Most people, when asked for their goals when it comes to weight training, will say that they workout for aesthetics. Unless your goals are to go into strength based sports like powerlifting or strongman, you very likely diet and exercise to build muscle mass and look good. A detail that is missed by many, though, is that different rep ranges for your sets lead to different results, such as increased strength as opposed to hypertrophy.
Now, it’s important to understand what hypertrophy is, and that there are different types of muscle fibers. There are two different, distinctive types of muscular growth, with one being sarcoplasmic growth, and the other being myofibrillar growth.
When you begin a workout regimen, you need to base your program around training to emphasize one more than the other in accordance to your goals going in, and understand that how hard you train will determine how they grow. For pure strength gain, you would want to maximize myofibrillar hypertrophy, which means working in lower rep ranges, which we won’t focus too much on in this article.
What we’ll be focusing on is maximizing sacroplasmic hypertrophy, which is done by working in the higher rep ranges of roughly eight to twelve.
Rep Ranges and Time Under Tension
When working for hypertrophy and aesthetic results, you’ll also want to work with time under tension during your sets of eight to twelve reps. The generally accepted cadence is two seconds on the lifting action, known as the concentric movement, and then two seconds on the lowering movement, which is known as the eccentric movement.
By doing this, your set will end up right in the neighborhood of the thirty to sixty second range for a given set, which is considered optimum range of time, because when the set lasts longer than just a few seconds, the body is then made to rely on the glycolytic energy system, which creates lactic acid, giving you that pump that makes you look huge during your workout session.
Now, some people may think of the pump as a bad thing, but the soreness associated with it is vital to new muscle tissue being produced by the body, since when lactic acid pools in large amounts, it induces a surge within your anabolic hormone levels within your body, which also includes testosterone; one of the biggest muscle building hormones you have.
And to put it simply, the old “no pain, no gain” saying isn’t incorrect. The increased time under tension leads to more microtears in your muscle, which is directly linked to muscle growth and repairing itself bigger, essentially.
Finally, while training within the moderate rep range, you have to make sure that your workouts never become so easy that eight to twelve reps is so easy that you can rep out another five or six reps at the end of each set. When looking to put on a large amount of muscle over the shortest period of time you need to also include progressive overloading into your training, which is quite simply just increasing the weight once the rep range you’re working in gets too easy with the weight that you’re lifting.
