Thread: The Big One

I have decided to put it out there. HEAVY VS LIGHT. The age old heavy while bulking and light more reps while cutting. is it bull?????
I personally think that to get anything out of throwing the iron about you have to go heavy. my personal favourate 4 sets of 6-8 reps as heavy as you can lift. i have recently tried the 3 sets of 10 and found benifit but it dosengt compare to cast iron gut wrenching weight. your thoughts gentlemen please.......... (please include evidence in the way of reports resurch ect if poss)
Much love Machine x

machine ive been looking at dc training which is all about heavy training, its long but worth the read http://forums.rxmuscle.com/showthread.php?t=168

I personally think a bit of both I have no evidence just a assumption. If you go heavy it will break the muscle more obviously needed to get bigger. Where as sometimes going light can give you a better pump, so surely if you have a mixture of both that's the way forward? Also to progress you need to improve and go heavier if your only going light you wouldn't really know when to increase weight. If your going all out your constantly pushing the boundary's and will increase weight quicker surely? I'm probably completley wrong but that's my thought.

Go heavy or go home.

End of

I like to mix it up, 2 sets heavy, followed by 2 sets of a lighterwight with slower reps, at the end the pump is great and it feels ive really targeted the muscle. Hopefully all the muscle is being worked by doing the slower reps meaning greater fiber recrution, which leads to an elevated metabolism . But i have no researches to back it up, apart from a bit of A level PE textbook (lol) that mentions the recrutiment of both FTG and FOG muscle fibres.

Ive always thought heavy for building muscle, light for toning

I think that as long as you cant give anymore at the end of the last rep be it the 6th or the 16th then you've gone heavy and hard!

Edd_123... Some guys at my gym use DC training and got nothing but good things to say about it! They add some isolation work with it too but they are big guys so it looks like 1 Max all out to failure set is good!

I just like to mix it up, I tend to go light at the start for warming up, then whack in some heavy sets and then depending on how i feel, I finish with some medium weights to exhaust the muscles. For me it also depends on the muscle group being worked. Whether its light or heavy most sets I go to failure (as much as you can without a training partner to assist).

If my forms starts to suffer because I am lifting too heavy, then I will drop it down.

Yeah I'm personally of the go heavy or go home mentality. If I feel sore the next day I know I've ripped muscle and done a good workout I'm sort of disapointed if I don't feel anything the next day. However light weight and max reps is also a great way to build muscle but as long as you feel the burn and the ache next day I'm happy.

for muscle growth a mix of both is necessary. for the whole toning aspect of higher reps. to a degree that may be true. if you have longer working sets and shorter rest periods then you are more likely to use your aerobic energy system over the usual creatine and lactic acid systems. the aerobic energy system uses oxygen and glucose for fuel. it is also more likely to use fat for energy. i may be wrong but that was always my thinking on the matter. longer rest and shorter sets allow your creatine stores to recover and you can train anaerobically.