You Don’t Need To Lift Heavy Weights To Build Bigger Muscles
Just put in a good effort and do it regularly.
February 12, 2024
Imagine by Inside Out Fitness
When you see the biggest guy in the gym pull up to the weight room, you might assume he’ll be reaching for the heaviest weights. You’ve gotta pump massive iron to build massive muscles, right? Well, not really.
“There’s a lot of lore around this routine or that routine, and a lot of it comes from former Soviet bloc country training regimens where most people were taking steroids,” says Stuart Phillips, PhD, a kinesiology professor and research director at McMaster University. Some of it also comes from a misunderstood study from 1946: While rehabilitating soldiers from World War II, army physician Thomas DeLorme argued that heavy resistance training was better at building muscle than, say, repetitive activities like walking or biking, and for decades, many took that to mean only heavy weights were helpful, says Dr. Phillips.
Yet the more scientists look into it, the more they’re finding that heavy lifting isn’t a prerequisite for growing muscle, or as the experts call it, “hypertrophy.” Recently, Dr. Phillips led a network meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that looked at 192 randomized, controlled studies with a total sample size of more than 5,000 people to find the “optimal prescription for hypertrophy.” What his team discovered shocked many. “You can lift lighter weights, and as long as you lift them with a high degree of effort, they’re as good as heavier weights in making you bigger,” he says. Even just using your own body weight, like with push-ups or lunges, works. The key is simply to get pretty close to what personal trainers call “failure,” or the point where you feel like you can’t keep going any longer. That could take up to 25 to 30 reps, and you’ll still build muscle, says Dr. Phillips…
