A Sane Perspective On Rep Ranges

It's long been believed that higher reps are for toning and lower reps are for building strength.

However, if you've kept up with the data on this topic, you'll recognize this idea as inaccurate - or, at minimum, misleading.

Sure, lower reps build strength, but so do higher reps.

Sure, higher reps "tone" muscle, but so do lower reps.

The current body of evidence supports this: as long as you make your sets challenging, it doesn't seem to matter whether you're doing sets of 5 or sets of 30 for muscle growth specifically. 

Does this mean that all rep ranges are created equal? 

No!

For example, it probably comes as no surprise that doing lower reps makes you better at doing lower reps, while doing higher reps makes you better at doing higher reps.

In addition, doing higher reps gives you more of that "burning" or "pump" experience, while doing lower reps just makes you feel like you're experiencing lots of pressure in the target muscles.

And while there are undoubtedly nuanced, physiological differences between rep ranges, what I care most about is maximizing muscle growth with the fewest possible downsides.

So, although I'm sure this will be a bit of an oversimplification, I'd like to provide a sane persepctive on rep ranges that will leave you feeling better about how many reps you should do instead of worse (which is how I believe many people feel at this particular moment).

Addressing The Question

Let's address the actual question first and the assumptions behind such a question: how many reps should I do?

First: there isn't - and there will never be - a single, black and white answer to this question. If you're looking for such an answer, you won't find it here.

Second: even if there were a such thing as a "perfect" rep count or range for lifting, should we assume that this applies to all muscles and all exercises for the rest of time? Should we assume if we find an appropriate rep range now that this won't change later?

Get the rigidity out of your head before thinking more about this topic.

Science doesn't give us black and white answers, only more precise directions to guide our future decision-making.

Narrowing The Window

On either side of the repetition range extreme, we run into some major practical downsides (and as you'll learn, rep ranges mostly come down to practicality to me).

On the high-rep end of the extreme - say, anything 20 reps and beyond - we run into a few potential issues:

• Time - doing sets of 20+ reps on all of your exercises adds up to a lot of time, especially if you're resting 2+ minutes and/or are performing single-sided exercises of any kind. Since time is the ultimate constraint on training, you should take this seriously.
• Cardio and exhaustion - while a challenging set of 20 reps might feel appropriate for an exercise like 2-arm cable curls, 20 reps on a challenging set of barbell squats, deadlifts, hack squats, or leg presses will make you feel like you just got hit by a truck. Even if time is of no real constraint to you, starting your lower body session with a 20-rep failure set of conventional deadlifts will leave you dead for every exercise that follows. 

On the low-rep end of the extreme - say, anything 4 reps or below - we run into a different set of potential issues:

• Low wiggle room - if you're doing a challenging set of 3 reps, by definition, you are lifting relatively heavy weights. When you use heavy weights, the margin for error decreases, and the risk of injury likely increases. This does not mean that lower-rep training is inherently dangerous, but it does mean that you have less room to screw up. The cost of course-correcting on a set of 20 reps is low because you can readjust your technique, but the cost of course-correcting a set of 3 may mean substantially loading a non-target tissue that wasn't prepared for it. Practically speaking, low-rep heavy training is much more risky than higher rep, lighter training.
• Cognitive load and poor technique - using heavy weights undoubtedly changes your emotional relationship with any exercise you're doing. People put themselves into a hardcore mindset when lifting heavy and tend to do anything just to move weights. As a consequence, people often end up using inappropriate techniques - i.e. techniques that do not align with one's goal - or they end up not controlling the weight at all.

It is for these reasons that I believe the most practical rep-range window falls anywhere between 5-15 reps. This is not a hard-and-fast rule by any means, but generally speaking, narrowing the window this way accounts for the practical downsides of training at either extreme.

What Now?

Now that we've narrowed the window down to a practical range, how do you decide how many you should do, precisely?

This is where you should pivot to the context of individual needs and demands of the exercise at hand.

Let's go over a number of different examples to make this thought process more conrete.

The Case For Using Lower Reps

Lower reps - which I define loosely as anything in the 5-9 rep range, are most appropriate in two scenarios, which often overlap:

1. Single-limb exercises
2. Exercises with a high degree of external stability and constraint

Single-limb exercises take more total time than double-limb exercises if rest total rest time is equated for (especially so if you're with a training partner or if you're doing supersets). Using lower repetition ranges can help offset this time-suck, simply because your sets end up being much shorter.

Exercises with a high degree of external stability, like most machine exercises, are lower-risk and less technically demanding. For example, there's basically no technique one can use on a leg extension machine that turns it from a quad exercise into anything else. In addition, when your quads fail to move the load, the weight stack simply slams down and your set is over.

Contrast this with a barbell back squat: not only can your technique easily shift from a more upright squat to a less upright squat (just to name one common example, if training quads is the goal), but failing becomes more risky, especially if you don't have the safeties appropriately set up or you're not skilled enough to fail safely.

And again, remember that people tend to get attached to weight on the bar, not exercise quality.

Using heavier loads isn't technically more dangerous until you walk into any commercial gym in the world and watch what people are actually doing when they try to use heavier weights.

