We’ve spent the past few weeks talking about repetition ranges and how they ramp-up your muscle mass gains.

Now, I know some readers out there remember what I said earlier and are thinking, “Well, low rep strength won’t do me any good. In order to get bigger muscles, I need to get stronger with higher reps — right?”

Well, guess what the quickest way to get stronger with “higher reps” is?

Get stronger lifting heavy weights and THEN apply that newly-built strength to your higher reps!

And here is why:

Maximal strength builds strength endurance, but strength endurance struggles to build maximal strength. Or to put it another way, you will increase the poundage of your higher rep sets the quickest by increasing the poundage of your lower rep sets.

This explains how you can take a powerlifter who squats 400lbs out of the gym and get him to squat 300lbs for higher reps with relative ease. Now compare this to the trainee who never strays below 10 reps on his sets and who struggles to squat 250lbs for a max single.

To illustrate my point, I want to tell you a “squat showdown” story…

For anyone who doesn’t know, Glenn Pendlay is a highly respected Olympic lifting coach. Not only that, but he has squatted over 800lbs in the back squat and 600lbs in the front squat.

And here’s something else you might not know about Glenn... he once got beat in a bet with a guy who squatted 200lbs less than him for a single!

The story goes that Glenn bet a bodybuilder a couple of pints of Guinness on who could do more reps on the squat with 400lbs. What happened? The other guy did 20 reps and Glenn only managed 15.

Well, Glenn had trained strictly for Olympic lifting. This meant multiple sets of low reps with heavy-ass weight. In contrast, the bodybuilder guy was used to much higher reps.

But our tale doesn’t end there…

Glenn was so ticked off by his defeat, that he did some high rep squats for a few weeks and challenged the guy to another squat showdown. The result? This time the bodybuilder guy again did 400 for 20, but Glenn did a whopping 500lbs for 20!

And the moral to our story?

Thanks for reading.

Squat for Glory!

Lee



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