Otherwise, yeah, it can get a bit tricky. You do a really great job at keeping up with all of these blog questions, so hats off to you! Second, taking high-rep sets to failure is so painful that it can make people vomit, give up, or hate training. For instance, let’s consider the bench press. Once you can hit the top of each rep range (8, 10, 12 reps), increase the weight by 5 pounds and go back down to the bottom of the range (6, 8, 10 reps). I’m a 6 ft 185 lb male and after lots of 3×5 Starting Strength and 5×5 Stronglifts and planning to do RPE at some point, to start off easy I decided on 3 sets of 15 reps (so I feel accomplished and getting more of a bodybuilding result, plus necessitating lighter weight so, to me, easier control and ergo lower risk of injury (granted, that’s debatable)). Think of underhand and hammer-grip pulldowns, pullovers, hammer-grip/underhand rows, and so on. It’s easier to do the moderate rep range. So the pull-up becomes a smaller, more advanced lift. So you’ll need to kind of play around with it to see what works. Maybe do 4, 6, 8, 8 instead. The reason this is confusing is because when most people talk about “strength,” they’re talking about maximal strength—how much someone can lift for a single repetition. Perhaps using a variety of rep ranges is indeed better for building muscle. All sets are to failure with good form (chest to bar). It includes a 5-month workout program, tutorial videos teaching all of the lifts, everything you need to know about nutrition, recipes to make the diet easier, and much more. We just need to be clear that not being able to bring our chests all the way to the bar doesn’t count as reaching failure yet. Because our lats are often hard to bring close to failure during those back exercises, this can help give them a bit of extra stimulation, and so will likely give us some extra muscle growth. I got up to 9 reps on the third set, but it hovers between 7, 8, and 9 (depending on the day). We can also use assistance lifts like the pull-up or row to work our upper backs and forearms. We’ve got a whole article on how many sets to do. For instance, doing 4–6 reps per set? Probably just need to build my chest more. It kicks off with a 5-part series about how to build muscle more leanly, gain strength faster, and improve your appearance. Also, reading and researching on your articles, so going to follow other routines after that. For more, we have a full article on chin-ups vs pull-ups, going over the differences in muscle activation and range of motion. As covered in the last section, chin-ups are incredible for bulking up your back and biceps. Bodybuilders often use the middle of that range, favouring 8–12 reps per set. I plan to checkout the Outlift Intermediate program once I’m back to respectable weights on your recommended “big 5 compound lifts”. But lifting in lower rep ranges is quite pleasant and easy. I find it really difficult and possibly a useless distraction, but it seems like a good opportunity to get some ab work in also. That means there’s no need to train for or test our 1-rep max to gauge our strength. Should I try to get the most reps on the last set (1), or keep them as even as possible (2), or just go all out on all sets (3), or do as many as I can on the first set but keep the others to a given number for a while (4)? But don’t worry too, too much about always staying above 5 reps. 4-rep sets might not be quite ideal, but you’ve already done an 8-rep set, which is. I do both decline and standard push ups but it takes a lot of those for me to get to failure and I’m trying to keep my workout time down. You might want to try doing an extra set each workout to sneak in some extra volume. There are problems with doing sets of 20–40 reps, too. And even within that shrinking rep range, different lifts respond better to different rep ranges, narrowing it further still. This makes chin-ups one of the biggest compound lifts, and certainly the biggest lift for your upper body. Next session, 2×10, 2×10, 3×10. Recently, it’s been shown that stretching our muscles between sets may slightly increase muscle growth, perhaps by giving our muscles a bit of extra overall tension, and thus boosting our training volume a little higher (study). That way when you do 8 reps, you have 2 reps left in reserve. That’s why strength training and powerlifting training use lower rep ranges. They aren’t matching the sets, comparing 3×4 versus 3×12 to see which stimulates more muscle growth, they’re matching the volume, comparing 7×4 versus 3×12. In fact, they’re one of the very best ab exercises, easily beating out crunches and sit-ups (reference). If you liked this article, you’ll love our full programs. It’s common to get some elbow strain from chin-ups, especially when using a straight bar. Great articles, thanks. Are Low Reps Good for Gaining Muscle Mass? Or maybe 6,6,5. This study appears to be an outlier, but until we have more research, it’s hard to