Thursday, June 20, 2013

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.

The first step to achieving the body you want is to learn that your body will not change by itself. You literally have to force it into change. It's only concern is keeping you alive, it really doesn't care if you'd like to look different. In order to make it more powerful you need to force it to become so.

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

* 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.

If you'd like to give yourself a confidence boost, we urge you to take a look around the resistance section the next time you walk into your local gym. You will see people training with seemingly no structure, going through the motions and, despite putting in effort while training, not seeing any results specific to what they want to achieve.

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.

Before we end today's class we also want to bring your attention to a second fact. This fact is the single most important aspect of your training, without it you won't get anywhere. We are talking, of course, about steady progression. Resistance training is something which your body is built to adapt to and, as we pointed out earlier, you will need to progressively challenge yourself more in order to keep forcing results from it.

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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