophy, and anything above for indurance. But why?
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The number of reps are for how many you *can* do with the weight. If you can do a lot of reps, the weight is probably too light to encourage muscle growth.
imagine you have different ways of playing with building blocks. You can build a tall tower, make a medium-sized house, or create a long line of blocks. Lifting weights is a bit like that!
When we talk about different rep ranges, we’re talking about how many times you lift the weight up and down in one set. For strength, it’s like building a really tall tower. You focus on lifting a heavy weight for just a few times, maybe 1 to 5 reps. This helps make your muscles strong and powerful.
Now, for hypertrophy, it’s like building a medium-sized house. You want your muscles to grow bigger and look more defined. So you lift a slightly lighter weight, but you do it more times, like around 8 to 12 reps. This helps your muscles grow in size.
Lastly, for endurance, it’s like creating a long line of blocks. You want your muscles to keep going for a long time without getting tired. So you use a lighter weight and lift it many, many times, like more than 12 reps. This helps your muscles get used to doing things for a long time without getting exhausted.
So, different rep ranges give your muscles different goals: strength for lifting heavy things, hypertrophy for making them bigger, and endurance for keeping them going for a long time.
basically, your muscles will grow to do what they are trained to do. If you train them to do a lot of reps, then they will be able to do a lot of reps. It will be a low weight because you are doing a lot of reps, so they will be trained to lift a low weight a lot of times.
If you train them to lift heavy weights (that you can only lift a few times) then they will be able to lift heavy weights (i.e. “strength”). As for the “hypertrophy” part, I think someone just made that up – however lifting fairly heavy weights 8-12 times will indeed result in hypertrophy. But so will the ‘strength’ approach.
Hypertrophy seems associated with stretching the muscle under load, so if you have higher reps, you have more instances of that stretching, even if the load is lower.
For strength, you want the contracting part of the movement to be the focus, and you want the load to be as high as possible to train the muscle for that purpose. Higher loads means fewer reps.
Building strength is primarily neural recruitment. Yes there is some muscle building that will happen but the focus is on recruiting more muscle fibers to do the job vs building more muscle. That’s why you can see “skinny” people deadlifting 300+ lbs. They have become very good at recruiting more existing muscle to move the load. Versus hypertrophy, which is about moving less weight but for more reps. This does more damage to the muscles causing more to be built upon repair. Your muscles only have so much endurance so in order to accommodate the higher volume you need more muscle. This is why you see “swole” guys who cannot deadlift 300+ lbs. Your body is an adaptation and efficiency machine, it meets the needs you demand of it. It will only build the minimum amount of muscle necessary to do the job. If the job is lifting heavy only a few times you’ll build a little muscle to meet the goal and then become very efficient in recruiting that muscle. High reps for endurance is similar in that you don’t need a lot of muscle to move light weights you just need to build the energy reserves. Hypertrophy is the middle ground, you need to be strong enough to move the mediumheavy weight but still need the energy reserves, more muscle is the answer to that problem
Building strength is primarily neural recruitment. Yes there is some muscle building that will happen but the focus is on recruiting more muscle fibers to do the job vs building more muscle. That’s why you can see “skinny” people deadlifting 300+ lbs. They have become very good at recruiting more existing muscle to move the load. Versus hypertrophy, which is about moving less weight but for more reps. This does more damage to the muscles causing more to be built upon repair. Your muscles only have so much endurance so in order to accommodate the higher volume you need more muscle. This is why you see “swole” guys who cannot deadlift 300+ lbs. Your body is an adaptation and efficiency machine, it meets the needs you demand of it. It will only build the minimum amount of muscle necessary to do the job. If the job is lifting heavy only a few times you’ll build a little muscle to meet the goal and then become very efficient in recruiting that muscle. High reps for endurance is similar in that you don’t need a lot of muscle to move light weights you just need to build the energy reserves. Hypertrophy is the middle ground, you need to be strong enough to move the mediumheavy weight but still need the energy reserves, more muscle is the answer to that problem
