Lifting Weights Is Heavy Necessarily Better?

August 23, 2010 By Mark

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Buffer
Tweet

If you’re one of those people who uses resistance training or weight training in your workout routine. You may be using weights that are heavier than you may need in order to get the results that you want.

According to new research which may be good news for a lot of people as lifting heavy weights can be hard work, and we always tend to think get the more we are lifting the better it will be for us.

Researchers at a University in Canada asked some young men to lift the heaviest weight, they could using a unilateral leg machine. And were asked to do one lift only during the subsequent weeks they were split into two groups one group was asked to lift 90 percent of their maximum weight.

And the second group was asked to lift 30 percent of their maximum weight. And here was the catch they were supposed to keep lifting the weights until they went into muscle fatigue and no longer lift any more.

Here is the interesting part the group that was lifting the lighter load was able to continue with their workout routine a lot longer compared to the heavier lifting group.

However, it doesn’t stop there when the researchers took blood samples from the lighter lifting group as well as muscle biopsies. They found even more when you lift lighter loads with more repetitions this increases something called acute muscle anabolism as well as myofibrillar protein synthesis.

So for people who want to use lighter weights and get some results this is good news, as some people may be put off due to the fact that they think they may need to keep increasing the amount, they are lifting overtime in order to get results.

The moral of the story is if you are lifting lighter weights just make sure that you do enough repetitions, and you should be okay hopefully in order to get some kind of results. As always, this particular study is open to suggestions from other people. What is your opinion on it? Does this sound feasible to you and is it a better way to train?