To up my workouts, should I start by increasing my weights or do faster or more reps?

Question

Bryan Meyer · Answer

So the question is, to up my workouts, should I start by increasing my weights or do faster or more reps? Well, first let's work on control and adding holds at different places in the range. So halfway down you can hold three seconds, lower it down to that point, hold three seconds, go all the way down another three seconds, and then try to come up for three seconds. So crazy threes, crazy fives, hold 10 seconds, come up, make it reactive. So you have to stop on command. The last thing that I like to do is add weight. And then the other thing is your stance. So worry about if you're doing something standing up, change where you're standing, change your foot position. The last thing that you should change is the weight, change the direction of force that's coming at you. So hopefully that helps, and reps are one thing, but how fast are you doing the reps? How slow are you doing the reps? So try the holds, try the stances, try the direction of where the force, where the machine, where the cable is pulling you, your grip in and out, wider, narrower, and it's a completely different animal, completely different workout. So hopefully that helps, and look forward to hearing more.

Paul Edmondson · Answer

To up my workout, should I start by increasing my weight or do faster or more reps? So let's look at these three things individually. If you increase your weight, you're going to increase the amount of and the synchronization of motor units and access more tissue. So if your goal is to increase strength, this is a viable method of progression in training. If you induce faster repetitions and you've gone from slow to fast, no longer are you using your red tissue, your muscle tissue exclusively. Now you're tapping into those elastic connective tissues as well. So skin, muscle, skin ligaments, tendons, fascia is put on pre-stretch and it's recoiling and it's taking the onus off muscles solely, which is how human function occurs. So if you want to be efficient, this is also a viable way of training. Good luck to you. If you induce more repetitions, you're going to get a strength endurance outcome, but also you're going to build more and more substrate, lactic acid, calcium, hydrogen ions, inorganic phosphates that induce blood acidosis. When you do so, that kick starts an mTOR pathway, which kick starts an anabolic secretion of hormones that is the cascade to protein synthesis or muscle hypertrophy. So three ways you can progress your workouts, all three have different physiological outcomes, all three are viable. Go for it, whichever one floats your boat.

John Sinclair · Answer

To help my workout, should I start by increasing the weights that you lift or lift the weights faster or do more repetitions? Those are all valid opportunities and options that you could do in your programming to challenge your workout. So if we first think about increasing your weights, that's increasing what we call your load or your intensity. So you increase your weights, your reps are going to drop down, but the outcome is going to be more of a, you're going to have a greater response in strength. If I keep the weights the same, but I move them faster, then that's going to be a higher power output. And so that's going to be beneficial to the nervous system and to the muscular system and connective tissue system. And then if I do more endurance, those are going to be more endurance based. So if I do more repetitions, I'm enhancing my strength endurance. So what we would do is we might change the way your program's looking. You can do two things. You could have different days of different types of workouts that one is moving slower, but higher loads, one is moving faster and one is moving lighter loads for more reps. We could do that in a week, or we could pick one thing to do, do it for a few weeks and then switch. So that's a great way that you can think about programming. And I like the way that you phrased that. Increase my weights, go faster, do more reps, all great ideas.

Benjamin Kessel · Answer

So my workouts, should I start by increasing my weights, do faster reps or more reps? Either of those can be a way to up your workouts. Each one's gonna have a different response because they're all different stimuli. You can increase your weights and get more general strength. You can increase your speed or velocity and get more explosive movements and more explosive response. Or you can do more reps and get more of that muscular endurance. So it all depends. All of them are a way to up your workout to be honest. So it really depends on what you're trying to do. I know with my endurance athletes, before I start increasing a lot of weights, I make sure that they can explode and have that velocity based type of training. That's to show that they're really in control. Then it's also a great way to produce more force out of the rep before we increase the weights. But that's just endurance training. So the answer is yes, all three of them are ways you can do it. Just all three of them have different responses.

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"To up my workouts, should I start by increasing my weights or do faster or more reps?"