Building Muscles for Size and Strength
Posted in: Muscle Building Workouts
While bodybuilding and strength training both utilize weights, and the same exercises, they are still two different beasts which provide different results.
Let me first get one thing straight: bodybuilding, in a sense is strength training, but the strength a bodybuilder gets isn’t the ultimate goal. It’s pretty much a by product – a means to an end - the end being all about how the body looks.
Now, strength training is different. If you have ever seen the average power lifter, for instance, you’re likely to see a guy who is pale, fat, and generally not very pleasing to look at, at all. He doesn’t care. He’s not there to look pretty. The power lifters’ only concern is how much pig iron he can lift. No more, no less.
When embarking upon ‘weight lifting’ the sooner you decide which is more important to you – raw strength or physique – the quicker you will achieve your goals.
If it’s just strength you are after, all you need concern yourself with is training in the lower rep ranges of 1 – 5 with very heavy weight. These lower rep ranges hit the fast twitch muscle fibres. These are the ones which provide the explosive strength, rather than sustained effort.
If you want to train solely for physique, however, you will do best by incorporating both strength training sessions and higher repetition (reps of 7 – 15) bodybuilding exercises also.
The reason for this is simple. Lower rep ranges help to build the fast twitch muscle fibres, which in the average person aren’t in great abundance, but, it’s still muscle and will make a difference to how you look. And, by doing higher reps, you build the more abundant slow twitch fibres, which will provide the bulk of your size.
It may also be that you want to train primarily for strength, but wish to develop a good physique also – in which case you’d train mostly with low reps, having a lighter session here and there for cosmetic reasons.
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