Struggling body building

GaryRuns wrote: »

psuLemon wrote: »

I have seen a ton more evidence to the contrary of what this guy is saying. Not saying people can't get big using high rep but a lot of his justification is regarding bodybuilders, who are largely "supplemented".

Speaking from personal experience and experience of working with a wide range of people now, most see more gains when incorporating heavy weight. The benefits of adding higher weight low rep work, is that it can complement your lower weight higher rep work. If you only practice within a single rep range, you are going to leave a bunch on the table. Heck, even Layne Norton, who is a pro powerlifter and bodybuilder, discusses how he gain 4" in his legs when he got away from bodybuilding routines and intermixed powerlifting.

We should never be as narrow as to only do one style of lifting.

This summary of some scientific studies on the topic seems to indicate that high rep, low weight is just as effective as low rep, high weight, when taken to failure, for building muscle mass, particularly in beginners.

I did read another meta-analysis on the topic that also supported that contention but I can't find the ref now. In that one the authors pointed out that, in general, people are more comfortable when doing low rep, high weight workouts because they tend to be less exhausting (I would assume because there's less cardio involved) and that would mean that most people trying to build muscle with high rep, low weight may not really be going to, or close to, failure because they're becoming exhausted and thus aren't building as much muscle. So while the two approaches, when done correctly, may lead to equivalent muscle mass increases it's "harder" to do the high rep, low weight approach in the proper way in order to increase muscle mass.