Optimal Rep Guidelines for Muscular Size and Strength

I was really intrigues by your comment: “One of the succinct conclusions I have reached from years of training participation is that the more advanced you become, the lower the repetition number that you will probably get the best response to.  Put simply, 12’s may have worked in the early stage, but chances are 5 or so years later, your intuition will tell you that you need to be averaging around 6 or so reps.  And as time goes on, this may go down.  What was once a neuro-muscular loading for you is now a hypertrophy rep, and in later years, you may find these higher reps to be totally non-response giving.” Can you give us a rough outline of this? How many years of training are we talking about here? Any help would be appreciated.

The text books offer guidelines that match reps or rep ranges to specific training effects, which is a nice guide.  But I have found there is another variable that needs to be taken into account and that is training age or training experience.  As you know, my observations have led me to conclude that the longer you are involved in strength training (and when I say strength training, I infer you are looking for strength enhancement, not just hypertrophy only) the lower are the reps that your body relate to.

To illustrate this point, I am going to develop a table that gives generalizations about this transition.  I really do mean generalizations, as only your response will can determine what is really happening with you as an individual.  Additionally, these generalization assume a serious commitment to training in the years that you have been strength training.

Table 1  - Generalized hypertrophy guidelines for optimal range of reps as they relate to years of experience

Table 2 - Generalized maximal strength guidelines for optimal range of reps as they relate to years of experience

Table 3 - Generalized combination hypertrophy-maximal strength guidelines for optimal range of reps as they relate to years of experience

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