I want to give my comrades advice and help the swoletariat grow. This isn't just about muscle gain, but cardiovascular health, diet, nutrition, and whatever weird shit your body may be doing.
If I don't know it maybe I can help you figure it out.
I want to give my comrades advice and help the swoletariat grow. This isn't just about muscle gain, but cardiovascular health, diet, nutrition, and whatever weird shit your body may be doing.
If I don't know it maybe I can help you figure it out.
Reps vs added weight as progressive overload?
Got to the point where my weights aren't heavy enough and I don't have enough money to buy more. Should I just add more reps to each set? Is that gonna keep building size?
Its real hard to find reliable information on that subject, much of it boils down to bro-science. Like, on one hand I have a friend who is a power-lifter and isn't close to looking jacked, he looks average. However, the results I've seen for muscle size usually comes from added weight. I suspect there's some goldilocks range between the two, but I would love to see some research on that.
If its between adding more reps and nothing, definitely add more reps. But if you can add more weight, that would be better. Sorry I don't have anything more conclusive on this.
Yh the goldilocks range seems to be 3-4 sets of 8-10 reps. I've heard that once you can easily do 8 reps of something it's time to make the exercise harder. Been following that rule and it's worked well.
Surely it builds size with added reps too though cos at the end of the day you're still causing the whole damage/repair cycle to take place?
Yes, but definitely not at the same pace. The body can be stingy about adding muscle, because it knows simply having muscle is calorically expensive. Ultra-high endurance athletes are typically quite skinny. You'll definitely benefit from increased reps, but not necessarily as muscle size.
As someone that does powerlifting myself, the biggest driver of muscle/strength growth is volume. The rep range during training makes one perform better relatively in that range so for example doing doubles and triples makes one better at doing doubles and triples and doing high rep sets makes one better at those sets and not as good at singles, doubles triples etc.
Uh some actual research on this instead of just "trust me bro" Schönfeld meta-study that basically says "higher training vol. = higher muscle growth (to a point) might add others later during the day.
Yo thank you so much for the research link, I love reading this kinda stuff!