Building strength is primarily neural recruitment. Yes there is some muscle building that will happen but the focus is on recruiting more muscle fibers to do the job vs building more muscle. That’s why you can see “skinny” people deadlifting 300+ lbs. They have become very good at recruiting more existing muscle to move the load. Versus hypertrophy, which is about moving less weight but for more reps. This does more damage to the muscles causing more to be built upon repair. Your muscles only have so much endurance so in order to accommodate the higher volume you need more muscle. This is why you see “swole” guys who cannot deadlift 300+ lbs. Your body is an adaptation and efficiency machine, it meets the needs you demand of it. It will only build the minimum amount of muscle necessary to do the job. If the job is lifting heavy only a few times you’ll build a little muscle to meet the goal and then become very efficient in recruiting that muscle. High reps for endurance is similar in that you don’t need a lot of muscle to move light weights you just need to build the energy reserves. Hypertrophy is the middle ground, you need to be strong enough to move the mediumheavy weight but still need the energy reserves, more muscle is the answer to that problem
The body responds to the stimulation it receives. So, if you want to get good at lifting very heavy things a few times. You lift progressively heavier things a few times.
If you want to get good at lifting lighter things a large number of times, then you need to lift lighter things many times.
Lifting heavy is about making the body strong. Lifting light is about getting sugar and oxygen to the muscle and getting lactic acid and CO2 out of the muscle as quickly as possible.
The adaptations are different. Lifting heavy is more about strengthening connective tissue and training the nervous system to trigger muscles to pull harder.
Lifting light causes the body to grow more blood vessels in the muscle and store more sugar in the muscles.
This is mostly just an old bro science myth, although there is at least 1 instance where this holds true. For hypertrophy, or gaining muscle size, studies have shown no significant difference when using rep ranges from 5 to 30 reps. This isn’t to say that anything less than 5 or more than 30 doesn’t work, it just hasn’t been tested.
Now the 1 notable exception comes from a more strength focused goal. The difference between strength and hypertrophy(or endurance) is strength is specific. This means we need to define what we mean when we say strength. Think of it kind of like concrete. Most people would say concrete is strong but if you ask an engineer they would say concrete has high compressive strength and low tensile strength. Since most of the time when people talk about strength in regards to weight lifting they are referencing a 1 rep max we can just assume that is our test. When it comes to performing a 1 rep max absolute force production only plays part of the role, skill is also a major component. So to get stronger, increasing 1rm, we need to practice the skill of lifting heavy singles.
TLDR: For hypertrophy and endurance pretty much anything works. For strength with respect to a 1rm you need to practice the skill and so using lower rep ranges is how you do that.
Lifting weights, and more generally any kind of exercise, stresses your body. Your body responds to this stress by trying to get better at dealing with that particular sort of stress.
Lifting heavy weights with low reps makes you adapt to lift heavy weights with low reps better. Some of this will be muscular hypertrophy, since more muscle cross-sectional area = more force produced, but a significant portion of it will be improvements in motor neurone function. You’ll also just get better at the skill of lifting heavy weights, which is the primary way weightlifters (and sports scientists) measure strength.
Lifting light weights for high reps makes you adapt to lift light weight for high reps better. IIRC this is mostly to do with how much glycogen (fuel) your muscles can store, and how efficiently they can use it and move it around. But the light weights mean that the muscle fibres aren’t producing enough force to break themselves down, so there’s not much adaptation in size or neurone function. The body pretty much goes ‘cool, looks like these are working pretty well for whatever it is we’re doing 👍’
Lifting moderately heavy weights for 8-15 reps is pretty similar to lifting heavy weights for 1-5 reps, but the lighter weights means that it’s less taxing on the whole body and you can do more total volume. Volume of reps done above a certain percentage of your 1RM seems to be the biggest driver of muscle growth, and sets of 8-15 seems to be the sweet spot to get the most useful volume in.
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