When you see the biggest guy in the gym pull up to the weight room, you might assume he\u2019ll be reaching for the heaviest weights. You\u2019ve gotta pump massive iron to build massive muscles, right? Well, not really.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s a lot of lore around this routine or that routine, and a lot of it comes from former Soviet bloc country training regimens where most people were taking steroids,\u201d says Stuart Phillips, PhD<\/a>, a kinesiology professor and research director at McMaster University. Some of it also comes from a misunderstood study from 1946: While rehabilitating soldiers from World War II, army physician Thomas DeLorme argued<\/a> that heavy resistance training was better at building muscle than, say, repetitive activities like walking or biking, and for decades, many took that to mean only heavy weights were helpful, says Dr. Phillips.<\/p>\n Yet the more scientists look into it, the more they\u2019re finding that heavy lifting isn\u2019t a prerequisite for growing muscle, or as the experts call it, \u201chypertrophy.\u201d Recently, Dr. Phillips led a network meta-analysis<\/a> published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that looked at 192 randomized, controlled studies with a total sample size of more than 5,000 people to find the \u201coptimal prescription for hypertrophy.\u201d What his team discovered shocked many. \u201cYou can lift lighter weights, and as long as you lift them with a high degree of effort, they’re as good as heavier weights in making you bigger,\u201d he says. Using a home gym machine<\/a> or even just your own body weight, like with push-ups or lunges, works. The key is simply to get pretty close to what personal trainers call \u201cfailure,\u201d or the point where you feel like you can\u2019t keep going any longer. That could take up to 25 to 30 reps, and you\u2019ll still build muscle, says Dr. Phillips.<\/p>\n To understand the physiology at play, it helps to know the difference between our two types of muscle fibers: fast twitch, or type II, produces force but fatigues quickly (think sprinting), while slow twitch, or type I, gives us endurance but aren\u2019t super powerful (think marathon running). When you want to get bigger, it\u2019s the fast twitch you mostly want to target since those have between 30 to 50 percent more growth potential than their slow counterparts, says Bradley Schoenfeld, PhD<\/a>, graduate director of the Human Performance and Fitness program at Lehman College, who wrote the book Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy.<\/a><\/p>\n While it used to be thought that only heavy loads\u2014weights you can only lift about three to five times\u2014could activate the fast-twitch fibers, we now know that\u2019s not the case, Dr. Schoenfeld says. \u201cProvided that you train with a lot of effort where the last reps are difficult to complete, you will recruit the majority of the fast-twitch muscle fibers,\u201d he says. \u201cMuscle growth tends to be the same.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, if your goals are more about strength than size, you\u2019ll want to keep reaching for the largest dumbbells<\/a> and kettlebells<\/a>. Our bodies get better at what we practice, so if you want to be strong enough to lift heavy things, you have to practice lifting heavy things, Dr. Phillips says.<\/p>\n But if getting big is primarily what you\u2019re after, rather than worrying about how much weight you\u2019re hauling up and down, the key is to focus on doing multiple sets. \u201cThere’s a certain amount of work you need to do that signals to your muscle to induce growth, to get bigger,\u201d Dr. Phillips says. Exactly how much volume you need to put in, however, is an ongoing debate. The BJSM analysis found you need to complete at least two sets to near fatigue to grow muscle and suggested that training twice a week is more effective than just once. But doing more and more won\u2019t make you bigger and bigger because, at a certain point, the benefits plateau.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you see the biggest guy in the gym pull up to the weight room, you might assume…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[64,63,538,137,15207,20116,1672,537],"class_list":{"0":"post-442392","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fitness","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-strength-training","13":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","14":"tag-web","15":"tag-wellness"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}