The Best Rep Ranges for Muscle, Strength

If you’ve been going to a commercial gym regularly, you might have noticed that some guys will crank out a set of 15 reps for an exercise while another guy just does 3 reps on a different exercise. What’s up with that?

The reason you’ll see people using totally different rep ranges is that some people have different goals. Doing more reps in your weight lifting routine can serve a great purpose, and doing less reps can also be useful.

Which rep range you ultimately decide to use should be based on your goals and what you want to accomplish. Here, we’ll talk about a few points that will help you make the best decision.

Let’s take a look at what each rep range can be useful for:

• 1-3 Reps: Best suited to boosting your overall strength. The focus here is improving the maximum amount of weight possible for a single repetition. You’ll see powerlifters use these ranges frequently.
• 3-5 reps: Best for developing power, meaning that this rep range is good for the combination of both strength and speed. This is particularly useful for athletes training for sports performance. See stronglifts for more on strength training.
• 8-12 reps: This is the magic range touted by bodybuilders as being the most useful for adding lean muscle mass. Your muscles will enlarge the most in this range and feel a “pump” as you workout. Building muscle mass and looking/ feeling better is the focus of this site.
• 10-20 reps: Very useful for building mass in your legs. Your legs generally are able to handle more stress than your arms can handle.
• 20+ reps: Best for endurance. Not great for what you’re trying to accomplish if you’re like most readers of this site.

Big and Strong?

It’s not uncommon for a person to want to build both muscle mass and strength. These two qualities usually go together, but bodybuilders with massive muscles often can’t lift as much weight as a strength trainer with somewhat smaller muscles.

Using the lower rep ranges will make you stronger first, and your muscles will also grow as a side benefit. Staying in the 8-12 rep range will build larger, more massive muscles first, and you’ll get stronger as a side benefit.

You can see where I’m going with this. Bigger muscles aren’t always equal to stronger muscles. In general, your muscles will become bigger as they become stronger, but each rep range has a particular focus. Pick your rep ranges based on your goals.

Small Range Exercises: Your muscles get the most benefit from your workout when you use them through the full range of motion, but not every exercise you do will have the same range of motion.

Simple physics teaches us that moving an object through a greater distance requires more force. For example, when you squat, you move the weight a good distance throughout the movement. But what about when you do a set of wrist curls? How much does the weight move on a set of wrist curls? Probably not as much.

Since some exercises have such a small range of motion, they can benefit from higher repetitions. Exercises such as calf raises, wrist curls, shoulder shrugs, and ab crunches can all work well with a set of 15.

More for legs? Your legs will definitely tire out less quickly than your arms. Try a heavy set of bicep curls. You might feel fine after 7 reps and then totally die out by the tenth. Notice how your performance can fail very quickly with your arms. When you’re doing leg exercises, on the other hand, you might be surprised how many times you can crank out another rep after taking a few breaths.

Arnold recommends 6-9 reps for the upper body, and 12-16 reps for the legs. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Nothing is set in stone

Let me just say that none of this is set in stone. If you want to train 5 reps for your legs and it’s giving you good returns, then go ahead. If you want to try 15 reps on your arms, go ahead. The above rep schemes are just guides that most people agree work for certain goals.

But you definitely should experiment with different rep ranges. The goal of this site is to help you build muscle mass and lose fat first… strength is secondary here.

Still, even if you don’t care how much weight you’re lifting, try a good month with sets of 5 when your progress starts slowing down. Always training with the same number of repetitions can lead to staleness.

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Related posts:

1. Bodybuilding Snobs vs. Strength Training Snobs vs. Running Snobs
2. Muscle Memory – Can Muscles Actually “Remember”?
3. Muscle Growth: Playing God With Your Body, Part 2

Tags: muscle, repititions, reps, strength