The Ideal Rep Range For Muscle Building

By Russ Howe


How many reps should you do to build muscular size and strength? Today we'll give you that answer and a few others as we help you on your quest to discover how to build muscle quickly and effectively with proven, science backed methods in the gym.

First of all don't worry. If you're a little lost on your training and what you should or shouldn't be doing, one thing is for certain. You are not alone. In fact, most people are in the exact same situation, they just don't do anything about it and spend years going through the motions without seeing any results. Today, you separate yourself from that crowd.

The reason most men get a bit lost with fitness is they're training for two different goals simultaneously. Whereas the majority of girls just want to shed fat, guys want to build while losing unwanted fat.

In order to get the right kind of results from your workouts, however, you need to know how to force your muscles to do what you want them to do. It will not grow by itself and this is where so many people go wrong. They don't force progress, but we'll go into that a little bit later.

There are two main ranges of reps which will help you to determine what type of results you will get:

* Muscular growth or hypertrophy.

* Muscular endurance.

The fact that you are reading this article, given it's title, tells us that you are here because you want to learn how to gain muscle and therefore you should be swinging for the hypertrophy zone. You should be aiming the majority of your sets at the 8-12 range.

If you were to continue pushing you reps, say, into the 15-20 zone, you would find yourself in the muscular endurance category. This would help you to tone up and really build up the stamina of whichever muscle you were training but it wouldn't work as effectively as the hypertrophy zone if your goal is pure size.

The next time you visit your local gym or fitness center take a quick look around. You will notice that not many people are training with a specific goal in mind, despite the fact that if you ask them what they want to achieve they will be able to tell you straight away.

The majority of people don't learn the different training methods and as a result they don't make much progress. It's up there with common gym myths, such as women who are afraid to touch resistance machines for fear they'll get big.

None of this information will do you any good of course unless you remember the golden rule of weight training. Some people call it progression, others call it overload. Basically, you need to force change from your body as we mentioned before. If you keep on doing the same thing your body will adapt and then simply stay in the same place.

Use your rep zone to determine how much weight to lift as well as deciding when it is time to increase the resistance. How? It's actually very simple. Whereas most people don't know when the right time to increase a weight is, or most women are scared for fear of gaining muscle mass, simply remember the rules of your target rep zone. If using the hypertrophy zone use a weight which you can manage to lift eight times. Stick at that weight until you are able to get past 12 reps with good technique, then it's time to increase the weight, consistently forcing yourself to increase loads and stay within the right rep zone.

And there you have it, guys. You now know the two things which many gym users never discover. You know how to build muscle with the right amount of reps for your goal and you know when to increase the resistance. Say hello to new results.




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