say for sure. I’ve been working out 3 days a week for about 60 minutes and I alternate chin-ups (8 sets of 11)(last set is 20) and pull-ups (8 sets of 7)(last set is 15). You could spend a few weeks in moderate rep ranges and do more volume, then a few weeks in lower rep ranges going heavier. There are a lot of options for that, and they all work fairly well. Done shoulder press 30kg for 3 x 20 reps. Usually would do 60kg for 3 x 4. I read through the article on hypertrophy training and with regards to reps, if I did a set that included say, the push-up, vertical push-up, squat, chin-up, and deadlift, would 3 sets of 8 repetitions be a good starting point, or should I do 3 sets of as many reps as I can get in as close to failure as possible? But if we’re doing 13 sets of 10 reps, maybe 2–4 minutes of rest between sets, fewer warm-up sets needed, we’re talking maybe an hour of work. The chin-up is done with an underhand grip, as shown above, whereas the pull-up is done with an overhand grip. Let’s go over the pros and cons of the assistance and accessory lifts so that you know how to choose the ones that are best for you. And you can do them with your bodyweight for as many reps as possible, or you can load them with weights and do heavy sets. In the latest issue of Monthly Applications in Strength Sport, Greg Nuckols said that he suspects that sets of 3–5 reps aren’t as good at stimulating muscle growth as moderate-rep sets, but that they’re not that far off, either. To get stronger at the chin-up, we want to take the same approach that a beginner would take. Does this mean only that only the 1st set stimulated sufficient hypertrophy because it was in the 6-20 rep range? And it’s true that lower rep ranges do a better job of improving our 1-rep max. Needing to use different muscles over the course of a single lift is one of the benefits of lifting with a large range of motion. Of all the studies comparing rep ranges for muscle growth, the most famous is the study by Brad Schoenfeld, PhD. Since training with more moderate loads may be more time efficient and carry a lower injury risk, you’re best off spending most of your training time in the more moderate load range, with low reps mixed in for strength benefits, variety, and personal preference. As a result, someone might spend half an hour doing their 5×5 on the squat, finish it already feeling a bit tired, and then have to grind through a 5×5 on the bench press and then row. If we’re talking about muscle growth per rep, then yes, better to use lower rep ranges so that each rep is damn heavy. But if the goal is to improve your strength in moderate rep ranges, then training in moderate rep ranges is perfect for that. Thanks again Shane for the clarification! Just wondering what you might recommend as an alternative for performing a chin-up or pull-up from home without the bar. The workouts become much, much more efficient. It’s more like an upper-body deadlift. How to assess your weaknesses and then fix them. For that, people often turn to powerlifting, thinking that they need to test their 1-rep maxes to see how strong they are. If we say 4 sets of 10–12 reps, that could mean: 4 sets of 10 reps Or is it better to use a rep range that’s halfway between strength training and hypertrophy training? If you increase the weight from set to set and it causes you to get fewer reps with each set, that’s called pyramid training, which looks more like this: Set 1: 10 reps with 225 pounds In bodybuilding, though, where the goal is to build bigger muscles as fast as possible, most people do sets of 8–12 reps. All of our elbow flexors (biceps, brachialis, and brachioradialis) are engaged instead of putting the emphasis on just our biceps. Some people’s lower backs get beat up with low-rep sets of deadlifts, whereas others get winded before they can finish a set of ten. For instance, lifting from 3 reps all the way up to 20 reps per set? But we also want to use a wide variety of similar exercises, such as lat pulldowns and rows, and to work our muscles in different ways, such as with curls and pullovers. Good to train slightly differently. Push-ups and chin-ups are great even when you’re training at a fully stocked gym. An intermediate bodybuilder might spend ten minutes doing 3×12 on the bench press and then another ten minutes doing 3×15 skull crushers. