What’s Better: Heavy Weights or High Reps?
This story is from Manual, GQ’s flagship newsletter offering useful advice on style, health, and more, four days a week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Ever since man first picked up heavy things and put them down again, the debate has endured: Is lifting lighter weights for high reps or heavier weights for low reps better for your gains?
“I wish that heavy weights produced better hypertrophy results,” the powerlifter and PhD Layne Norton tells GQ, “because then I could sit here and feel self-righteous about it.” But he says that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Norton cites Stuart Phillips, a professor in the department of kinesiology at McMaster University, who he also considers one of the best protein researchers in the world. Phillips was one of the first to find that, when it comes to enhancing hypertrophy (muscle growth) and muscle protein synthesis, low-load training, when taken close to failure, shows similar results as heavy weights taken to failure.
In plain English: you can make gains without picking up heavy weights. But you’ll need to lift until it feels heavy, and you’re just a couple reps shy of not being able to lift any more.
