Lower reps

S4ny4

This is just a newbie question:

I want strenght and speed, with minimal muscle gain. Should I do lower reps, 5x3 (or something like that) instead of 5x5?

canadianlbs

afaik 5 reps will mostly give you strength. 8-12 is the 'hypertrophy' range i'm used to hearing about if you want to add actual mass/muscle volume. for what it's worth, two years of lifting seems to bear that out in my case. i have more muscle than i used to have, but it would be pretty hard for me to have less. i'm stronger for sure, but i'm still wearing pretty much the same clothes that i was wearing the week i walked into a gym.

speed - again afaik - is mostly a product of how fast you do the reps that you do. i squat/dl/etc fairly methodically, but my trainer sees rows as an 'explosiveness' lift, so i pull those as fast as i can without losing my form.

ime, the higher the weight the slower i get with the reps. so if speed is the thing you prefer you might need to give up some weight. whether you also miss out on strength doing that, i don't know. some of the more experienced lifters here might have the answer to that.