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. For every low-rep set that you do, you may only stimulate 50–80% as much muscle growth as you would by doing moderate-rep sets. Or you could do both moderate and heavy sets each workout (as in reverse pyramid training). When I was skinny, I was far more desperate to get bigger than I was to get stronger. I understand it has to be tweaked but for someone who is just trying to build muscle and size, what do you recommend? Skullcrushers: 3 sets of 15 reps Hopefully I can get some new gains from training this way. It seems that muscle growth is maximized by doing 4–8 sets per muscle group per workout. His specialty is helping people build muscle to improve their strength and general health, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes. We can lift the most weight. If you liked this article, I think you’d love our full programs. The Workout Program to Build Lean Muscle. You aren’t lifting heavier weights, though, so there’s no extra fatigue or strain on your joints. It’s a good idea to use those other back and biceps lifts as accessory and assistance lifts, and they should help your chin-up in a roundabout way, but they may not be quite similar enough to the chin-up to get you past your plateau. If you don’t want to dive all that deep into workout programming, you might want to follow a workout program instead of building your own. So with neck training, we might want to use higher reps: 15–40 reps per set. That way your chin-up muscles get plenty of rest between sets. The thing is, using an overhand grip prevents the biceps from engaging, and using a wider grip shortens the range of motion. Thank you so much for the kind words! But you can imagine how those workouts could get quite long. For most of our reps, that’s a great goal. The following workout is a 4 day split you can follow for the next 6 weeks to build lean muscle. Mind you, they were training their entire bodies, and the difference in muscle growth was only seen in their arms. That kind of thing. Your SEO strategy is working 🙂. This is a great option. Chin-ups are a great lift for your upper back, abs, and grip strength. Plus, since we’re stretching during our rest times, it won’t even increase the length of our workouts. That’s not completely crazy. At first, we might only be able to do lowered chin-ups, or maybe grind out a couple hard reps. That’s when we’re focused on doing more chin-ups, adding more reps to each set we do. Need to figure how to do that without a proper bench or heavy bar weight. But even so, this remains an example of a study that at the very least found equal muscle growth between lower and moderate rep ranges. If we look at a study by Schoenfeld et al, we see that doing sets of 8–12 reps stimulates the same amount of muscle growth as doing sets 25–35 reps. We have other examples of higher rep ranges stimulating plenty of muscle growth per set, too: So the good news is that if you’re forced to use light weights or bodyweight training to build muscle, you can delve into those higher rep ranges. Since we know that compound movements are better than isolation ones, it’s only logical to assume that a compound movement that engages more muscle groups will be better than the one that engages less. If all of your lifts are plateaued, the problem might not be your chin-up training, just that you need to improve your ability to build muscle overall. Again, it’s so much easier to hold at the top for 5 seconds and when I’m tired (which happens fast on these, the reflex is to cheat). Side question: Any thoughts on keeping the knees tucked up for extra ab engagement during chin-ups? It’s more complicated and painful than free weights, so if you have access to lifting equipment, I’d definitely take advantage of it right from the very beginning. Hey Alfons, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that heavier strength training can improve our strength in moderate rep ranges, allowing us to use more weight when doing our hypertrophy training, and thus stimulate more muscle growth, right? If our goal is to become generally stronger, we can usually do that more efficiently by lifting in the 6–20 rep range. Lifting in moderate rep ranges is great for improving our general health and fitness. Plus, the main benefit of lifting in lower rep ranges is that it gives us practice lifting close to our 1-rep max. B) Is it better to stick to round numbers without trying for as many reps as I can get on some sets, or should I always do as many reps as I can? But given that curls are a smaller single-joint movement, they’re better thought of as an assistance lift to the chin-up anyway. Took some time off, swapped over to ring chin up for a while as well. That can start making your workouts take longer, though, so I’d understand if you didn’t want to do it. For example: For everyone else, though, we can measure our strength by how much we can lift in a variety of different rep ranges. For instance, with your chin-ups, that might mean stopping 2 reps shy of failure on your first set, 1 rep shy of failure on your second, and doing as many reps as you can on your third set. You might have better luck by finessing your technique. I kind of plateaued, and I wanted to get your thoughts. It’s still a great lift, but the chin-up is better for gaining overall muscle mass. While the other 2 sets stimulated mostly stimulated strength? You should also use the resting time program that is listed above. Since Saturday been training 20 reps with my mate who is 57. For instance, you could stimulate