In the world of exercise, variety abounds. You can lift light weights, or heavy weights, or no weights at all. If you don’t lift at all right now, it doesn’t matter much where you start. But that doesn’t mean that all of these options are equivalent. Light weights can build muscle, but they do not have the same benefit as heavier weights.
Friends, it does matter. You might decide that lighter weights are best for you, or you might want the benefits that heavy weights provide. But you deserve to know the difference. Because there is definitely a difference. Even the studies that show benefits of lighter weights for muscle gain still find that heavy weights have advantages.
80% of single repetition maximum) prescriptions maximised strength gains, and all prescriptions comparably promoted muscle hypertrophy [growth]." In short: light weights can help you gain muscle (with caveats, which we’ll discuss) but they aren’t a good way to build your strength, in the sense of your real-world ability to lift heavy things.
If you’d like to continue with light weights past the beginner stage, that can work too—depending on your goals. It is true that you don’t need to lift heavy weights to build muscle. Light weights, which I’ll define here as anything you need to lift for 12+ reps before you start to feel any burn or fatigue, can signal your body to build more muscle tissue as long as you keep lifting until you literally cannot lift them any more. That’s called lifting “to failure.”
We also know that most people underestimate themselves, doing fewer reps or choosing a too-light weight for their intended exercise. If you aren’t constantly asking yourself “can I do more?”, you might be missing out on the muscle growth (or “toning”) that you’re hoping to get.
When you should exercise with heavy weights
Remember how light weights need to be lifted to failure to stimulate muscle growth? That’s because our bodies can choose to only “recruit” a few muscle fibers at a time to do a job. If you pick up a 2-pound dumbbell, your nervous system says “ehh, we only need a few motor units to do this job” and doesn’t bother activating the rest. But as you reach your 18th, 19th, 20th rep, it has to recruit more and more of those fibers as the ones you used at first begin to tire out. With heavy weights, though, you end up recruiting large numbers of muscle fibers right from the start.
You need to work with heavy weights if you want to learn to move heavy weights. Many people also prefer heavy weights because each set of an exercise is over in just a few reps—maybe eight or 10, or in some cases as little as a single rep. What counts as "heavy" depends on the person—I've written about how to know what counts as a heavy weight for you.
How to combine the benefits of heavy and light weights
As with many things in life, the “why not both?” approach is best for most people. Strength athletes (including powerlifters, Olympic weightlifters, and Crossfitters, to name a few) will typically center their routines around a few heavy lifts, and then get in some extra work with lighter or medium-ish “accessory” lifts. That’s still a solid approach for the average person who just wants to lift for fun or for health.
Meanwhile, “heavy” just means any weight that doesn’t take dozens of reps to get results. If you can only do about 10 pushups, then pushups count as a “heavy” exercise for you. Going for something heavy on a compound exercise (one that involves multiple body parts) gives your body a loud signal to increase your strength, while leaving you plenty of time for lighter exercises if those are how you prefer to spend your gym time.
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