Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [41]
As a starting point, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends doing a range of exercises targeting different muscle groups, each with a weight that you’re able to lift 8 to 12 times. (You can find the appropriate weight through trial and error over the course of a few workouts and then adjust as you get stronger.) This will produce good results for three or four months—but to maximize your gains after that, you’ll need to decide whether you’re more interested in developing bigger and stronger muscles, or muscles with greater endurance.
The standard approach to building strength and muscle mass is to emphasize fewer repetitions, lift heavier weights, and take longer rests. A typical workout might be three sets of four to six repetitions for each exercise, taking three minutes of rest between each set. As you become more experienced, you might do a set with anywhere from 1 to 12 repetitions. Varying the amount of weight you’re lifting provides a different stimulus, and it’s important not to get into a rut where you do the same workout three times a week. (Some important terminology: if you lift a weight 10 times, take a short break, then lift it 10 more times, you’ve done two “sets” of 10 “repetitions” each.)
Not everyone wants bigger muscles, though, whether for aesthetic or functional reasons. A cyclist, for instance, would rather build the muscular endurance to keep pedaling for hours rather than develop short-lived brute strength. The optimal approach in this case is to do more repetitions using lighter weights and taking less rest. For example, you could do four sets of 20 or more repetitions with less than 90 seconds between sets.
Of course, there are countless different approaches, such as the currently popular CrossFit regimen, which emphasizes short, high-intensity workouts, and the “high-intensity training” system pioneered by Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones. This approach calls for a single set of each exercise, performed at a deliberately slow pace of 15 seconds or more for each lift. Like cow-lifting, these programs undoubtedly produce significant gains if they’re done right. Whether they’re better than traditional programs is another question.
A 2008 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research compared traditional strength and muscular endurance regimens in a head-to-head match-up with a “low-velocity” program in which the subjects took 10 seconds to lift each weight and 4 seconds to let it return to the starting position. (The traditional programs took 1 to 2 seconds in both directions.) As expected, the high-weight/low-reps group gained the most strength, and the low-weight/high-reps group gained the most muscular endurance. That left the low-velocity group in the middle. “You can gain [both] strength and muscle endurance,” said Sharon Rana, the Ohio University professor who led the study, “but the traditional methods are going to do a slightly better job for those two things.”
Similarly, several recent reviews have concluded that single-set training is sufficient for staying fit, but that multiple sets are needed to gain the greatest possible strength. Of course, unless you’re focused on a very narrow goal—developing the biggest possible bicep or lifting the heaviest cow—you’ll benefit from variety. Keep experimenting with the number of sets, reps, and even lifting speed, and you’ll develop a healthy balance of strength and muscular endurance.
How do I tone my muscles without bulking up?
If your upper arm feels a little flabby, you might decide that you need to tone it up. At the gym, you’ll do some biceps curls and triceps pulls, with light weights and lots of repetitions, say 30 or more. After all, you don’t want to risk adding bulky muscle mass to your arms.
If this sounds familiar, you’ve fallen prey to a common but mistaken assumption. “Toning,” in the sense of light exercise to make a muscle look taut, simply doesn’t exist. (In medical terms, muscle tone refers to the low level of tension maintained