How Many Reps?
That people still ask this question confounds me as much today as it did when it was first asked of me by one of my very first training clients, way back in the day. Back then, one of the biggest hurdles the newfangled personal trainers—who, at the dawn of the fitness boom, were mostly broke bodybuilders—encountered when we all started training the “normal people” who all of a sudden started flocking to the gym—was taking for granted that they knew what was, to us, very basic stuff. Because it was so “normal” to us, it never dawned on any of us that, going in, these actual normal people didn’t know what foods are carbohydrates, proteins, or fats, or what a set was or a rep, let alone how to do them and how many. In a sense, it was like teaching people how to run who you just assumed weren’t in a wheelchair.
So, in this example, I had just explained and demonstrated how to do a particular exercise to my new client. Once she got into position and was ready to begin her set, she asked me, “how many reps?” I looked back at her, confused, like she had just asked what color an orange is. So I said back to her, in a tone like I was being punked, “all of them.” That response was met with a cheery face turned upside down. Was I being rude? Exasperated? Condescending? Ugh… I felt like I needed a translator.
As it turned out, over the course of the fitness boom, “how many reps?” became almost like a battle cry in the trainer/trainee paradigm. I saw it happen a million times. The client would ask, “how many reps?” and the trainer would yell, “give me 10!” And the hapless client would set out to meet their objective—and, no matter how much assistance would have to be applied, the trainer would make sure they got all 10. But why 10? Why not 11? Why not nine? No one ever asked.
Is there anything wrong with 10 reps? Well, that all depends on how you do them. And therein lies the rub: It doesn’t matter how many reps you do, it matters how you do your reps. What is the goal, actually? You have to decide—doing reps or building muscle? They are mutually exclusive.
The Real Work of Getting Strong
Now, to the 38-year-old soccer mom who hasn’t seen the inside of a gym since college, 10 reps should be just fine, right? She’s in the kind of condition as anyone who’s ever modeled for Botero,10 reps of anything is better than the status quo. But notable improvements in your physique are not going to be had with the notion that “at least I’m moving” will suffice. It will not. You have to build muscle!
Now, the knee-jerk reaction to having to do strenuous weight training to build muscle is, “I don’t want to look masculine.” Trust me, there is a chasm vast enough to put on the brakes long before anyone could accuse you of anything masculine. That Boterismo you have going on is not going to fade lightly. You didn’t get that way overnight; you’re not recovering overnight. It’s a long, slow process that requires discipline and commitment, with ample exit ramps if you think you’re going too far. So there’s no downside. The only thing at risk are the folds in back of your arms that wave to the buses as they go by.
While we’re at it, let’s talk about that flappy back arm as an example, because this comes up all the time. No one likes a flappy back arm—or front arm, or lower arm, or legs, or anywhere else. But you can’t isolate the areas that bother you the most. You can’t spot-reduce. It’s got to be the whole thing. And in most cases, it needs to be the whole thing. Flappy back arms are never alone. If you have a flappy back arm, you’re flappy everywhere. And there’s no surgery or spa modality that’s going to fix flappy either. And if you think Ozempic is the answer, you’ll have even more flaps headed your way, and most of them will be on your face. The real truth is that you have to work it off.
Why Building Muscle Is the Only Way Out
So, the simple solution to all of your woes about your body is this: modify your diet and start exercising—with weights. I know that sounds easier said than done, but I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that this works for 100% of the people — men and women — 100% of the time. IF they do it right. Doing it right is going to mean paying attention to several things at the same time. One of those things is “how many reps?” and what do I mean by “all of them?” That is the focus of this discussion. I’ll cover other items in future articles.
So why lift weights? Because you need to build muscle! What did I just say? You read that right. Build muscle. It almost sounds nefarious, doesn’t it? And you have to do it with iron, in a gym—another word that conjures up dark images. Hardcore gyms are often referred to as “dungeons” these days, with probably a few Harleys parked outside—black ones… with loud pipes.