a similar amount of muscle growth by doing 3 sets of 10 repetitions as you would by doing 5 sets of 5, keeping your workouts shorter or freeing up more time for other lifts. Awesome information about reps. How about sets what has the best results. Most barbell lifts have a fairly similar (bell-shaped) strength curve, but pulling movements fall into their own unique category. Like, a workout where you do sets of 5 reps, another workout where you do sets of 10 reps? So can we add weight from set to set for muscle growth? Thanks for all the great info on all the new posts also. Powerlifters measure their strength by how much they can lift for a single repetition—their 1-rep max strength. That’s not quite right. We’ve been trying to put up a bunch of good content before officially announcing it the Bony to Beastly and Bombshell communities. The idea being to start with just a few reps in reserve and finish our final set without actually hitting failure. These lifts don’t engage as much overall muscle mass as the chin-up, but they’re perfectly ideal for bulking up our lats and biceps one by one. And thank you, Sam 🙂. The chin-up is a compound exercise that works our upper backs and biceps. How many reps should you do to gain muscle mass? Set 2: 8 reps with 225 pounds, 2–3 reps in reserve It’s not a popular style of training. Maybe do 4, 6, 8, 8 instead. Whether you should use a neutral grip, overhand grip, or underhand grip as your main chin-up variation. Sets of anywhere from 4–40 reps will stimulate muscle growth quite well, but most research shows that doing 6–20 reps per set is the most efficient way to build muscle. Hey Jesse, that’s a really good question and, yeah, I totally should have explained that. So by combining the row, pullover, and curl, we have a combination of exercises that will help us fully develop our backs and biceps. But that doesn’t make us stronger, per se, it just helps us specialize our strength for powerlifting. 2. Still mostly focused on building muscle, though. For example, you could spend a couple of months with a moderate grip, then switch to a super close grip, then switch to overhand pull-ups. Didn’t even know Outlift was a thing. You’ll still develop the same muscles and get the same benefits. You’ve made the exercise harder but with no real benefit. When you can do 6–12 reps, you can start adding weight to your chin-ups. The chin-up is one of our Big 5 bulking lifts, and in this article we’re going to go over the best strategies for integrating it into your bulking routine, getting the most muscle mass and strength out of it as possible. Wanted to get your input on this! They have a larger range of motion and do a better job of engaging our biceps. If you want to bulk up the long head of your triceps, chin-ups can certainly help, but skull crushers and overhead extensions are better bets. There are many different ways of periodizing a program. I’m training him, he wants to do lighter weights and more reps mainly for his joints. You’re right that doing 2 reps on your final set isn’t adding much volume, and so there’s a problem there. With that said, you can do chin-up in a variety of different ways. And third, higher-rep sets can cause a tremendous amount of muscle damage, making our workouts harder to recover from. This is most pronounced with pull-ups and barbell rows, but it applies to chin-ups as well. If you have free weights, you can still do the better bodyweight exercises, yeah. Bench Press: 4 sets of 10 reps 10 (don’t try), 10 (don’t try), 4 (try) But you want to pick a grip width that you’re strong with and that feels good on your joints. It is written to focus on increasing hypertrophy by performing 2-4 exercises for each muscle group during that muscle’s training day, for 3-5 sets, and 6-12 reps (although we’ll keep everything 8+ here).. Plus, this is assuming that muscle growth is maximized with just three sets per muscle group per workout. The first that doing fewer reps per sets means we’re lifting less total weight each set (less volume), which seems to stimulate less muscle growth. And then you do, say, a set of 6 reps and then 8 reps? This technique, called interset stretching, involves stretching the prime movers of a lift for thirty seconds between sets to the point where we can feel a hearty but not painful stretch. If you’re maintaining your reps while gaining weight, that’s at least a bit of progress. You don’t have to ever add weight, but since chin-ups are quite taxing, it can help to do them for 6–12 reps so that your cardiovascular system doesn’t start to limit your performance. That tends to work quite well, and even if the numbers aren’t quite that perfect, you’ll probably be doing more than 5 reps on the third set. So far, when I do weighted chinups for 3 sets, I get 8 reps on the 1st set, 5 reps on the 2nd set, and 4 reps on the 3rd set. I focus mostly on mind set and what to eat and NOT eat so you are a great resource for me. I try