Strengthen your long-term health with 8 reps or less

Maximize Muscle Recruitment

When you lift heavier weights for less reps, it requires more muscle fibers to take part in a rapid fashion. This outcome has several benefits for your long-term health: 

• Nervous System Adaptation and Regulation

• The heavy lift and recruitment of several muscle fibers calls on the CNS to work in an efficient and effective manner. 

• Bone Health (and strength) 

• A heavy pull on the muscle fibers means a heavy pull on the bones, strengthening the muscles, bones, and connective tissue (ligaments, cartilage, etc.) simultaneously! 

Strength Adaptation 

As you continue to lift heavy weights for less reps, you can progress the weights for additional benefits! Progression means increasing resistance for each lift as you are able. This could be for less reps,or for a different exercise entirely. With progression, you call on the nervous system and muscular systems to not only respond but also adapt! You send the message, “figure it out brain and body!” Strength adaptation: 

• Calls on the brain to create new neural pathways, helping to strengthen our brain and nervous system - clarity of thought, decreased stress, etc. 

• Calls on the muscles to grow! Increased muscle mass leads to stronger bones and calls on the muscles to grow! Increased muscle mass leads to stronger bones (already covered that) but also decreased body farm decreased free-floating cholesterol, increased metabolism, etc. 

Low weight, high reps means muscular endurance (feel the burn!) and hypertrophy (muscle growth…in size). There are benefits to this approach as well, but not toward your long-term health. We’ll cover this in a later blog post! 

So, say it with me now, “8 reps or less!”

This information was collected from a strength training textbook by National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA).

If you are interested in this topic, you can also read this article recently printed in the New York Times!