How many reps you should do
A rule of thumb to make your strength work more effective
Two of the most common questions I get as a trainer:
1) Which exercise should I do?
2) How many repetitions (reps) of it?
Let’s tackle #2 today!
Too Few Reps
Imagine you have an early meeting at work, so you set your alarm. But in the morning, it just quietly whispers to you, and you sleep soundly through your meeting.
You can think of not doing enough reps as similar to the whisper. In the case of strength work, you’re not providing enough of a stimulus to recruit all the little parts of your muscles to get up and go to work.
*Note: this does NOT mean that doing “too few” reps is bad, wrong, or can’t provide value of some kind. It’s just to say that if you can do 50 squats with a light weight, doing 3 won’t make you stronger.
Too Many Reps
Have you ever done a set of pushups until you literally couldn’t get yourself off the floor? You just melt into a puddle of your sweat, and feel the beat of the gym’s music pumping in your arms…
If so, then you know how much fatigue you create by going all the way to failure. It’ll take a long time before you’re ready to do your next set of pushups, and when you try, you might not be able to do nearly as many.
Again, this isn’t wrong or anything, but it likely isn’t necessary. Why use a strategy that will be so “expensive” in terms of recovery?
Just Right
Here’s a rule of thumb you can try: If you want to use an exercise to get stronger, try doing as many reps as you could possibly do, minus 1-3. Enough of a stimulus, but not so much that you’re stuck on the floor.
“What if I can do sooooo many reps that it would take forever?”
With pushups, maybe you can do 1, 5, 10, or even 20…so stopping a little short of failure should be relatively straightforward. But what about something like a bodyweight squat? What if you could do 100? Or keep going for a few minutes?
This is a sign that if you want to use the movement to build strength, you’ll probably benefit from making it harder — this is why you’ll see many people loading up squats with heavy weights. Now it becomes STRENGTHIER — one my of my favorite technical terms!
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