Sure, there are more mainstream “health club” environments if that makes you feel better. They market themselves as “judgement free zones.” You might be able to bring your support puppy with you. But it’s all the same. Regardless of how you might feel about the etymology of building muscle, if you’re fat and out of shape, your first order of business is to start building muscle—immediately. Join a gym, hire a trainer, or watch YouTube vids, whatever it takes—you have to build muscle. You do for two reasons:
First, you can’t flex fat. All the body parts you would like to “tone,” “sculpt,” “tighten,” “trim,” whatever, have to be done with muscle. Muscle is the marble with which you do the sculpting. But you have to be aware of what happens at the onset if you’re taking this seriously. When you first start to work a flabby, flaccid, loose, jiggly body part, the muscle underneath first starts to become denser and tighter, long before it gets bigger. Many times, those first starting out noticing a strength increase—which would indicate muscle is being built— but they complain that they look worse—flabbier, softer… “Aghhh, this ain’t working, let’s go to Ben & Jerry’s instead of the gym.”
Sorry, it is working. If you’re getting stronger, you’re building muscle. The reason you might look softer is because of two things: first, there is fat marbled in the muscle—just like a steak. As the muscle gets stronger and as you follow your diet, that marbling recedes. The muscle is getting denser and more streamlined because of the muscle fiber activation from your workouts. When you take the fat out of the muscle it gets a little smaller, at first. Next, fat and muscle do not take up the same volume. A pound of fat takes up about two and half times as much space as a pound of muscle. Since you’re going to lose much more fat than the muscle you will grow, both cases create more skin than the substructure needs. Your skin will eventually tighten up. But in the beginning it needs time to catch up with your fat loss. Unless you really stretched it out. I’m talking about severe cases of steatopygia, which require a weight loss of 100 pounds or more to resolve. In such extreme cases, you might want to look into a tummy tuck, thigh and butt lifts, etc., to deal with the acres of extra skin you’re going to end up with—after you lose the fat, not to lose the fat. It’s just the way it is.
You have to look at it this way, and if you haven’t thought I’ve been already, I’m going to be blunt—if you had to lose 100 pounds or more to find the physique Mother Nature granted you, then you abused your body to get there. And by and large, that comes with a price. And there’s no getting around paying it.
The second reason you need to build muscle is because muscle is the oven where fat is burned. The more muscle you build, the bigger the oven. The bigger the oven, the more fat you can burn. So the takeaway is simple—you can’t sculpt fat; you sculpt muscle, and muscle is where fat is burned. It’s quite an axiom: build muscle, burn fat. The more muscle you build, the more fat you burn.
Why the Right Number of Reps Is ‘All of Them’
So, Now that you are convinced that you need to build muscle, how do you get the body to build it?
By doing all the reps!
But why wont I just tell you how many that is?
The question is nebulous because the answer is an action, not a number. What I mean by that is that every set’s rep range is dictated by your ability to complete repetitions. So the goal is not a number—the goal is to fail. However many reps that takes depends on how much weight you use and how much intensity you can generate. You can literally do all the reps with any amount of weight, or even no weight at all. You begin a set with the intention of doing all the reps you can possibly do on your own, plus a few more with the help of a trainer or a training partner, until you reach the point where your brain tells the muscle to flex, contract, to squeeze—and the muscle says, nope, sorry, I’m dropping the weights on the floor now. That can be after five reps, 12 reps, 15, 22, 39, 56… it doesn’t matter. As soon as that happens, you have just quantified the meaning of “all of them.” And it’s going to be different every set.
By doing all of them, what you have done is trigger the body’s adaptive response, which is basically the brain telling the body it’s not strong enough to survive the environment it’s in and must adapt to survive. The adaptation, in this case, is to make the body stronger. It does that by building muscle—which, by the way, is the ONLY way to get the body to grow muscle. If the body is not threatened, it does not adapt. That’s how you got fat in the first place! You threatened your body by overeating. It adapted by shuttling the excess calories you consumed and didn’t burn off to fat cells and made them bigger. So now, you have to trigger a different adaptive response. And you do that by doing all the reps.
Arnold Schwarzenegger always said, “never waste a set.” If you don’t do all the reps, you wasted the set. Listen to Arnold, don’t do that.