thenaturalone’s BodyBlog

Training with light weight and doing high reps will get you more defined. This is one myth that will just never die. Gaining muscular definition has mainly to do with your diet and not anything to do with using light weight and doing high repetitions with it. If anything, training with heavier weights is the most important way to gain muscle density and achieve a harder, more defined look on a restricted calorie diet. The reason being is that your body doesn’t  want to keep any extra muscle on it’s frame because it’s just higher maintenance for your body to keep up with. For every extra pound of muscle you have on your body, your entire endorcine system including your heart, liver, kidney’s pancreas and gall bladder must work harder in order to support each additional pound of muscle that it has so your body will try to quickly let muscle mass go in order to maintain it’s equalibrium. You cant really blame your body because think about it, would you rather pay the heat and electric bill for a one story 1400 square foot house or would you rather pay it for a two story 2200 square foot house? Of course you would rather pay for the energy being used by the one story 1400 square foot house. It’s no different with your body. It doesn’t want to pay the energy bill for the extra active tissue (muscle). Now how does this relate to training with heavy vs. light weights? Your body will lose extra muscle if it has no reason to keep it. If your body is put under heavy weight loads, say heavy sets of 4-6 reps, then your body will retain that extra muscle to compensate for the heavy weight load that it knows it will be subject to. If you use light weight and high reps all the time then your body doesn’t need the extra muscle to move light weights that it can handle for 15-20 reps so your body will let that extra muscle slip. Now with muscle being active tissue that burns calories 24/7, it would make sense that when you lose muscle your metabolism will slow down and therefore be counter productive to trying to obtain a nice hard, defined physique. The leanest I ever was for a competition getting down to 4% bodyfat, I did so by lifting very heavy weights and despite the fact that I had lost 60 lbs for this contest, I didn’t lose hardly any strength. I hope this information can be helpful to those who have been sold on that rumor that light weight and high reps are better for hardness and definition. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.