Heavy vs Light Weights for Muscle Growth (WHICH WORKS BETTER)

If you have ever wondered whether to use heavy vs light weight to build muscle, you’ve come to the right place. In this video, I am going to explain to you whether you need to use heavy weight or light weight in order to build muscle and when to use both in your training. You might think one is bett

so heavy weighs or lightweights which one do you think builds more muscle well you’re about to find out but not before you’re about to be tested see check out this clip of Jesse doing a dumbbell bench press on the left a you’ll see him using an 8 to 10 rep max performing his repetitions and on the right side B you’ll see he’s using a much lighter weight somewhere in the 20 to 30 rep max and all he’s doing here is again performing these repetitions I want you to analyze and tell me which one is more effective for building muscle be careful with your choice because again we’re going to grade you when this is all said and done and here on the left hand side he’s looks like he’s getting ready to reach failure and about does it okay but he’s still going over here at rep 18 there’s 19 got a little Grimace on his face over there looks kind of uncomfortable 202 how far is Jesse gonna go here it might matter for those of you that think that light might be useful here we are he’s getting at 24 will he yeah no sorry so he gets 24 to failure okay what is your answer now I know you could probably just fast forward until you get the answer but that would be cheating so what I’d rather you do is even have to pause the video leave your answer and why you feel that way and don’t go back and change it later I want to know your real answer now what is my answer well I think I have to appeal to sort of the authority here and I’m not it because apparently in my last video where we talked about repetitions and how many you should be performing there was an expert there and he left a comment and it said to build muscle you have to use at least 80% rep max so easy and they went on to say directly at me show us how much you’ll increase the muscle with only 30% rep max stop blah blah blah clown party guy I’m not a party guy I don’t know where that came from then he proceeded to say a next stop blah blah publish a study proven that with only 30% rep max you can increase the mass if not close this Channel and then he says show me a natural bodybuilder training with only with 30% of rep max and once again stop blah blah blah and party guy with the hat now in the past I’ve actually interacted with some of these guys and one time in particular we called him professor dickweed this is his cousin Professor dick wagon but I have a reason for that because if you answered lightweight don’t feel bad you actually could be right if you answered heavyweight don’t feel bad cuz you actually could be right if you answer both that’s what I answer you’re going to be right but it requires an understanding of the repetition Continuum here because when you understand this you can make any of these work and before we even have to go any further he asked for studies there’s plenty of studies and not just studies that prove that you can build muscle in any of these rep ranges but there’s actually real science being done on this every single day one of my friends Dr Brad shonfeld has done plenty and I’ll let him him explain for dick wheat dick Wagon in his own words why this is so so I had always thought that if you’re doing anything over 12 to 15 repetitions it’s basically glorified cardio and that you know it’s just muscle endurance you’re not going to gain muscle um the literature is now compellingly showed I I just there’s so much literature on the topic our lab is uh done quite a bit of research as well as many others and it shows that you can gain um muscle similar amounts of muscle regardless of the loading across a wide range of loading spectrums up to 30 to even 40 repetitions which is a long that’s a long set and again that’s a large amount of research that’s being done to show this but it’s driven by a few different things namely the fact that there’s different stimuli here that drives muscle growth the three main ones being the heavy tension high tension we get down here in these lower rep ranges the Ecentric overload that’s very possible as we get to sort of these midre ranges here and then the metabolic stress that we can get as we get all the way up into these higher repetitions but knowing how to apply them is really critical if you want to see the gains from all these rep ranges and it might just be that the person who did comment here never experienced any success with those higher rep ranges because he didn’t apply them right the first thing you have to understand is that your margin for error when applying these different stimuli for growth comes very very narrow when you get up into this range meaning there’s only one repetition that’s going to matter here in terms of its ability to produce growth and that will be the one repetition that you do that takes you to failure and I mean real failure hold on to that for a second because down here we know that we can drive heavy tension just by lifting the weight if we’re using a two or three rep set it’s really heavy we know that right away and then this area here applying those slower Ecentric like I covered in our three sets of 12 video that you’re going to want to check out at the end of this one becomes an easy driver of overload and also Ecentric muscle damage that we know can cause growth but look what happens here when we look at this rep scale again this way subjectivity what happens is that the scale of subjectivity becomes very broad as we get into those higher rep ranges meaning no one’s going to question what it feels like when you reach failure here again we’re not talking about training for stress you wouldn’t really be training to failure here but if you’re training for size and you’re using heavier weights you know when you hit failure you either can or you can’t when we get into this area it starts to get a little bit more broad but it’s still pretty clear whether you end your set to failure at 10 11 or 12 even the research will back up the fact that whether you take it all the way to failure or maybe a rep or too shy of true failure you’re still going to get the same results but when we get up here it starts to get so muddy because what is real failure here are you really reaching it when it starts to burn that’s not failure that is not failure that’s not enough of a stimulus you have to get to that really high level of intensity and it might happen there or it might happen here or it might happen here but it has to be a specific number based upon your effort let’s go back to that set from Jesse and let’s watch if he had decided to stop at the point he’s going to stop even though he’s feeling a burn here I could tell by the Grimace on his face is that really a stopping point there I mean I’m sure it was difficult but no we have to rewind that pick those damn dumbbells back up Jesse and keep going and I’m not saying you could evaluate everything based on the look on his face or even the pace of the dumbbells but I can tell you this he’s getting more repetitions which means he did not reach failure and I’m talking about pushing through this extreme level of burn until those dumbbells cannot move anymore now he’s reached failure now that set has become an effective one for building muscle even though it was lightweights and so if your answer to the quiz was that yes lightweights is my choice for building more muscle you could be right could be because it depends also on what you’re doing right now I think it’s safe to say that we should all be doing all of it and that was my original answer both why is that because all of them serve as a stimulus that you’re going to need to adopt at some point the guys that want to always lift heavy are going to find that that