How to Perform Reps for Most Muscle Growth

Understanding how to perform reps for most muscle growth starts with understanding how to perform reps correctly. Most lifters focus heavily on workout selection, workout volume, and even nutritional strategies, but overlook one of the most important variables in hypertrophy: rep execution. In this

What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalere, ax. com. Today I’m going to try to help you to understand the best way to perform your reps when you’re trying to build muscle because there’s a lot of variables that go into this. However, I have to start in answering this question by asking you one and that is what are you training for?

Because there’s a difference between training for strength and training for hypertrophy or increased muscle size. So let’s say you were training for strength and we’ll give an example like a barbell bench press, right? If you’re trying to get stronger here, then there’s one thing that you should be looking for out of this exercise, and that is efficiency. In other words, when you’re doing this exercise, you should not be caring about how to isolate the chest from the triceps, from the shoulders. You want them all to work in concert because at the end of the day, your absolute level of strength or the output of how much you could actually lift is going to rely on the fact of all those muscles contributing together to that lift.

So, we’re not trying to do anything but be very efficient at recruiting those. You also want to have some element of speed. You want to be able to accelerate that bar because power and strength will go hand in hand often. So, you want to make sure you’re working both of those things. However, when we’re talking about building bigger muscles, which is the subject of this video here, you want to actually do the opposite.

You want to try to find ways that you can be inefficient. In other words, find new ways to challenge your muscles so that they are forced to have to come back and grow bigger and stronger. And that doesn’t always come in the form of just using heavier and heavier weights cuz at some point you wind up stalling out there. So let me use an example here of a lat pull down. Right?

If I was going to do a traditional lat pull down. If I was trying to do this for strength, I’d have weight on the bar here. Actually, let me go a little heavier. I’d have enough weight on the bar here to challenge me. I wouldn’t necessarily care.

I’ll go underhand. I wouldn’t care about isolating the biceps, right, from the back, the lats, the rhomboids. I’m trying to move this thing still with good form, right? But try to get strong and let all those muscles that prefer to work together work together. That’s one way to do this.

If on the other hand I wanted to kind of introduce a different stimulus, I could take a lighter weight and then try to become much more inefficient. And that means let’s slow this thing down. Let’s make this thing absolutely miserable for my lats if it’s the lats I’m trying to grow here. So what I could do is firstly I’ll go overhand, right? To get the biceps out of it a little bit.

Get into the lats. Get that narrow grip. Keep my elbows in front of my body. Go at a slower pace. Drive my elbows down.

Really squeeze. Come up out of it. Good stretch at the top. Again, this is all inefficient and it’s not what you’d want to seek out if you were trying to maximally test your strength. But we’re trying to overload these lats.

All of these individual stimuli are good, right? that good hard focus contraction, that lengthened time that I’m in this stretch, right? Applying more tension here, still having good amount of weight on the bar. I didn’t go super light. I’ll talk about that in a second.

I’m using a good amount of weight that still challenges me. But all of these things would make anybody looking at this say, “Wow, that was pretty damn inefficient there, Jeff. ” And they’d be right because it is. But it creates growth. Let me take you here to the board for a second.

So, if we were looking at, let’s say, those two examples, okay, this is, let’s just say, intensity on this side, and this is the rep count. 0 1 2 3 4 5 all the way up to 10. That does not look like a five, by the way. All the way up to 10. In that first example, I’ll bring out different colors.

I do these more than just drawing my body with these things. So, the first example, let’s say it was my 10 rep max or 8 to 10 rep max here in blue and I was going to do it to 10 rep max failure or 8 to 10 rep max failure. Okay? Whatever I chose, that would be my failure point. What would happened is in terms of the effort level on the first rep, you just imagine that the weight is heavy enough to kind of start a little bit higher on that intensity line here, right?

because we know we’re using something that’s going to cause failure in that 8 to 10 rep range. What happens is though, it’s not that difficult on the first rep or necessarily the second rep or the third rep or the fourth rep. It starts to kind of catch up at the end where it really starts to skyrocket and difficulty level and it gets very difficult at the end. And we talk about this all the time, these being sort of the effective reps, the ones that actually cause real muscle growth, but it kind of takes a while to get up there. Okay, if we took that lighter weight, whatever this one was, the second round here, let’s just say it’s like my, I don’t know, 13 rep max weight, right?

Odd number, but I just want to show you that it’s lighter. But I’m going to perform it to 10 rep failure, right? Can we do that? We definitely can do that. We can do that by doing what I just did there.

Slow down the reps. Do something called one and a half reps where we come down halfway, go up, and come back. like we’re using more range of motion, more time and tension, all that stuff. So, what happens here is you would think that this being a lighter weight would start down here on that intensity line. But if from rep one I do something very difficult where I slow that thing down, really squeeze, get that that elongated stretch on the on the way up, I could actually theoretically jump that.

I really could. I could jump the intensity there cuz the difference in weight here can be made up through the intensity techniques that I’m using. And by getting at a higher level here, we also know that rep two is going to be pretty damn challenging, too. Because again, we’re using these techniques that intensify things. So, rep two, rep three, rep four, it’s really getting and staying at a higher level throughout.

And then what happens is just the fatigue of the set alone is going to make that continue to climb higher, higher, higher. So whether it finishes above or below, the idea though is they’re pretty close. And if anything, this set that was very inefficient actually took place with some of those techniques that made this more difficult from start to finish. So the tension that we got here, the cumulative tension could actually be higher underneath that curve, the red lighter one, than it could be maybe in this one, even though it peaked out over here. And even if it peaked out at a higher level, right?

Even if it peaked out somewhat higher over here, it doesn’t matter. Now, what’s the benefit of that? The benefit is that you don’t always have to lift super heavy weights to get things to work. I will actually show you where super heavy weights don’t work. You want to make sure that you’re understanding these things because I think people just think of and in absolutes, right?

If I took a really heavy weight down here and now I grabbed that same weight and I got down and now my set looks like this. Right. Whatever that might look like. I would argue that even though it was super heavy, do I have another color here? Even though it was super heavy, that’s down here because those are reps.

That was all momentum. That was not a muscle you were trying to build th