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UllrsIshtar -> RE: Exercise tips for a woman about 325 lbs (2/3/2016 9:57:29 AM)
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ORIGINAL: CodeOfSilence
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ORIGINAL: UllrsIshtar
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ORIGINAL: WinsomeDefiance
Kay has really been working on her upper body strength and has upped the weights to 30 lbs and increased her reps. We both have, actually. Which I think is great because, yes, using your arms to beat your body weight is hard!
If you go higher than 30 reps than that per set, you're losing the benefits of the weights, and might as well just do the exercise without any weights at all. (Although with some people who are really severely out of shape, some exercises even done without weights will be difficult enough, even without weights, that they cannot complete 30 reps in good form when starting out, in which case weights should obviously be skipped until they can.)
Although I'd agree with you that 20-30 reps is the best sample size I don't think that doing more causes you to lose the benefit.
What's exercise without any weights in this case? Aerobic? Lifting your arms in the air without anything?
The most healthy muscle group to train (if you're not going for a sport or athletic achievement) is type IIa. To get to the point where you start secreting lactic acid you'd have to have some amazing cardio endurance if you're going to get it while sitting down. So doing light weight lifting is fine.
You'll not get the bursts of strength and ability to lift heavy objects and not doing any 20-30 rep sessions or manual labor of some sort is bad for you but that's not to say that anything above with lighter weights is not adding anything.
You're right that it's not literally not adding anything, but at the same time, it's very inefficient.
Time and time again you see beginners, especially women (who are afraid that lifting is going to 'bulk them up') start of with light weights doing sets of +/-100 reps, because they believe that this way they're training anaerobic and are making great progress.
After all, they're doing tons and tons of exercises, so that must mean that they're working really hard, right?
The issue with doing that kind of rep count is that it's grossly inefficient towards achieving the goal of getting good results while not spending half the day excising.
People's time is limited. Very few will spend more than 30-60 minutes a day on weights, especially beginners.
So if you take that time constraint into account doing reps over 30 is absolutely not advisable, even when attempting to achieve anaerobic results, because it simply isn't high enough impact to make a difference in enough different muscle groups in such a short period of time.
That's not to say that it won't do anything of course... any well performed exercise is obviously better than no exercise at all, and if light weights with high reps is what motivates you to do something, whereas higher weights low reps discourages you from doing anything, then the first one is obviously the better choice.
However, because low weights high rep results are so slow to manifest because of their inefficiency, it gets lots of people discouraged because they don't see the results they're looking for after spending a lot of time (which they view as a lot of effort) excising, which in turn encourages them to quit because 'it's not working'.
Given the presumption that we want the most amount of results, in the least amount of time spend, weightlifting gains for weightloss are invariably restricted to sets of less than 30 reps.
But you're right of course, I was technically inaccurate there, low weights high reps don't give no added benefit, in most cases they just don't give enough added benefit for it to be worth doing from a psychological perspective.
And just to be more clear again for people not familiar with lifting:
When I say "high weights" I am not talking about massive amounts of weight, or even a set amount of weight.
"High weight" in this context means "any weight heavy enough so that you personally will start to fail to be able to maintain form in under 30 reps". What the amount of this weight will end up being will vary from person to person.
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