So maybe every week, you work the following exercises into your workout routine: Over time, you’ll get stronger at the chin-up, your reps will start to climb. Now, that doesn’t invalidate the idea of combining strength training and hypertrophy training. So instead of doing 6–20 reps for every lift, we want to use different parts of the rep range at different times. If we challenge ourselves with the first set, our strength will typically go down a bit on the next set. Are you gaining weight? It’s possible that doing a set of five reps stimulates about as much muscle growth as doing a set of six reps. And even if it doesn’t, the difference is surely quite small. And since low-rep sets tend to benefit from longer rest times and can be somewhat difficult to recover from, using lower reps comes with an opportunity cost. Or maybe gaining strength in lower rep ranges has useful carryover to our strength in higher rep ranges. Set 2: 6 reps with 255 pounds In strength training, doing five reps per set is a popular way to gain mass. You guys seem like the real deal, people of knowledge and common sense, unlike many so called experts that don’t have the slightest idea what thye’re talking about. If you want a customizable workout program (and full guide) that builds these principles in, check out our Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program. Within that same 20-minute timeframe, they’ve stimulated the same amount of chest growth, they’ve doubled their triceps growth, and they’re probably still feeling fairly fresh. When doing isometrics like that, you’ll build more muscle doing them at longer muscle lengths, with your muscles in a stretched position, as explained in our range of motion article. (We should probably write a full article on it, too.). After all, they won’t grow your upper traps or spinal erectors, both of which are big muscles, important for general strength, and contribute quite a lot to our appearance. Shane Duquette is the co-founder and creative lead of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell, and has a degree in design from York University in Toronto, Canada. I was reading another article of yours. If you don’t want to dive all that deep into workout programming, you might want to follow a workout program instead of building your own. Free weights are popular for a reason. The majority of your muscle growth comes from myofibrillar hypertrophy, muscle fiber growth, but sarcoplasmic hypertrophy will give you an added layer of muscle growth on top of the dense muscle you build from strength training ... Use pyramid and reverse pyramid training. This is our newsletter for women who are interested in getting bigger, stronger, fitter, and better looking. That’s why strength training and powerlifting training use lower rep ranges. We don’t want to stop our sets as soon as we can’t touch our chests to the bar. Thanks again Shane for the clarification! On the other hand, even small differences in rep ranges could result in different amounts of muscle growth over the longer term, and that could apply even within moderate rep ranges. Or you could do both moderate and heavy sets each workout (as in reverse pyramid training). And even within that shrinking rep range, different lifts respond better to different rep ranges, narrowing it further still. And if so, what is it? However, since our lats are our strongest pulling muscle, if we limit how much we can lift based on how much weight our smaller muscles lift, then we won’t ever be lifting enough weight to challenge our lats, and our lats won’t grow. We tend to stimulate the most muscle growth near the sticking point of the lift, where our muscles are challenged the most. Set 3: 8 reps with 225 pounds, 1–2 reps in reserve When reps are low, the number of hard sets is not a good proxy for hypertrophy. For that, we would need to build bigger hips, spinal erectors, and forearms. the popularity of bodybuilding versus strength training, the ideal training volume for gaining muscle size, https://outlift.com/hypertrophy-training-volume/, The 5 Big Compound Lifts for Building Muscle. Here’s a more complete list of chin-up assistance lifts: The best accessory lifts for the chin-up are the ones that work our biceps or lats under a deep stretch. So, for example, let’s say that you could hold your knees up for 60 seconds, but you finish your set of chin-ups in 30 seconds. Second, taking high-rep sets to failure is so painful that it can make people vomit, give up, or hate training. We just need to be clear that not being able to bring our chests all the way to the bar doesn’t count as reaching failure yet. We’ve written a few articles going over the basics of bulking for women, such as our beginner muscle-building workout guide for women and our beginner bulking diet guide for women. Also, feel free to vary your grip width from phase to phase. This article confirms what I’ve been thinking for a long time now, that the Chin-up is the superior movement. And sets of 20+ reps are more painful, making it difficult to push ourselves hard enough to stimulate growth. It’s an easier and more efficient way of building muscle. Great articles, thanks. It can extend the elbows, as in a skull crusher, and it can also extend the shoulders, as in a pullover. However, there’s another important aspect to general strength. Set 4: 10 reps with 215 pounds. If you’re maintaining your reps while gaining weight, that’s at least a bit of progress. That’s why 6–20 reps is often dubbed the “hypertrophy rep range.”. So today I tried for as many as I could, and did 12, 7, and 4 reps. What I’m really curious about is and want to get input on are two things, which are: A) Is it better to do more reps in earlier or later sets? For the chin-up, the sticking point tends to be at the top of the range of motion. For every low-rep set that you do, you may only stimulate 50–80% as much muscle growth as you would by doing moderate-rep sets. For instance, let’s consider the bench press. No, no, beginners don’t need to start with bodyweight training. The advantage of pull-ups is that they work your lats just as hard as chin-ups, but with less work being done by your other muscles. Your limit strength is your base. What does that actually mean? I decided I needed to do something rather than skipping my missed reps. I’m still learning lowered chin-ups but they seem quite complicated. 3. Or, if you’re still skinny, try our Bony to Beastly (men’s) program or Bony to Bombshell (women’s) program. Still mostly focused on building muscle, though. You don’t have to ever add weight, but since chin-ups are quite taxing, it can help to do them for 6–12 reps so that your cardiovascular system doesn’t start to limit your performance. Didn’t even know Outlift was a thing. With that said, these differences in volume really only start to become significant when comparing rather different rep ranges. Our lifting newsletter for men—16,001 readers and climbing. However, lifting in higher rep ranges is a fetid nightmare, especially when doing the bigger compound lifts. Since Saturday been training 20 reps with my mate who is 57. It’s important to note the one study by Mangine et al that showed greater arm growth from doing sets of 3-5 reps than from doing sets of 10–12 reps. I do both decline and standard push ups but it takes a lot of those for me to get to failure and I’m trying to keep my workout time down. definition of - senses, usage, synonyms, thesaurus. For instance, doing 225 reps for ten reps is 2250 pounds lifted, whereas lifting 275 pounds for five reps is just 1375 pounds lifted. That’s less than half the volume required for the same gain. ​Or click here to join our newsletter for women. I searched for what is the ideal rep and set to stick with to build from and you mention a plethora of different studies and my head now is so confused. Hey Winston, you might like our article on bodyweight hypertrophy training. Doing 24 sets of 3 reps, maybe 2–5 minutes of rest between sets, a few warm-up sets beforehand, we’re talking about a good 2–3 hours of work. If you can’t add weight, try to add reps. If we look at a systematic review of 14 studies, we see that sets of 6–20 reps stimulate a similar amount of muscle growth per set, provided that we take those sets close enough to failure. If gripping the bar a little narrower or wider feels better or makes you stronger, go for it.