HEALTH: Lift Big to Grow Big

Friday, June 26, 2009

Posted by Yaqub Khan

The longer you've been lifting weights, the heavier the weights need to be in order for you to see results. On one hand, it's a stupidly obvious point—of course you use bigger weights as you become stronger. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about.

When you were a beginner, you could gain size and strength as long as the weight you used on any given exercise was at least 60 percent of the amount you could lift for a single max-effort repetition. It's a weight you could lift 15 to 20 times in a single set. By any definition, that's pretty light.

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That percentage, though, increases with experience. Most gym regulars need to use at least 80 percent of their 1-rep max to grow bigger and stronger. Now, we're talking about a weight you could probably lift about 8 times in an all-out set before there's nothing left in your tank.

Be honest: Do you really use weights heavy enough to fall into that range? If you typically perform multiple sets of 8 to 10 repetitions for each exercise, you don't. To use 80 percent of your max for 3 or 4 sets, each set would probably consist of 5 or 6 repetitions.

It becomes even harder from there. If you're beyond the intermediate stage—if you're a serious gym rat and have been lifting consistently for much of your adult life, you might need 85 to 90 percent of your 1-rep max to see genuine progress. In a normal workout with multiple sets of each exercise, we're talking about 2, 3, or 4 repetitions per set.

You can see the problem: Nobody can lift near-max weights on every exercise of every workout. You'd either burn out or hurt yourself, and it wouldn't take long.