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upper/lower body reps
- Thread starter gymtime
- Start date
edgecrusher
New member
What are your goals?
I have personally found that doing heavy weight and low reps for just about all exercises has been most beneficial for me. However, I have recently become quite a fan of doing high rep squat sets. For some reason with squats you can kind of force more reps out of your self. I found high reps for squats to help my lower body size quite a bit. However, I still think for exercises like leg extensions/curls, lower reps are better. This is what has been working for me anyways...
gymtime
New member
Goals right now are cutting and maintaining muscle as much as possible. However I do my workouts the same in either case. It's always heavy weight, low rep while maintaining a strict diet.
DaCypher - Much of what I've read has dealt with squats in particular. You could be right, it might not apply to isolation leg excercises.
DaCypher - Much of what I've read has dealt with squats in particular. You could be right, it might not apply to isolation leg excercises.
I like to stay as heavy as I can both upper and lower while still keeping my form. However I do occasionnally take a week and cut the weight in half and try to do reps till failure with this I think it helps keep my muscles guessing as i am very very sore in the muscle groups the next two days after this. I did try to do this two weeks in a row not too long ago but didnt get the same effect. So like I said I stay heavy but every now and then a good light week helps shock plus gives your joints a break.
Blood&Iron
New member
Generally, the rational I've seen for using higher reps for the lower body is that the muscles there are of greater size and work capacity. I think what's more important is experimenting to find what's best for you. Depending on the predominating fiber type in you're individual muscles, some upper body muscles may respond best to a long TUL and some lower body muscles respond best to a short TUL and vice versa. I've found that I, like many, do best on lower reps, i.e. 3-5. But for someone with a predominance of slow-twitch fibers this would be less than ideal. Occasionally, I'll use higher reps, for instance if I find my form is breaking down. But in general I find that very high reps are more a metabolic/mental exercise than anything.
