Ask James Fitness Questions!

[AGDee]

And it depends on your goals. A very good friend of mine who is orthopedic surgeon suggested, since I am doing a high protein/low carb thing and need to increase my metabolism that I should use the highest weights I can and lift to failure, even if it's only 8 reps. By "lift to failure", he means do reps until until you can't do them anymore, your muscles are incapable of doing one more. He said it's a quick way to build muscle fast and increase your metabolism. His thoughts were that if you're doing as many as 30 reps of something, you're not using enough weight. By doing it this way, you are creating microscopic tears in the muscle. You release Growth Hormone to repair those tears and, that greatly increases your metabolism. I have used this method over a period of time twice now and it seems to be what works best for me. You cannot do weights like that every day. In fact, he said I absolutely have to wait at least 48 hours between weight workouts to do it this way.

[KSigkid]

Originally Posted by AGDee

And it depends on your goals.

Exactly, and I'm a good example of how that could change. Before I started law school, I was lifting mainly for strength and building "quality" weight. I was pretty thin and had really low body fat (around 7-8%), so I was doing the high weight/low rep workout pretty frequently.

Now, after three years off from working out, I'm trying to cut down on the excess fat, so I've moved to doing more reps and more cardio. Many of the exercises are the same, but I've changed the way I do them.

Like AGDee said, it's dependent on your individual goals and where you want to go with your overall health.