The Case For Using Higher Reps

Higher reps - which I define loosely as anything in the 10-15 rep range, are most appropriate in two scenarios:

1. Exercises with higher demand on non-target tissues
2. Exercises done bilaterally 

Double-limb exercises, like 2-arm presses, rows, pull-downs, squats, RDLs, etc., all take less total time to perform compared to single-limb exercises and don't add large amounts of time if done in higher rep ranges.

In addition, exercises that require high contribution from non-target tissues (exercises that are less inherently stable) can benefit from the fact that less total load is being used during the exercise.

For example, if you've ever tried to do a glute cable kickback with low reps and heavy weight, you've probably found it incredibly difficult to stabilze the rest of your body so that you can isolate the leg-kicking motion. While this contradicts the concept of using lower reps for single-limb exercises, it may be necessary to use both higher reps and single-limb lifts in scenarios like these (as an aside, there are exceptions to pretty much everything).

Another example might be the classic barbell RDL - where, if you're trying to target your glutes and hamstrings, your lower back might fail first with heavy loads. If you choose to do higher reps on an RDL, you may not even notice the fatigue in your back, while your glutes and hamstrings end up with a massive pump (this is true for me personally).

Use Both Ends Of The Range

Regardless of which exercises and scenarios tend to lend themselves better to the higher or lower end of the 5-15 range, I believe it's incredibly important to maintain a wider range of possible options, rather than to assume one end of the range is always appropriate.

Why? Two main reasons...

The first and most obvious reason is that while lower and higher reps lend themselves better to certain exercises and scenarios, there may be certain circumstances - like the cable glute kickback - that require you use higher reps despite the fact that you need to spend extra time training both legs. Subscribing to specific ranges across all exercises will limit you from thinking outside the box.

The second relates to making progress in any exercise. Assuming the technique of the exercise is standardized, progress is ultimately a matter of increasing the amount of load you use and the reps you perform.

If you use 100 pounds and perform 10 reps on week one, performing 12 reps on week two is progress. If you use 105 pounds and perform 10 reps on week two, that is also progress (assuming standardization of effort and technique from week-week). 

If you pigeon-hole yourself to only performing 5 repetitions on an exercise (or every exercise), you'll be forced only to add load to that exercise to make progress. Why would you do that? Do you really think performing 8-10 reps on a given lift will suddenly make it ineffective? Why would you think that? Doing is more is doing more, and that is ultimately what we're after when trying to grow muscle.

Allow your rep ranges to remain open-ended. Progression in reps is just as valuable as progression in load - you're simply doing more in either instance (and removing the option to progress in reps is a fool's errand).

Practically speaking, here's how the use of progressing in load and reps on any exercise might look:

• Use a rep range of 5-15 reps (I tend to stick between 6-12)
• Pick a weight that allows you to hit failure (or come close to it) within your chosen range
• Stick with the same weight until you reach the top end of your rep range
• Add more load when you come close to the top of the range
• Rinse and repeat

Here's an example of what that might look like over the course of a 10-week period:

1. 100lbs for 6 reps
2. 100lbs for 8 reps
3. 100lbs for 9 reps
4. 100lbs for 11 reps
5. 100lbs for 13 reps
6. 105lbs for 7 reps
7. 105lbs for 9 reps
8. 105lbs for 12 reps
9. 105lbs for 14 reps
10. 110lbs for 7 reps

Standardizing the load helps me more easily track progression every week because the addition of reps makes it much more clear that I'm progressing compared to the continual attempt to add more load.

While I don't subscribe to hard and fast rules, this is the general rubric I've followed for the last several years of training, and it works fantastically.

I'll also add that I personally prefer to perform every set to failure, so that I can be absolutely sure about whether or not I've made progress week-week. There are many people who (successfully) prefer to program sets with one or more reps in reserve ("reps in the tank"), but I generally prefer to remove this guesswork by performing each exercise until I fail non-volitionally.

Training to failure is by no means a necessity, but I personally believe that intermediate/advanced lifters should be able to train to failure often without the fear of injury - if you're scared you're going to get hurt every time you train to failure, you're either using way too much load, your technique is poor or inconsistent, your program design is a poor fit for you, or all of the above.

Clear Takeaway

Using higher and lower rep ranges are useful for different reasons, and allowing yourself to work up and down these rep ranges while progressing across different exercises is ultimately what allows for a program that can continue to generate progress.

Performing higher and lower rep sets both clearly work, as long as each set you perform is challenging.

Do not fall for the black-and-white rules that some content creators make you believe are gospel. There are simply trade offs, and one should recognize which trade-off they're willing to make in the context of any individual exercise.

In short: use a variety of rep ranges to fit the practical needs of your circumstances and to address the limitations of the exercises you've selected. Allow for movement up and down the rep range you've chosen to continually generate progress in each exercise. 

Practicality above all.

If you're uncertain about how many reps you should do and you feel paralyzed about how to go about progression - that is a good sign that you need to begin testing things out on your own and that you need to develop an ability to troubleshoot your own training - because no one else ultimately can. Just pick a range and see how it goes.

-Ben

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