• It is very common to do 3sets of 10 reps if you look for muscle gains. but is it really a good idea??

How is writting??

Shun.M / Personal trainer 

Academic Background

Master degree of physical education (sports medicine)
Bachelor Degree of Biomedical Engineering

Experiences

Over 10 years in fitness industry
Over 6 years of sports coach
Over 5 years of personal training
Over 2 years of research and teaching assistant

what do muscles need for hypertrophy??

Mechanical stress

Mechanical stress is a physical stress on the muscles. That is, high intensity training is required. In general, mechanical stress is important for increasing strength so, many people use heavy weights to train strength. 

Matabolic stress

Metabolic stress is a chemical stress caused by metabolism in the muscle cells. When you get “pump” , you get metabolic stress. That is, high reps training is required. Normally people try to get this stress for muscle hypertrophy.

 However, the studies comparing the effects of those stresses have done experiments with untrained people. Therefore, it is unsure that the same effects apply to well-trained people as well.

What a new study says

This study shows that differences between high loads training(mechanical stress) and high volume training(metabolic stress). 

Methods

study participants are separated into tow groups

high intensity group: 90%1RM 4sets 3-5reps 3mins rest

high volume group; 70% 1RM 4sets 10-12reps 1min rest

Results

As we thought, high intensity group improved 1RM more than high volume group. Interestingly, high intensity group improves lean body mass (muscle gains )more than high volume group as well. That means, high intensity training is more beneficial for muscle hypertrophy than high volume training for well-trained people.

However, this study found out the effects of 8weeks training. So it is still unsure that the effect of the trainings for longer periods. 

Many studies demonstrated that high load and high reps trainings have similar effects on hypertrophy if the total volume is the same. Therefore, high volume group in this study might have too much volume as they had 4 compound exercises out of 6 exercises in total which is pretty high.

 Some other studies have also shown that is it more beneficial if you change your training methods every now and then like every 4~8 weeks than keep doing the same for a long time. 

 In conclusion, it demonstrated that high load training is effective not only for strength but also hypertrophy so you might want to do high intensity training if you normally train high reps.