What’s the Best Repetition Range for Exercises

Posted by Nutribody

June 15, 2010

What is the best repetition range for your workouts? This is a question that is often discussed and has many rumours surrounding it. In most cases, a distinction is made between three different repetition ranges: low, medium and high. Below, you’ll find a brief description of each of these rep ranges along with their strengths and weaknesses.

Low Repetitions

This range is anything from 1 to 6 or 7 repetitions. Training in a low rep range means using a high weight-load. In this repetition range, the weights will feel heavy, even during the first rep of the first set.

Low repetitions with lots of weight are ideal for building strength. The emphasis here is on “strength” not “volume”, in other words, for pure body-building, a higher rep-range is the better choice.

Training with low repetitions will take less time than training in a higher rep range. This can be a positive or a negative aspect: While it saves time for your overall workout, this also means that your muscles are under stress for a shorter period of time. This, in turn, can mean less growth stimulation.

Another downside of a low repetition range is that with the kinds of huge weight-loads you’ll be using, there’s a higher chance of injury. Obviously, you have to be especially careful when lugging around these kinds of weights (especially when doing free-weights exercises).

Medium Rep Range

This rep range is between 8 and 12 repetitions. This is the bodybuilding repetition range, as 8-12 is ideal for stimulating hypertrophy (muscle growth). The gains in terms of increased strength are smaller than with lower repetitions and higher weights, but in terms of what your mirror tells you, this rep range gets you the best results.

The benefits and drawbacks here are pretty obvious: If you’re after bigger muscles, this is the rep range to go for. If functional strength and better muscle-performance are more important to you, then lower repetitions are better suited.

High Repetition Range

This means anything above 12 repetitions. Doing more than 12 reps of an exercise will usually take longer than 30 seconds and that’s about where the threshold lies for what can be called “strength training”. If your muscles are under continual (or almost continual) stress for longer than that, then, biologically speaking, you’re already getting into “cardio training” territory.

This is not to say that high repetitions are useless, though. If you are using low weights and doing more repetitions, your body simply has to recruit different resources to keep you going.

One thing that needs to be addressed is a common misconception: High rep ranges do not build “lean muscles” rather than “bulky muscles”, as is often claimed. High rep ranges simply promote less muscle growth, but you can’t really influence the shape of your muscles with a particular way of exercising.

In conclusion, for most people, low to medium repetition ranges are ideal. In any case, mixing things up and changing rep ranges from time to time is probably one of the best things you can do for yourself.