Exercises With High Repetitions

Exercising with lighter weights for a higher number of repetitions builds your muscular endurance while still building strength and burning fat. Although you should go for variation and lift heavy weights for fewer reps, too, you should do some high-rep strength training each week whether you want lean, toned muscles or you're trying to bulk up.

  1. Burning Fat

    • It's not so much that heavy weights cause fat burn, but high intensity causes fat burn, which can be achieved either doing a few reps with heavy weight or a higher number of reps with lighter weights. By the end of each set, your muscles should feel as exhausted as they do after lifting heavy weights. This tells you you've reached the intensity level required to have hormonal and metabolic effects that increase fat burn.

    Muscle Size

    • Heavy weights pump up your muscles in size faster, but lighter weights with high repetitions build a platform for larger future growth. When you do a high number of reps for muscular endurance, you strengthen your muscles' capillaries, which are responsible for releasing nutrients to your muscle cells to allow for growth. Therefore, doing high reps improves your muscles' ability to grow more when you do lift with heavy weights for faster growth.

    Strength Gain

    • Doing strength training exercises with high repetitions helps you gain endurance strength by working your slow-twitch muscle fibers. Slow-twitch fibers depend on oxygen in the blood instead of readily available glucose, so strengthening them improves your muscles' ability to use oxygen. For optimal strength gain, do both low reps with heavy weight and high reps with less weight to work both types of fibers. Another way to strengthen both types is to do an extremely high number of reps with light weights, like sets of 50 to 100 reps. Over 50 reps, your slow-twitch fibers will start to fatigue and your fast-twitch fibers will take over.

    Considerations

    • Whether your goal is to gain muscle strength or size, you need to consume enough calories and protein to gain muscle mass. Variety and moderation are important when muscle training, so mix high reps and low reps either within your workouts or within your week. Women only have about 10 percent of the testosterone men have, which means they won't bulk up lifting heavy weights or doing high reps.