Strength Training Reps vs. Muscle Mass Reps

How many reps do you perform to increase muscle mass? Which exercises must you do to get muscle definition? In many cases, I do believe that there is much to be learned in the arena of exercising and how many reps or sets to do and how to build strength as opposed to big muscles. It used to be that everyone believed that you do fewer reps to make your muscles bigger and a great number of reps to tone your muscles. Oddly enough, this is exactly opposite from the reality.

Before further discussing strength reps vs. muscle mass reps, I’d like to describe the difference between muscle mass and muscle tone. Rusty Moore gives a balloon analogy in his course Visual Impact. Like filling up a water balloon, getting that bodybuilder physique is not difficult at all to do. Getting dense, toned muscles would be like making the balloon rubber thicker which ultimately makes it denser and stronger.

Doing a smaller number of reps with heavier weights is the optimal way to gain strength. More important than either the number of sets or reps is that you must avoid training to failure. By the time your workout is over, you should not have completely exhausted your muscles. Stop one rep short of that instead. With this training method, your muscles will get more toned, lending that tight physique that you want. You only need somewhere between three to five repetitions to build up your strength. If you do between five and ten sets then you won't hit muscle failure.

Now, if you want to make your muscles bigger, then you need to do a lot of reps and then train to fatigue. By requiring your muscles to overexert themselves, they will increase in size. You may find out that your muscles may look cumbersome and not as toned even though they are bigger in size. Twelve and fifteen repetitions is the target range for increasing your muscle mass. Don't forget that you need to work your muscles until they cannot work anymore. Because of this, you probably won’t be able to, or need to, perform quite as many sets.

How long a break between sets should be and how long you should take to finish your repetitions needs to be thought about too. It's a good idea to make a brief cessation after each rep to allow your body to re-energize when training for strength. For mass reps, training to fatigue is the goal so you can perform a faster set of reps to really torch your muscles.

The time when you rest after a set follows the same principle. If you want stronger, more toned muscles then the rests can take a little longer, say two to three minutes and your muscles won't get over tired. On the other hand, you want to make sure you keep your muscles exhausted, so just rest for 45 seconds or so.

Needless to say, the best muscle building approach incorporates both muscle mass reps and strength reps. Tone your muscles with strength reps and increase muscle size with mass reps. Additionally, you can use different rep schemes for different parts of your body. I want a more toned chest, not a bigger one, so I train by doing three rep sets with a substantial amount of weight and then I make sure not to train to failure. However, I’d like to add some size to my biceps, so I’m performing 12 rep sets to failure with lighter weights.

A lot of people have not realized the difference between muscle mass reps and strength reps for a long time. Just remember that if you want your muscles to be tighter and more toned, do low reps of heavy weights, avoiding failure. Higher reps until you experience muscle failure is ideal for bigger, softer musculature.