high rep vs low rep experiment.. interesting

[viking88]

to make this as short as possible let me tell you my story on my little "experiment" i inadvertently did over the past 5 years..

when i was 15 years old i had a trainer and we did a lot of high rep exhaustion type workouts, trained a body part per day with a secondary muscle if thats what you call it, ie: chest/tris, back/bis, shoulders/abs.. the only way i can describe it was it was very high rep 90% of the time ( 10-20) reps per set with lots of drop sets till exhaustion. now i know a lot of people on here may say this was over training but i never had one injury and developed a pretty lean body from this and was pretty vascular, i was 16 and i was 5'11 and 170-180 pounds.. ate pretty well through all of this by the way with lots of calories..so i went from being about 155-160 at the end of middle school to about 180 at my peak sophomore year, then football came and i lost all the weight during double days lol

when i was 17 i started reading body building magazines and this forum and decided to start the whole high weight low rep range (6-8).. started noticing my workouts were a lot "easier" then before.. started eating really well and force feeding to get those calories and protein in.. i went from 180 when i was 17 to about 205 when i was 18.5.. i must admit at the time i thought it was great cause i was starting to fill out my t shirts and was a pretty thick dude for my age..


looking back at some of my old pictures and hearing what my friends say on how i used to look im going to start going back to the whole high rep, high intensity type workouts

first of all they were way better workouts, always felt satisfied when leaving the gym.. i was pretty lean and loved the results i was getting.. when doing the low rep workouts i had a chunky face and was just "thick" all around.. the only advantage to being thick is you look bigger in a t shirt but when it gets time to go to the beach or pool or wherever that kind of goes out the window.

so i guess my question/comment is do i just do what works for me? i mean from the reading ive done it seems that any talk of high rep/ high intensity workouts for building "muscle" or "mass" is nothing short of blasphemy.. i was thinking of incorporating both types, maybe that would be better..

[FireGuy]

Nothing wrong with sets in the 10-20 rep range. As a matter of fact I would be hesitant to classify that as high rep training, more of medium reps. There is a ton of muscle to be had in that rep range and I agree its much tougher than doing sets of 5-8 reps. If that's what your body responds to than by all means stick with it.