Many people don’t realize that when you go and lift weights, there’s a certain strategy to be employed when it comes to how much weight you’re doing and how many reps you’re doing.
Finding a balance between the two is important, but most people either tend to do high weight with lower reps, or lower weight with high reps. Depending on which one you choose, you can have some drastically different results in terms of how your body looks.
High reps and low weight will get your muscles used to higher amounts of stress and they’ll be better adapted for endurance, which is good for things like sports. However, for building muscles, you want to go with higher weight and lower reps.
You might only be able to do five reps with a certain weight, but training that way will help you get muscles better than you would with a lower, more comfortable weight. When you lift weights, you’re microscopically tearing your muscle fibers.
Not enough to seriously injure you, but this is why you feel sore. When you eat and drink protein, your body repairs those microscopic tears stronger and larger than before to accommodate.
This is how you get stronger and how you build muscles from lifting weights in the first place. By lifting heavier weights, you’re putting more direct strain on your muscles rather than testing their endurance, causing more micro-tears, leading to larger muscles.
Lifting heavy is how bodybuilders get into the shape they do, because they solely focus on putting on pure muscle mass while also being sure to shed as much fat as possible, making their muscles pop a bit more.
There’s a serious caveat to keep in mind when it comes to heavy lifting: you need to be careful. If you do everything right, you’ll put on muscles and keep getting stronger and lifting heavier weight.
However, if you try to lift more weight than you can actually reliably lift, there are going to be some problems.It’s not uncommon to see injuries from weightlifting, but most often it comes from people trying to lift as much as humanly possible.
You should be aiming for a heavy weight that you can lift for about five reps per set cleanly. If you mess up on your form and have to jerk the weight in a weird way, you can end up causing things like muscles separating from tendons, which can take , if not years to fully recover.