to promote that achieving good health does not need to dominate our lives. Set 3: 8 reps with 225 pounds, 1–2 reps in reserve And what about compound versus isolation lifts? It’s possible that doing sets of seven reps would eventually yield more muscle growth than doing sets of six reps. It’s possible that doing sets of eight reps could eventually stimulate more muscle growth than doing sets of seven reps. It’s the bottom part of the range of motion that’s the most important. Your limit strength is your base. It kicks off with a 5-part series about how to build muscle more leanly, gain strength faster, and improve your appearance. But there are a few different variations of the chin-up, each with their own pros and cons. When volumes start climbing higher like that, it can pay to have an easier and more efficient way to stimulate muscle growth. Open source password manager with Nextcloud integration - nextcloud/passman Gaining weight and muscle mass will also help (although it will also mean you have you to lift a heavier body!). So it was good for a change. Are close grip chin ups even better because they further increase the range of motion? If chin-ups aren’t hitting your lats, it might not be the range of motion that’s the problem, though. Variations like that can definitely be helpful and it’s a nice way to mix things up. In your case, doing 3xAMRAP (as many reps as possible) is better. Failure is when we can no longer bring our chins all the way up to the bar. If you’re only doing chin-ups once per week, try doing them 2–3 times per week. The different intensities help you gain more strength and size in the long run. I do pull-ups along the bar parallel, moving from side to side. If we want to be able to carry stuff in front of our bodies, we might want to spend more time doing front squats. We also need to make sure that your diet is allowing you to gain muscle. Shane Duquette is the co-founder and creative lead of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell, and has a degree in design from York University in Toronto, Canada. And if we add in the biceps curl, we have an exercise that’s perfect for our biceps. Marco Walker-Ng is the co-founder and strength coach of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell, and is a certified trainer (PTS) with a Bachelor's degree in Health Sciences (BHSc) from the University of Ottawa. Of course, I’m sure most people would prefer to go with the moderate rep range for fewer sets, for reasons you mention some of later in the article, but this calculation just wasn’t accurate by total volume of reps. Volume isn’t calculated via reps (at least not as far as I’m aware and not in the hypertrophy research I’ve seen). Reverse Calf Raises: 6-8 reps / 3 sets Once you have completed the 4 week program, I suggest staying in the 6-8 rep range, but still continue to increase the amount of weight you are doing. The Hypertrophy Rep Range: How Many Reps to Build Muscle. I was reading another article of yours. (Or, if you can’t do 2–3 chin-ups yet, doing lowered chin-ups instead.) And if you’re interested in improving your 1-rep max, you might want to favour lower rep ranges, doing 4–10 reps per set. ​Or click here to join our newsletter for women. Now, I realize it’s not your elbows, it’s your forearms. However, lifting in higher rep ranges is a fetid nightmare, especially when doing the bigger compound lifts. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the chin-up will work your triceps hard enough to build much muscle back there. Thank you Shane for your response! That’s a great summary, yeah. It’s easy to hold at the top, but then descending goes very quickly and I don’t feel like I’m getting much out of it. It’s always hard to say with these multifactorial things. With all of that said, I do think it’s useful to use a variety of rep ranges. If we compare to how a bodybuilder trains, we can see the advantage of using moderate rep ranges. As beginners, our strength on the chin-up is measured by how many bodyweight repetitions we can get. It’s said that the bottom half of the movement activates lats most – so for those lacking lat development, is it ok to cut the range of motion and focus only on bottom half? If you’re intentionally trying to build bigger triceps, it can help to include triceps isolation lifts like skull crushers and overhead extensions. Should we use lower reps for our compound lifts and higher reps for our isolation lifts? And to improve their skill at lifting 1-rep maxes, they turn to strength training, as they should—that’s what it’s for. However, this comes at the cost of our other elbow flexors (brachialis and brachioradialis) having a harder time contributing to the lift. A bigger muscle is a stronger one, so any rep range that helps us build muscle will also help us gain strength. Set 3: 6 reps with 245 pounds 4 sets of 11 reps If the reps get painfully high (or they’re above 40 reps), use a more difficult variation.