Lifted 3 banana vodka smoothies yesterday and 4 beers.

 

Nice, maybe one day I'll be able to do that....

 

I knew a guy who powerlifted; but only 1-3 reps MAX for each movement. Each Rep looked like he was trying to kill the bar/plates.

He was 5'11" at about 235lbs of insanity. Built like a brickshit house. I think he was benching in the mid to upper 4's and squatting in the 700's.

He would work out ONE day, then take two off. That's how intense his workouts were.

 

Recently got a book which reconfirmed everything I had read previous so we can put much of this to rest especially whether or not "8 or less reps is just stupid because I think so"

High volume training causes cortisol levels to increase and testosterone to go down.

10+ rep range just causes muscles to store glycogen locally, and contributes minimally to size gains since all you're doing is storing more liquid in your muscle.

4-8 rep range causes hypertrophy in the fast twitch muscle growth, aka the stuff that has most potential for size gains

1-3 reps improves firing of the central nervous system. This range + heavy weights is best for strength gains which may not lead to size gains but will lead to absolute strength gains

Not surprising to many of you but hypertrophy is where you gain the size (duh)... and super low rep range for strength. This has been proven in a number of studies (Google is wonderful), and not to say high rep doesn't work but it's more useful after you build the size.

 

it`s more because of the kind of muscle fibers being used..
FT are bigger in diameter and thus contribute to real size gains ST muscle fibers are more of the endurance muscle fibers..
best is to try to involve the max amount of muscle fibers possible...FT and ST,..but this is a head thing since the central nervous system is responsible for sending out the impulses to the muscle fibers...
Dropsets,forced reps,partial reps,rep-pause etc are great methods for that but are over a long period of time too much stress on the central nervous system which could then ultimately lead to overtraining...
increases on strength are basically results of the different muscles as well as muscle fibers having learned to interact better with each other..
the intramuscular and intermuscular coordination(sorry I translated it directly from German in English dunno if it`s called like that )
you can be rather small but fvcking strong...have seen that numerous times..

 

imho reps that count for size are those that are performed well but feel like your skin is about to tear apart. whether you do that from the get-go 1-3 times; or you max out at 8 reps and then force those last 2-3 that REALLY count.
when that stress and load is created, when your muscles can't breathe and the type2b fibres kick in = growth

of course how much cardio you do and at what rate/intensity/pace and how much and how well you eat factors in, but i am talking about the reps alone

just from experience